[Sigia-l] Date ranges

[Ziya Oz]

"Avi Rappoport" wrote:

> ...Truly an innovative way to approach date-ranges: I wish I
> could say I thought that up, but it's used by Apple's Sherlock,
> HotBot and Inktomi Search software.

Those are newcomers. :-)

Those of us who have been designing/developing applications in an age when
bandwidth, hard disk space and CPU power were at a premium had to come up
with ways of optimizing both the actual and the user-perception of our apps'
performance. 

One way to do that (like mining web logs today) is to profile usage and
query patterns. It often is the case that a statistically significant
segment of users do very similar queries. So why not factor them out! In
most pop-up menus I list on top up to half dozen most-used items: date
ranges, countries, denominations, stocks, reports, etc., followed by the
regular elements in that array type.

The second level of optimization (if possible) is to pre-calculate those
(often sought) queries and save the result sets for instantaneous access.
One could even save the base result-sets and further refine them with actual
user queries when submitted via very fast set operations. By having a
feedback loop and bit of analysis, one could also automate the process of
extracting most-used patterns and a have a dynamically changing selection at
the top of the selection list. In large-scale enterprise apps with massive
datasets, these will result in enormous usability improvements, not that I'm
a 'usability engineer' in a white coat. :-)

Best,

Ziya