phatch-dev team mailing list archive

[Stani <spe.stani.be@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Carl,
As this is useful info for our development mailing list, I'll reply there.

On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Nadia Alramli <nadiana@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hey Carl,
>
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 2:19 AM, Carl Karsten <carl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>> Good news: Sheila installed it, we played around with it, works fine.
>> Sheila thinks it is pretty neat :)
>
> This is great!
>
>>
>> Now that I have something to play with, where can I enter suggestions?

It is good to email them first as some of it are design issues. So it
is good we can discuss them first. We use launchpad for bug reports
and blueprints (feature changes/requests):
https://launchpad.net/phatch/

>>  like:
>>
>> 1. when I drop images I get a sequence of dialogs:
>> add Save
>> Drag & Drop - click Batc
See preferences dialog box. When you don't do drag and drop, but
Tools>Run (or equivalent toolbar icon) it gives you the option to
choose the source folders/image(s).

>> Exploroer- click Contine
This dialog appears as in the previous dialog, this option "Check
images first" was checked. Maybe the option "Check images first" could
be disabled by default? (Note this might bite you when processing many
images. You don't want your batch process to be interrupted by an
invalid image.)

>> Ready! - click OK
See your comment about "Open target folder when done.".

>> Move the options from those dialogs to Preferences so that when you
>> drop it just happens, no dialogs.
We don't have a Preferences dialog yet. Right now Phatch shows you the
options/preferences where you need them. This is not a decision
because we like it, just a lack of man power in our dev team. A
preferences dialog box is already an old blueprint but never got
highly prioritized.

>> 2. add a preference: [x] Open target folder when done.
In the Ready dialog box, there is a button "Show images" which shows
our custom dialog. The reasons for this dialog are:
- There might be more than one target folder. As you can use variables
in the save action of where to save to, there might be hundreds or
thousands of target folders.
- The target folders might be spread anywhere on your harddrive, the
dialog provides a tree overview.
- The dialog allows you to quickly inspect some important variables
which are sometimes very valuable when you use some advanced Phatch
variables.
- The dialog isolate only the processed images. If you open the target
folder with Finder, they might be hidden in between other files.

However the use case where is only one target folder present is
probably 90% of the time and maybe it shouldn't suffer to deal with
10% of the use cases. So there is probably some room for optimization.
It would start however to add functionality to Phatch to recognize
there was only one target folder.

As an alternative we could also use the common parent folder. This
might be mostly useful, but sometimes also completely useless eg when
it points to your root folder (eg if some files are saved somewhere in
your home folder and somewhere on a thumb drive).

>> 3. add a preference: [x] auto add Save step.
We've always considered it the user responsibility to add a save
action as there are important parameters which shouldn't be
overlooked. Also there are two Save actions: Save (quality loss eg for
jpeg) and Save Metadata (lossless for jpeg). There are four solutions:
1 keep it as it is
2 when no save action is specified, don't add one but save it with the
default save parameters
3 when no save action is specified, add one without presenting a
dialog box to the user
4 add a save action automatically with the first added action

Options 2+3 are problematic for me as the user gets no feedback where
his file(s) will be saved. Option 4 was an idea I just got from
thinking about your email and I actually I quite like it. Maybe it
would be a good feature request (=blueprint). What do you both think?

>> and there is some problem: old file names seem to become the default
>> in the Drag&Drop dialog.  or something.  I'll give a more formal bug
>> report when you say you are ready for bug reports :)
Could you describe more exactly what you mean with this? It is
completely intended that the last processed files are the new default
files in the Tools>Run dialog. However if you drag and drop files and
later you drop new files, it should process the new files. If it would
process the old files it would be a bug.

> We are always ready for bug reports :)
> All suggestions are appreciated. I'm CC'ing Stani because he was looking
> after the user experience on Mac.
Well, I feel this is not Mac related, but very welcome feedback. It is
more about:
- the experience of a first time phatch user to people who use it more
frequently
and more important:
- should we optimize the workflow of Phatch for the 80-90% of the use
cases or should we always enable the safety net for the 10%?

Maybe we can experiment with this. If we get a lot of negative user
feedback on this, we might need to be obliged to revert to the old
behavior or to come up with something better.

Hey Carl, how about hacking also a little bit on Phatch within your
limited time to help us go more fast?

Best regards,
Stani