Announcing ImageIngesterPro -- preview available for Mac

[Mike Guilbault]

Thanks for the in-depth reply Marc.

1. I understand the Client/Project/Card/Notes is for future developement - can't wait!  I'm not sure what was happening to my Pref's, but after I restarted the program, it worked fine.

3. Thanks for that... I just couldn't remember how I did it the first time.  It did/does work.

4. I understand what you're saying about 'Save' and agree with your philosophy with regards to it.  So.. if I wanted to create a new Preference set based on an existing one, do I; select the existing Pref set, go into Preferences, make my changes and then select New to save it under a new name?  If I do that, will the original Pref set be intact?

5. I'll have to experiment with this as I wasn't really paying attention.  I'll try some ingestions in the next day or two and let you know.

Keep up the great work Marc... it's looking good!

[Marc Rochkind]

Mike--

The way to think of the Preferences is that what you see is what you have, and everything you see is always being saved. So, as soon as you enter a new name, the Preferences you see are those that go with the new name, and the Preferences that you last saw for the old name are still with the old name.

Whenever you change a preference or, on the main window, the starting number, user-named folder, or metadata template, those changes are made in the Preference Set currently showing in the Preference Set drop-down.

(Inside the program, when you created the new Preference Set, the preferences for the old set were copied to a new set under the new name. If I had a Save button, this would be the Save As button that goes with it.)

--Marc

[Mike Guilbault]

So... I believe what you are saying is this.  If I want to create a New Preference Set, I should first create a New Name.  This will still have the prefs that I defined for the Set that was 'active' when I created the New Name.  I can go in and change whatever prefs I need, and when I close the Pref's window, it is automatically saved.

Do I have that right?

[Marc Rochkind]

Mike--

Almost right. I would say it this way:

1. As soon as you click OK in the Preference Set new-name dialog, you have the Preference Set.

2. The app saves its state when it needs to, and that definitely isn't correlated with closing the Preferences panel. I think it saves when you switch to a new Preference Set, when you click the Start button, and a few other times.

It's like changing the shutter speed on a camera. You expect the camera to remember the shutter speed, and there's no "save" button. This is a model for how I think computer apps ought to work. The Save button is a carry-over from the days when saving was time consuming, so you didn't want to do it too often.

More UI stuff: Running quickly through some Mac apps, I see no save button on Address Book, none on iCal, none on iTunes, none on Quicken. What these apps have in common is that they have no document. On the other hand, there is a Save on Mail (to save a draft), one on Mellel (my word processor), one on BBEdit, etc. Those all have documents.

One day somebody will make a word processor without a save button. Will probably freak out the users, if there are any users, but, in my view, that would be the right way to do it. Fear of saving the wrong thing should be addressed by versioning and infinite undo, not by a save button.

Sorry to get on my soapbox, but you gave me a chance to speak up! Actually, I had a much shorter post prepared in BBEdit, but forgot to save it... ;-)

--Marc

[Mike Guilbault]

Thanks Marc.. I think that explained it.  So if I'm going to change something in Preferences - say I need to create a special folder for a particular job - I should probably create a 'Temp' pref set that I can change at will so that it doesn't affect any of my other named Pref Sets.  Then when I need something different, I use this Temp Set.

 I guess I'm used to software such as PhotoShop where when we make a change, we can "Save As" so the original isn't affected. I don't use iCal or iTunes that much, but I do understand what you're talking about with how they 'save' things.

No apologies needed for soap-boxing - you explained what I didn't understand.  Thanks again.