TF Usability vs. Functionality

Thanks for all that great feedback. I’m going to copy your post and keep it handy so I can refer back to it from time to time.

It’s true that Tap Forms doesn’t have a lot of power user features and yes, it’s definitely designed for the majority people to understand and use. I try to make it as easy to use as I can and I know there’s lots of room for improvement still.

I don’t want to talk too much about the beta version. I’ve given hints here and there from time to time, but I’m not ready to post a list of changes or give free access to the private beta forum. I’ve asked all my beta testers not to post screenshots or talk about the beta. Hope you understand.

I have someone working on an updated manual for me and I am also hiring someone to make some screencast videos for me. So it’s coming.

There’s always someone who needs this feature or that feature. I listen to everyone and take everything under advisement. Sometimes it’s necessary to ask further questions to clarify a feature request and sometimes I even discuss ways that it could be implemented. But it doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be able to implement that feature in the next update or update after that or whenever. I receive hundreds of feature requests for improvements to Tap Forms. Not all of them make sense, but a lot of them are good ones. I pick and choose the features that I believe I can implement in a reasonable amount of time that I feel will benefit most of my customers. I also implement features of my own that I feel will make Tap Forms a better product overall.

John, what’s the problem with Backup & Restore on your device? Mac, iPhone, iPad?

Do you have a specific question about how One to Many relationships work that hasn’t been explained well in the manual?

I just tested having a Section Heading as the first field and I collapsed it and it seemed to work ok. I’m not entirely sure what you meant by “when messing around in an expanded header”, but I assumed you meant visiting some fields, saving them, editing some data, etc. It seems to be functioning ok for me. At least in my new version.

Hi Brendan,

Great to hear that there will be Youtube screencasts. Your database is making my life a lot easier. Thank you.

John

Tap Forms uses the SQLite FTS search engine for general search. By default all search terms are “ANDed” together. You can put “OR” in between search terms to get an OR search. OR must be in upper case. For example “Terminator OR Hunger” would return all movies with the word Terminator and all records with the word Hunger in the content somewhere.

But if you need more advanced searching it’s best to just use the regular saved searches and combine the rules.

It should. What Tap Forms is doing in the new version is executing two searches and then intersecting the results. It’s using the Saved Search to return those records, then the FTS search to find all of the records that match the search term, then intersecting the two result sets.

Is there a specific kind of search that you’re trying to accomplish where you need this?

I’m late to party here, Angri, but I just tried your scenario and couldn’t fulfill step 2: “add 1 of my 120 Saved Searches.”

I was able to click on a Linked Record (One to Many) to see all linked records and then use the General search to further refine those results.

Just clicking on a saved search after clicking on a Linked Record executed the search on all records; not just the linked ones.

Full disclosure: I’ve been using TF5 for < 10 days.

Maybe an option (feature request) could be an option to, when viewing the linked records, save them to a new form using the existing form as a template. That existing form could have saved searches. The new form could even be a temporary form that required confirmation when moving off of it to save the form or drop it.

I’m curious how your database search has panned out. I’m cautiously optimistic that TF5 will provide me with the functionality I need, though I am still testing.