If a filter-type has more than ten items, the filter selection changes from checkboxes, which can be changed very quickly, to a dropdown selection, which is (being polite) extremely slow to change.
Why?
Why not allow allow a project with 100 locations to add 5, or whatever, locations as checkboxes? (I know I can go into the location tab and select there, I’m making a general point. Though those filter icons should be checkboxes too, imo, but I digress.)
Hi Marc,
This was simply about neatness and conserving space. If you are building a filter containing multiple different criteria, it would not be helpful to have one of those criteria to push 3 pages down the screen because there are 100 items to scroll through.
Switching to the dropdown style provides the same functionality in a tighter space. The decision of 10 is a fairly arbitrary decision based on design taste.
Matt
It’s not the same functionality, though.
Serious question: Are the team mainly using Windows? Because the clicky-clicky through menus, and dropdowns is a very Windows-type behaviour, and that might explain my incomprehension about what’s happened to TL3’s design.
Hi Marc,
How is it not the same functionality?
Both options let you select from 0-N items by selecting them from a list. The only difference is whether every item in the list is always shown, or whether the items are inside a dropdown menu to conserve screen space to fit other things on screen.
No, we all use Macs as our primary OS.
Most of my usage of Windows regarding selections is by keyboard shortcuts and the use of “Shift+Arrows” or “CTRL+Shift+Arrows” “Shift+PGUP/DN” etc. or in some few cases the TAB key and the already mentioned function keys in any combination…
so I miss the possibility specially use the “Shift+Arrow” to select things, regardless of what and where…
Hi Matt,
Apologies to resurrect an old thread but I have a related question as I just discovered this peculiar behavior where the UI changes once you have more than ten items in the filter. Because the behavior changed, I genuinely thought something broke when I added my 11th tag. I wonder if it would be possible to make this less jarring to a new user. The filter system is very boutique as it is, to put it mildly. I’m still trying to learn its nuances after a fair bit of use, and it is a struggle.
I wonder if, rather than forcing behavior change with an arbitrary threshold, that you could maybe make it a setting toggle. Like “checkboxes? y/n” or “dropdown list after x items” with x being user configurable.
I’m using “Tags” as my primary filter since it gives me the most flexibility to categorize items. But when I try to use multiple criteria for filtering, it gets very difficult to understand the software’s behavior. The combinations of “Match All”, “Match Any”, and “Match None” behave in extremely unintuitive ways. Is there any way we could be given more direct control over what is and is not filtered out of the view? I often find it very difficult to exclude specific things while simultaneously including other specific things.