Left Justified
FeedsRebuild Woes - Taping Some Cats Together to Build a Horse
∞ | September 19, 2004 | Category: Web Nerdery, Site News
This site has been a bit quite for a while because my computer has pulled a Titanic; it scraped an iceberg about a three weeks ago and has been taking on water ever since. Last weekend I had to jump ship.
The technical issues have been solved and I’ve taken the opportunity to totally rethink how I store my personal files and perform a clean install of everything. That has left an entirely different problem - a massive loss in familiarity/usability due to a system full of ‘default’ settings.
When you’re trying to escape a sinking ship, you don’t have time to go looking for belongings that are scattered over every deck - the same can be said of trying to capture all the personalised settings and modifications to your favourite programs when escaping a crash-happy computer. The first thing I missed when I got back to work on my fresh system was the ordering and positioning of all the palettes and preferences in Photoshop. This was followed minutes later by a stark and conformingly high contrast UltraEdit interface; complete with 12pt Courier. Wouldn’t it have been great if I could have just looked in the root directory of each program and found an intelligently named xml file containing all my preferences?
Proof of Concept
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about. I’ve used Photoshop as the example application as it is the closest thing I use to an IDE, it is the program I have been using the longest (as of next birthday I will have been pushing pixels for more than half my life!) and it is far and away my favourite piece of software. Element names have been made purposefully verbose to ease readability .
Below is a snippet detailing how basic preferences could be stored:
<preferences><preferencegroup><name>General</name><pref name="color picker" value="Adobe" /><pref name="interpolation" value="Bicubic Sharper" /><pref name="history" value="30" /><pref name="export clipboard" value="true" /><pref name="zoom resize" value="true" /><pref name="auto update" value="false" /><pref name="asian text" value="false" /></preferencegroup><preferencegroup><name>Display and Cursors</name><pref name="color channels" value="true" /><pref name="diffusion dither" value="false" /><pref name="pixel doubling" value="false" /><pref name="painting cursor" value="brush size" /><pref name="other cursor" value="standard" /></preferencegroup></preferences>
Simple, yes? Now to use XML to really make a difference. The snippet below is an example of what I really wanted last Monday - the details of my desktop arrangement within photoshop.
<palettegroup><height>710</height><width>274</width><x-pos>1292</x-pos><y-pos>2</y-pos><palette>Layers</palette><palette>Channels</palette><palette>Paths</palette></palettegroup><palettegroup><height>132</height><width>212</width><x-pos>1571</x-pos><y-pos>2</y-pos><palette>Info</palette><palette>Histogram</palette><palette>Swatches</palette></palettegroup><palettegroup><height>382</height><width>212</width><x-pos>1571</x-pos><y-pos>136</y-pos><palette>History</palette><palette>Actions</palette></palettegroup><palettegroup><height>218</height><width>212</width><x-pos>1571</x-pos><y-pos>520</y-pos><palette>Character</palette><palette>Paragraph</palette></palettegroup>
This could easily be extended to include the paths to action files, patterns, brushes and other such goodies. Techniques like the above are the sort of lead the big guys should be taking from the linux/unix crowd. I’m not saying everything should be controlled via .conf files, but at least give advanced users advanced options.
Oh, in case Andrei stumbles upon this, perhaps you could mention the idea to the guys at work? 
Have Your Say
Sorry, comments are closed on this post.
That would be hella convenient. I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve had to re-configure all of my programs to the settings and style I like.
And I can never remember every setting so I’m stuck with something odd for a month till I remember to change it.
Remembered to delete Comic Sans MS?
As for storing preferences using XML, is that worse than this post of mine at CF?
@Chris: Totally man. That’s what I’m stuck with now
@Geoffrey: Of course I did! I consider that standard procedure for reinstalling Windows - make sure Comic Sans and Curlz MT are nowhere to be found…
Andrew:
Comic Sans and Curlz MTWhy isn’t <del> working, it’s meant to be in my last post, crossing out the fonts…
Hehe, whoops
. I had left it in the list of allowed files on the about page, but had not allowed it in the php.
All fixed now.
I’ve also allowed
blockquote, I just hope people remember that there has to be<p>s nested in them…Doesn’t WP automatically insert the paragraph tags in blockquotes? I thought of that when I first put a blockquote in a post, the paragraph tags that is, and without checking the markup, I checked the page and it validated. I guess I can’t say if it does indeed do that automatically…
a solution like the one you proposed would have made my life on monday night SO much better. i managed to clobber my system and had to redo the whole thing monday night. i think I’ve got most things back to the way they’re supposed to be, but who knows…as i go through each app, i’ll immediately notice what I’ve forgotten
hang in there! (i’m trying to…)
Seth: Good point! You’re probably right.
Nick: I feel your pain man, hang in there.
I always find it useful to leave Comic Sans available, then when you happen upon a site which makes use of the dreaded font, you can make a mental note not to visit that site again!
@Blair: Exactly.