[App Loader]: Feature request: Have an option to search by author

[RKBoss6]

Affected hardware version

Bangle 2, Bangle 1

Your firmware version

2v27

The bug

With the addition of an author field in metadata, I thought it would be useful if we could add a search feature using that, so searching for "gfwilliams" would return all the apps with the metadata that has "author":"gfwilliams". This would result in a more dynamic search, and would help if you want to see what apps different people have contributed. I envision it to be something like this:

Where the author search is a toggleable button that then searches by author or not. However, as we found out in a previous PR, my machine has difficulties actually testing out the changes in a submodule, so it may take a while. I would love to get more opinions on this to see what we can come up with!

Installed apps

No response

[bobrippling]

Interesting idea - at the moment it searches a set of metadata fields depending on the type of search. So another approach is to add the author field to that set - this might be ok since most author names are distinct from anything else that might appear.

Of course a field selector, like you've shown, would be more accurate - and perhaps this works with a url selector, like how there's ?q=... or ?id=... at the moment

Maybe we add ?author=... and see how that goes. @gfwilliams what do you think?

[RKBoss6]

Yes, and we can just modify the search bar as well to do a full search, including author, instead of a seperate button...

[gfwilliams]

I'd have though just adding the author to the metadata search might be good, Or detect author:foo in the search itself (kind of like you can do in gmail)

Personally I wonder if we want to make too big a deal of searching by author? I can see why you might want it but it might not be that friendly to new contributors (or maybe they'd like being able to link to their apps?)

[RKBoss6]

Yeah, I think just adding author search to the search bar in addition to everything else is good, instead of a seperate mode for it and everything. I'll get to work on that!

[RKBoss6]

I just made a PR! Check it out!