A couple of interface suggestions from a newbie

As a new Mac Switcher, I decided to try the II Pro beta. I've been a big fan of Downloader Pro on the Win side for several years. My take on II as compared to DL is that II is much more full featured, but, as is typical of full featured software, it comes with a full featured learning curve. And like most beta software, the documentation is still a bit sparse. This forum was actually a tremendous help in that regard, it's just slow to pick your way through the info.

Anyway, after banging my head against the wall for almost 3 hours this weekend, I finally figured out how to set the Image File Name and Folder Arrangement macros. (I was doing a lot of gereral reading, as well). These are too areas that I feel most people will want to customize in some manner right from the beginning. Having eventually figured it out, I would like to offer a couple of suggestions for the interface that would have made my journey a lot easier.

The biggest problem I had was being able to see the "Custom" selection at the bottom of the dropdown list, but not being able to get to it, as it was always greyed out. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to solve that riddle. Eventually, I clicked on Show Macros, but didn't realize for a while that that was the edit window I needed. So, my first suggestion would be to change the "Show Macros" wording to something like "Edit/Compose Macros". That would make it a lot more obvious why one would want to click the button in the first place.

Once I had figured out that I could use the Show box to change the macros I still wasn't out of the woods. I would change it and then end up clicking on the dropdown box again which would instantly change it back. Finally, I just changed it and then quit the preferences screen and WOW, it worked. But it wasn't until I reopened the Preferences panel (I can't remember if I quit and restarted II first, or just opened preferences again) that I saw I finally had "Custom" in the dropdown selection.

So, here are a couple of suggestions for all of that:
When you click on Show Macros, maybe in addition to displaying the macro, it could also add a couple of words of help, such as, "Edit the macro and press Enter to continue". (I read in the forum about the need to press Enter so that never gave me a problem) But the really important point would be, once you press Enter, the dropdown list should immediately change to Custom, if in fact you've created a custom macro, rather than showing the old wording until the preferences panel is opened again. That would have been a BIG help. A future enhancement might be to display a Save button when the macro is displayed which would allow wording more meaningful than simply "Custom" as the title. But that's more of a feature addition, while my real reason for this post is to offer some simple suggestions which should ease the learning curve for people new to the program, especially those like myself who didn't jump in until Beta 9.

Anyway, most of what I experienced would be eased significantly with documentation, but my son is also a Mac shareware developer, and I realize that when you are trying to develop a concept, especially when it's still in a fluid beta state, you can't afford to spend much time on a user manual. There would be too much rewriting going on for that.

So far I've only begun to realize the potential that is available in II, but I've seen enough to know it will be a permanent part of my workflow from here on out.

Good work, Marc.

Charlie Dunton