Customisation annoyance

[Smith-Corona]

hi,

there are very few things if any in UR I find positively annoying, but this is definitely one. Say you do some customising in UR - set up some keyboard shortcuts, make some new toolbars and put buttons on them etc. Say you have just one database open while doing this. Then you open another database. You notice your customisations don't show in the new database. So you close that database, you're back with the one you had open when you did the customising, the customisations are now back. You think fine, now if I close and reopen UR the customisations will surely be "set" and will appear in all databases. So you close UR and reopen - and all your customisations are gone. And now you have to put them all back.

This has happened to me quite a few times. It took me a while to work out what was happening and even then I would sometimes forget. So now my rule is: a) never customise UR when you have more than one database open, and b) as soon as you've finished customising, close UR and reopen. That way you can be sure of keeping the customisations and of having them show in all open databases.

It's annoying because customisation is a really strong feature of UR, extremely useful and you can spend a long time setting up your shortcuts etc, only to see it all vanish.

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Smith-Corona

[$bill]

Your rule certainly agrees with the help file on customizing toolbars and panes...
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Manual/toolbarcustomizing.htm
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/Manual/panecustomizing.htm

• Customizations should be performed with only one database open, since the settings for the last open database window will be persisted and used the next time Ultra Recall is started.

Perhaps your suggestion "as soon as you've finished customising, close UR and reopen" would be a useful addition...

[Smith-Corona]

aha - it never even occurred to me there would be something in the manual on this! Thanks for pointing that out.

My homemade rule of "as soon as you've finished customising, close UR and reopen" is maybe just "belt and braces" on my part. One thing I would query though in the manual is the bit about how "the settings for the last open database window will be persisted". My experience is that even if you switch back to the first database - the one with the customisations - and then close UR, on re-opening UR with that same database or any other, the customisations are gone.

So the point about "customise, close and reopen" is really in case I forget the above and go and open another database at some point after customising. It seems to me once you've done that, you'll always lose your customisations.

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Smith-Corona

[schferk]

1 )

It's even more weird than that.

2 )

Today, again, I lost another hour's time by redoing all my keyboard assignments first, then closing down the database in which I did it, in order to work on other databases that were open at that very moment - just a matter of my memory too strained for memorizing that this was indeed the wrong way to do things.

But then, my memory indeed tends to memorize things I need OFTEN, in UR and in general; where it abandons me, it precisely when it should remind my, weeks or months after I did something the right way, that, here again, I should again do that thing in exactly that special way I did it weeks / months ago.

And since UR's keyboard assignments (and other customizations) are NOT done on a daily basis for the most of us, I suppose, but in a halfway-permanent way, before, here and again, being adjusted weeks or months later, those customizations invariably fall into my "used too sparsely in time for me having the important special points present in my mind to consider them", or even, more precisely, I don't even remember that there had been such points to observe here, in the first time!

And since I'm not alone with this lack of perfect memory, customization in UR should be more intuitive, not being vanishing-if-you-don't-respect-those-very-special-conditions-imposed-by-UR-if-you're-happy-enough-to-remember-them.

Thus, please consider any NORMAL way to store any customization:

a ) store them when the user does them, i.e. when he closes the dialog (= without further asking) (= my preference)

b ) the same, but trigger an additional dialog then, i.e. ask for "Store these changes permanently yes/no?"

c ) set a system variable and ask for that whenever the user closes down that database; then, in case, trigger a dialogue as in b).

1 again )

Indeed, as said before, it's even more weird than that!

So here I lost my key assignments, and THEN, I remembered why I did, so I did it anew, and I thought I did it right this time: Just one db open, and, after the assignments, I closed down that (single) db. Then, I reopened UR... and my assignments were LOST again!

Why? Well, more than once, I close down programs by clicking with the mouse on that "X" on the right top corner of the screen, instead of doing Alt-F4 (= which is equivalent to File-Exit by menu);

internally, clicking the "x" is different: even if there isn't but a single file open, making the program in question closing down, clicking the "x" is TWO steps internally, instead of a single step - but for me as a user, this does NOT become evident; it's another thing I need to bring in my mind first, from a programmer's view, and then, remember each time (see above).

And this first internal step, closing down the UR db before closing down the program, made me lose my key assignments anew.

Now, I'll spend a little hour on my key assigments for the THIRD time today, again by my own fault, but please, kinook, do something about this, it's simply too weird a behavior for any non-programmer who hasn't got and available those programmers' basics in his mind every second of his using a comp!

[wordmuse]

Customizations should be divided into two classes: global and database.

Global customizations ought to be stored separately from the databases and should apply to all databases unless...

Database customizations are in play and dictate something else.

This would be analogous to css styles in HTML documents. You can have a separate style sheet (here it would be a customization sheet) that is called by the html files (here, the databases).

But once an HTML file is opened, it can have styles that specifically override the external style sheet. Thus database customizations would override the global customizations.

I think this would solve the problem discussed here.