Suggestion – Viewing Forms in Multi-Column View mode on a Mac

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Brendan,

Here is one more suggestion I think would be very useful.

Suppose:
– we are viewing a form in Multi-Column View mode
– we have Show Sections ON
– Sections are based on a text field, so we have sections A, B, C, and so on …
– To look at the records we could roll them up or down with the mouse
– The number of records is large, so rolling up or down is not a pleasant job
– To jump straight to one section we have to click the section index button and choose a letter

It would be very useful, in situations like the described, if we could jump from section to section just clicking the letter of that section on the keyboard.

Perhaps that idea could be extended to other kind of sections, but I have thought just in this one.

Hope you agree and that can be implemented.

Jose

[Brendan]

Hi Jose,

I’m not entirely sure that’s a viable idea given the way Tap Forms behaves. It would have to be a command-key or something because if you just type the letter, depending on where your keyboard focus is, you would end up just typing in that letter into a field somewhere or if focus was directly on the multi-column list view, then you would end up typing over whatever value was currently displayed in the selected cell.

[Jose Monteiro]

Hi Brendan,

What matters here is if you find the suggestion useful as I do.
If to get there we need a combination of Keys (such as CTRL-LETTER, or whatever you may think better) that doesn’t matter.
And on such a combination I will make no suggestions because you surely know better than me what would be best.

[Brendan]

I suppose one option would be to display the popup using a command-key combination, perhaps command-i (for index) and then you type the letter, which should get handled properly anyway. Then when you press Return, it will jump to that section. So really I’m just missing the command-key to activate that popup. That’s easily doable.

[Brendan]

I just tested that and it works really well. Now, is command-i the most appropriate command-key to use to display that? Actually it’s used for the Italic command under the Font menu under Layout. Hmm… Maybe I’ll have to think of something else. I could use command-shift-i instead to avoid a conflict.

[Jose Monteiro]

Or perhaps CTRL-SHIFT because this keys are just side by side.

But I don’t know, because there is a philosophy for these combinations of keys that I would not like to break.
For instance:
– CMD-LETTER or COMMAND-DIGIT is for executing some command
– SHIFT-COMMAND-LETTER means places; GOTO somewhere in Finder; SHIFT-COMMAND-H goes to Home Folder
– OPTION-COMMAND-LETTER means functions; OPTION-COMMAND-D shows/hides the Dock

Anyway I’ll be looking forward to what you find best.

[Author]

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