GUI item search

I often help my relatives do something on their computer remotely, over the phone.

Since we switched to macs, it became much easier thanks to Spotlight. It’s very easy to instruct someone to click that search icon in the top-right corner of the screen and type the name of an app (or even a preference pane), or click on Help in the menu bar of any app and search for a menu item.

The process is fairly unambiguous and intuitive, up to the point where they need to do something in the app’s GUI. Show me the Preview app and I’ll point at the Annotate button in 0.8 seconds. Make me explain how to find it to someone over the phone, and that becomes a problem, especially since I don’t really remember how it looks*, or if it is even visible by default.

A natural extension of menu item search would be GUI item search – finding buttons, tabs, etc. by keywords. This would also let users educate themselves easily.

There’s already a similar search feature in System Preferences, by the way:

* I cheated here for the sake of simplicity — toolbar buttons are captioned by default.