Autocomplete friends’ names – Unsatisfactory Progress
I spent a while today trying to get auto-complete of friend names working. I tried several different mechanisms:
- I added jQuery to Buzzbird, and tried to use it on XUL documents directly. I hoped that XUL and HTML were similar enough that I’d be able to use a jQuery autocomplete plugin to do the autocompletion, but had no luck. I patched up jQuery a bit, and tried out two different plugins, but ran into too many roadblocks to ever make it work.
- XUL has auto-complete text fields, so I tried using one, along with a custom component that allowed me to populate the valid auto-completions programatically. Unfortunately, the XUL widgets that support built-in autocompletion do not support multi-line entry with word-wrap, so even though I managed to get the completion drop-down list to work, it’s not a viable solution.
- I tried making my own popup using XUL popup menu elements, and I made the popup appear when the user hit the @ sign while typing. Unfortunately, XUL popup menus appear to be modal, and forcing the user to choose from a list when a list item may not even be applicable won’t work
I did manage to get the Twitter API call to fetch all your friends’ screen names working, but because I can’t get the UI to do what I want, it’s kinda useless right now. I’m pretty bummed and frustrated. I’ll probably have to release 0.8 without this feature.
I might be able to build in a sort-of “address book” feature that a user could bring up if they forget the name of a friend, but that falls short of my original goal of username completion by quite a bit.
Tags: autocomplete
This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 16:58 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
