Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Been struggling the last few weeks, again with the concepts of how to implement the Auto-, Surname-, and Instant-, and ReOrganize buttons. This time my problem is that the user might customize after AutoOrganizing and then want to save this. I was throwing around the idea of saving four versions of the organize info, one for each of the Organize types, and save all 4 with the Behold file. Night after night, I was thinking about this, and couldn’t quite get it just right. It was too complicated, and might be non-obvious for the user. The real problem, I finally realized, was that after custom organizing, the custom info could be saved unintentionally over the original organize info. My solution is for the first three reorganizes, append a suffix to the file name when saving (_AO, _SO, and _IO). And if that new name will write over an existing file, prompt first. Maybe that will work okay. I’ll have to implement and try it.

There was a very well-written article about .NET in Karen Kenworthy’s newsletter. It looks exciting. It’s not for now, and not until the next Windows Operating system supporting .NET and 64 bit processing is out, but its best feature is its machine independence. Eventually, emulators will be written for the Mac and for Unix systems to allow a .NET compiled program to run on anything. That’s exciting for Behold. It will make porting a snap. Delphi 8 has .NET built in, and that will be added to my future plans for Behold.

Bug fixed. Now its a matter of finishing the History List for Instant Organize. Takes some time to hook everything up. It uses two sets of saved items, one which the internal IDs of what is to be organized, and the other is the names to be displayed in the list. The internal IDs are hidden. When adding or deleting, both sets must be done together.