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More updates on the performance side have been made for the new link dialog feature for Deki Wiki. This is strikingly similar to an earlier video I posted, but this one is a *lot* speedier and and has very subtle changes to it to improve usability. This video was made live from http://wiki.opengarden.org; you can register a free account at that wiki and edit any page to try it yourself.

Some things to note:

• Initial link population does a search - the great benefit of MediaWiki is the ability to link any word just by doing [[this]]. In a hierarchical system, this functionality fails; you might end up doing something like: I like eating [[Fruits/Apple|apples]] while sitting in front of my [[Computers/Apple|Apple]] computer. We've attempted to inject a little smartness by doing an initial search against the keyword. There's some work left to do on that UI view (the paths only populate when I clicked them; if you had 20 results, it would really suck to have to discover the paths, especially if they all share the same title!).
• Each search result has a blue icon to the right - this triggers you into the hierarchy mode. From this view, you can navigate up and down the whole hierarchy and find whatever page you need. Notice how fast it is!
• Icons on the left correspond to "Back up the hierarchy tree", "Root node", and "My page". After I clicked "My page," you'll notice there was some lag as I hit "up." This was because that top level had over 1,300 pages. I still think it handled that pretty well!

The dual mode should be good for finding information on a large system pretty effectively through computer and human searches.

Of course, the only real test for success will be whether or not people actually like using it - I'm sure I'll make more use of it over the next few weeks and see how I feel about it.

P.S. There's an easter egg in this dialog that'll let you link to files on your local network share as well, but I'll leave that discovery up to somebody else :)

Some improvements we talked about:

• Adding an autocomplete to the search form while in navigation mode. Not only that, but typing while in navigation mode would walk you up/down the hierarchy. Not entirely useful, but would be a very nice WOW factor
• Adding an icon to differentiate search/navigation mode - I agree the initial view is very jarring if you're not familiar with it (what just happened?!)
• Do something better than the "return to search / return to navigation" mode text

Thoughts, suggestions?