Suggested "Small" Improvements

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Reggi
Posts: 48
Joined: Wed Feb 10, 2010 8:10 pm

Suggested "Small" Improvements

Post by Reggi » Wed Jan 22, 2014 10:16 pm

iFamily for Mac - Snow Leopard ( & Tiger )

There are several small 'annoyances' & bugs in this program which I feel would require minimum effort to fix.

1) When adding a source by opening the A/S dialog box the cursor or entry point selects line 1 and not the last line in the source table. This is very inconvenient as it is easy to make a mistake and modify Line One before realising that the new entry line at the bottom has not been automatically selected. This problem does not seem to affect Tiger, which correctly places the cursor at the bottom of the table.

2) Could an option to move the Focal person within the main diagram be provided? Sometimes it is useful to be able to see a few more generations of Descendants rather than many generations of Ancestors. This could be a simple option slider like the Levels one on the tool bar.

3) I have used the source dialog to store PDF's and JPEG's of actual source documents. This may not be to your 'approval' but I find it very convenient. I would like an option for these PDF's etc to be available on the Web pages iFamily so efficiently generates. This should only be an option, as with a large image folder the Web site generated would become rather big!!!
The HTML format is useful to distribute, say on a DVD, to other family members etc and it is here that full access to the source PDF's would be most beneficial.

4) When opening a document via the Sources dialog in true Mac style one is offered a sometimes large selection of installed applications to use in the opening. Usually, and conveniently, I use Preview and would appreciate if iFamily would realise this! Its not too bad with PDF's in which Preview is at the top of the list, but JPEG's are treated differently and Preview is located someway down the list of app's. Additionally PDF's have a direct option to open, but not JPEG's. You could extend this direct open option to all Preview capable files.

5) iFamily's included viewer cannot handle multi page PDF"s. Also the "Finder" button is very dangerous as one can easily replace an image with another without realising it. This requires a "double lock".

5) Is there any way in which fixed text labels etc could be modified? In my case I've decided to use the "Published Date" entry box on the source dialog to indicate what would be more like the "Original Date" , in cases like these it would be nice to be able to change the text.

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Warwick Wilson
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Posts: 495
Joined: Sat Nov 15, 2008 12:36 am
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Re: Suggested "Small" Improvements

Post by Warwick Wilson » Tue Feb 04, 2014 1:43 am

Reggi wrote:1) When adding a source by opening the A/S dialog box the cursor or entry point selects line 1 and not the last line in the source table. This is very inconvenient as it is easy to make a mistake and modify Line One before realising that the new entry line at the bottom has not been automatically selected. This problem does not seem to affect Tiger, which correctly places the cursor at the bottom of the table.
Another vote for point 1 today:
JimR(via email) wrote:I have been cleaning up my very long list of sources, and there is one change that might be worthwhile in the way the program behaves in the Sources Add/Edit dialog.

Here is the present behavior —
select a source entry to edit
type some string in the search slot
some one or more source entries are displayed
delete the string from the search slot
the program displays the beginning of the sources list
The change I would suggest concerns what happens after step 4. Presently, the result of step 4 is that the very first few entries in the sources list are displayed. But I *never* want to return to the beginning of the sources list when I finish the search steps. I think I almost always want to return to the source I was looking at or editing before the search. To get back to it always requires me to do something. To be sure, I could easily do a search for it, but what I am doing is a sequential process of correcting the sources list from start to finish, and so I typically want to get back to the source I was editing, and then when I am done editing it, I just want to progress to the next source in numerical order.

I probably could do a better job of arguing for the suggested change.

Let me know if I need to clarify/amplify the argument/justification.

mclewis
Posts: 37
Joined: Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:01 pm

Re: Suggested "Small" Improvements

Post by mclewis » Thu Feb 06, 2014 7:38 pm

For what its worth I'd add my vote to the suggested change that the A/S dialog box defaults to the last line in the source table - can't say its a great inconvenience but I always seem to end up scrolling down - alternatively if the source table could "remember" how it was last sorted or there was a user set default for the table view that would keep everyone happy!

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