Service for the Common Lazy Man

If you’re one of those who don’t like to read long texts, click many links, use your eyes and in general are a lazy bastard, boy do we have a treat for you.

Introducing the Repaint Search v2, now labeled as “good” by the authorities, bringing new Improved Qualitee™, and an almost working auto-suggest feature. “Almost?”, you ask. “But I deserve better than “almost”. Well, no, you don’t, actually. But apart from that, creating an auto-suggest search feature from scratch is one thing. Trying to have it working on other sadomasochistic browsers that happen to come out of Redmond is a whole different thing. So for the time being, this feature only works on IE8 or higher – or probably any other browser not naming themselves “Internet Explorer”. If you use the newest versions of Gecko- (Firefox), WebKit- (Chrome, Safari) or Presto- (Opera) browsers, you’ll get some design goodies, but other than that that, cross-browsers-wise, the whole thingumajig should work pretty well.

A few rules and tipps for using the search

1. Though most often you won’t need to, you can use a wildcard in form of entering the “%”-sign – except when using the authors search.The reason for this is we have a highly complicated system, designed by twenty-three monkeys and Denis Schranz, to enter the authors for a repaint, separate them, combine them again and then extract them for auto-suggest while separating them again.
   So somewhere in between there, the wildcard function gets lost.
2. While umlauts (ä, ö, ü) and special characters (é, ‘, “, í, etc.) won’t get you auto-suggest suggestions, it will eventually work in the search (well, except in IE, as you might imagine…). For auto-suggest, replace them the “%”-sign where applicable (i.e. not in the authors search – see i. for explanation).
3. JavaScript. You need it. Enabled. Also, it’s good for you.
4. Scenario: when seeing all those round corners, gradients, shadows et al., you yell “what the fuck, this is gonna drag my system enormously, and slow down the stupid site even more!” While we respect your freedom of imaginative thought, you’re completely wrong (and also making an ass of yourself). The search uses a whole total of one image, and that’s that tiny search magnifier icon. Other than that, only CSS3 has been used. This should improve speed noticeably when comparing it to the old search.
5. Personally, I’ve experienced that when using the search, getting the results, and then using the browser’s back button, the category selection won’t work immediately, hence the auto-suggest won’t appear. I blame that on [enter the browser of your choice here], of course. You might have to click a couple of times, or try a forced refresh.
6. As with everything concerning design and coding, this will always be a WIP. If you find any bugs other than the ones mentioned, or have improvement sugges… well no, strike that. If you find any bugs, we’d appreciate it if you’d let us know.

Now go, kiddo, go and be lazy.