The Old Interface

In Rename Master, and most of my programs, I've tended to leave options to use older implementation. With RM's two year old scripting interface, I left a button to toggle between the scripting interface and the much older interface (and also auto-magically convert scripts in the new interface from older scripts). Since this was a drastic change at the time, I felt it important to have backwards compatibility and a slower/unforced learning pace.

My philosophy was that the old interface would be feature frozen as I improved and created new renaming options. The idea was to give an incentive to learn the new interface if it contains useful features not present in the old interface and to make learning desirable. I've no statistics for version usage, but there are a group of people that use versions of the program that are several years old and still leave comments.

In the last Beta of RM, I fixed a bug for saving scripts when the old interface was active. My policy is usually to leave this section alone, even for bug fixes, so that it operates as it did before version 2.8.0. With this bug, however, the old interface was not functional as intended and I do not want to discourage users from upgrading. I've delayed removing the old interface for much longer than expected for this very reason.

A logical step - part 2

I've uploaded a new Public Beta of Rename Master that implements the first version of Skip/Execute Steps. This first version is limited by design to illicit feedback. As I've stated previously, I've some ideas for improvement to this new feature already, but it wouldn't be wise to do so without getting useful user input first. I'm most interested in real world examples of renaming needs that can be done with a Skip/Execute renaming option.

A logical step

With Rename Master, my goal became to add expressive renaming without extreme complexity. I have, however, added some advanced options - like Full Regular Expressions - as a means of working around limitations. I was able to add a very flexible and accessible Remove Expression that allows for very flexible removes that define the same rules used by a simplified expression.

I one point, I was pondering the idea of creating a simplified script language that RM could parse and execute. This, however, really wasn't a good idea since those that could understand programming wouldn't gain much from a specialized language and those that didn't understand it wouldn't be able to use it. I altered this idea into a much simpler model with a graphical interface. The user defines an ordered list of renaming options and this because the scripting that is used today. Most "scripts" used by most users only consist of one or two renaming options, so this has worked for quite some time.

The next alteration was the addition of a ?temp? variable. This variable is used by Remove steps to store the contents of the removed text. This allows the text to be added using any of the existing Add steps. This isn't very intuitive, but it is very flexible. As long as the user is familiar will the Add steps, there's nothing to relearn once the ?temp? variable is learned. While I'm happy with the method of cut-and-paste operations, I'm still looking for a better way of explaining it or divulging it in the program itself. A wizard might help this process - by changing the scripting options to only Removes and Adds and showing some dialog for how this works.

Now, the next alteration I'm thinking of is a Conditional Execute step. This step would conditionally skip or execute a defined number of the following steps, depending on the previous step. The normal case for all steps is to alter the filename, but the name may remain the same in a few cases. For example, if you're removing text and nothing is removed, there may be a number of step you would not want to execute. Conversely, only if a remove was successful you might want a group steps executed.

Right now, I'm just in the thinking stage, but there should be a new Public Beta available in the next few days. It will probably take more time to think about how to do it than to actually program it.

Textfile Confessions - Part 2

I've uploaded a new Public Beta of Rename Master with an improved Textfile tab. This version does not include a Wizard interface that I spoke of in the previous post, but a lot of the settings have been automated. I've also re-worded some of the items to make their purpose a bit more clear, but I still think the wording isn't clear enough and I'm still looking for anything better to use.

The first thing that happens after selecting a TXT or CSV file, the program looks at the data contents and attempts to automatically change the import settings. These settings divide each row of data into columns and each column is assigned a Meta-variable. Data that contains quoted fields will automatically detect comma and tab delimited CSV, even when a single column is present. Data without quoted fields must contain at least 2 fields to be detected. A single column of data is the default, for all other cases.

The last thing that happens, the program searches for the selected filenames in the rows of imported data. If the filenames are found in the data, then the program automatically sets how the program populates the ?TextN? Meta-variables for each file -- by Searching in this case. The other case is the program will just use the rows of data in order of appearance. That is to say, file number 1 will use row number one in the textfile.

At the end, a detailed description tells the user what to do next. A new "Example Script" button is also present that will create and show a new script using the ?Text1? variable as described. This way, it's possible to for a new user to get a visualization of the effect of the settings using Preview. Basically, with two button presses, the user will be in a situation to be able to experiment and see the results. I think a big problem was at the end, the user really had no idea what to do next after loading the textfile.

This Textfile section still needs a lot of polish, but it's possible I might not need a Wizard if I can get the wording fixed and the automation reliable. This all depends on what (if any) feedback I get about this part of the program.

Textfile Confession

The Textfile tab of Rename Master sucks. There, I said it. While it's rather functional once you get past the steep learning curve, it takes some leaps of logic to get there. Usually, most things can be figured out with just some playing with the Preview function, but the only feedback I'm getting about the Textfile tab is questions just getting it working. While I could add another entry to the Online Help, the help file should be a last resort and not a cheap fix for a poor design.

First of all, each section of the tab isn't labeled. The items are logically grouped, but there's quite a bit of guesswork to figure out what the settings are conveying.

The first section is the Preview section. It is used to tell the program how data in the textfile is stored and the program responds by showing the columns of data if finds and the Meta-variable names it creates. Currently, only one row of data is displayed because of size constraints.

The second section tells the program how to match files in the File List to rows in the Textfile. There's no preview here, no one-to-one mapping visual. By default the ?cfn? (current file name) meta-variable is search for in each row and a "match" means to use that row. Most user have no idea what ?cfn? even means. The user won't know it's correctly until after a script has been made using the newly created meta-variables.

The last section just vaguely references the ?TextN? meta-variables that should be shown clearly in the Preview section. The problem here is that there's nothing to tell the user to go to the Scripting tab and use the Text meta-variables in a scripting step.

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What I'm thinking about for a fix is using a Wizard to populate the Textfile tab. First, using the Wizard, I can include more descriptions and more previews. Second, I can break the sequence into logical step so the user doesn't need to be drowned with details and the users doesn't need to proceed forward until each part is working as expected. Lastly, a Wizard can even create a generic Script so that logical jump from using the Textfile tab to the Scripting tab is easy to make.

ArsClip Icons

I've uploaded a beta showing off the new icons and fixing some small problems. You'll notice that all the icons haven't been fixed - especially since the the "system tray menu" is shown in three different places three different ways. This is on my must-fix-list.

Icons Continued

As harsh as I was on Inkscape, seen below, I thought it fair to show the icons I was able to create for Arsclip that are only 16 pixels in size. After fumbling with the program and dodging crashes for hours, I learned to whip up an icon in about 20 minutes that looked decent at such a small size. For reference, I included some of the icons scaled up 3 times. I can say that I worked harder making much, much worse icons before using Inkscape.

Icons, Icons, Icons

Every once in a while, I'll get a message or two concerning the icons in Rename Master or ArsClip. Usually, I'll update them with something that's a bit better, but they're not great by any means. It's that time again and not only did I get feedback on the icons but this time I also got a user created icon.

For creating all my images, I've been using an ancient version of PaintShopPro that's around 9 years old. While great back then, it's now really behind the times and only barely supports vector based graphics. I did some searching for freeware solutions and found Inkscape, a rather horrible and sluggish program but very functional -- with a very, very useful Icon Preview feature. With just 3 objects on the screen and a 32x32 pixel sized page, it brought my modern system to a crawl once a filter was added and happily crashed several times. When it's free, it's hard to complain too much.

I've icon amnesia. Every time I start to make icons, I alway forget how difficult it is to get something that looks good at only 32 or 16 pixels square. With Inkscape, it's damn easy to get a 48x48 icon that looks good and scales up extremely well - something that vector graphics are very good at. The opposite, however, isn't true. Scaling images down make them horrible.

Based off the work of a user submitted icon, this is what I came up with for a new Rename Master icon.



It's no where near as fancy as it should look, but that's a side effect of creating something that's simple enough to scale down to 16x16 pixels in size and not look completely awful. I only had to minimally change the smallest icon by hand to have something that's a representation.

I've uploaded a new build of Rename Master using the new icon. In the next upload, I'll update the upload for more color depth, a transparent taskbar icon, and a super huge 256x256 icon (with the last 2 changes only for Vista/Win7).

I've also updated some of the icons in ArsClip, but it needs more work. Seeing it took a full day just to create a single icon, it might take a little while more to update the dozen icons used in ArsClip.