Plans to take out features from TrackerV3?

Features wanted...
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spinner
Posts: 85
Joined: 01 Oct 2004 13:25

Plans to take out features from TrackerV3?

Post by spinner »

I started to post this in reply to an existing thread but I reckon it might be better as a topic on its own!
admin wrote:Actually I'm planning to take some features out of the program! And I would be interested to hear from you all what you think is totally superfluous and should be removed from the app.
I think that might well be a backward step. What about putting those less-used functions into a power user's mode so that they only become visible when that mode is selected.

To follow up your idea that you might want to reduce the feature count. I think that at a technical level TV3 is fast. It may be technically quite hard to make it any faster.

However to complement the fast technical speed I do rather think that the user interface should be improved. Opera calls itself "the fastest browser on earth" and that is a fair claim largely due to its ergonomics rather than simply judging it by its rendering speed.

I would hate to see TrackerV3 go the way of Ghisler's Total Commander (or Windows Commander as it used to be called). Technically Total Commander is a really great file management tool-kit. But its ergonomics are definitely not intuitive. OK, so Total Commander tries to be a bit like the very old Norton Commanders but I was actually brought up using Norton Commander v2 back in the very old days of the IBM PC-XT and yet I regularly struggle to find Total Commander straightforward to use!

So I would welcome any good ergonomics for TV3. Like most regular users of PCs, I am a keyboard man rather than a mouse man. At the moment if I want to search for a file I launch TV3 using a hotkey and then I have to put the cursor onto the name field. Hey yes! - sure I have worked out that ALT + N will do that but should I have to ALT + N my way on every launch?

Then, worse still is how I have to find one of my regular folders in the Location field. As before, I have worked out that ALT + L gets focus there. But whatever happened to the customary ALT + DOWN ARROW to open the dropdown for that input field from the keyboard.

Some innovative way to get to old locations would be welcome. The one I favor is to enter a substring of a previous folder path and have that appear as a suggestion. EG: If I often go to:
C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\
and it is in TV3's list of previous locations then I would lke to be able to key a string like quick and have that path appear. If my string is not unique then I could BACKSPACE and try launch. Perhaps even explore is unique enough.

Now this is just an example and I hope it is received in the same positive spirit as it is made! :-)

admin
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Re: Plans to take out features from TrackerV3?

Post by admin »

spinner wrote:Now this is just an example and I hope it is received in the same positive spirit as it is made! :-)
Absolutely! I very much agree with your general statement (and also with your specific points). I suggest to take a little time and collect more ideas from other users, and with combined forces we'll finally arrive at some ergonomics-wonder-app!

admin
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Joined: 22 May 2004 16:48
Location: Win8.1, Win10, Win11, all @100%
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Re: Plans to take out features from TrackerV3?

Post by admin »

spinner wrote:But whatever happened to the customary ALT + DOWN ARROW to open the dropdown for that input field from the keyboard.
It's back! I did not even know this trick :)
spinner wrote:Some innovative way to get to old locations would be welcome. The one I favor is to enter a substring of a previous folder path and have that appear as a suggestion.
I stuffed that into the next BETA. Maybe you can use it :wink:

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