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Smart Browsing

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 9:41 am
by Erwin Denissen
Would it be useful to restore the Browse history from the previous session? I also wonder whether adding "Browse Favorites" support would be useful?

Browse History

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 5:41 pm
by Dave Crosby
Another subject I feel very strongly about both ways.

Some times it is nice to quickly find a font I looked at a couple of days ago.

Other times I have just downloaded 8-12,000 fonts, and I like to look at each of them. That browse history is worthless.

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 6:45 pm
by pentool
Personally, I don't see a need to restore browse history. Why? Let's say the last time I browsed a folder with 100 gazillions of fonts (including subfolders). When I start MT, it will automatically start to browse the Windows font directory, so that procedure will be in progress. So what will happen at this point with the browse? Will it start automatically browsing the last visited folder as well? So this will be 2 threads going at the same time? Or it will start only when I click the "Browse" tab? But when I do that, I probably don't even want to automatically start browsing from my previous session, just navigate to another directory. In that case starting an automatic browse session from the last place would not be helpful.

However, I do see a good idea behind having "Favorites" folders somehere in a dropdown list that I could quickly browse. I'd support having that feature. This feature could replace the need for the browse history, because if I want to remember the last browsed place, I could just quickly add it to the favorites list. (...just make sure there'll be an option to be able to remove items from the favorites list...)

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 7:01 pm
by Bhikkhu Pesala
The loading speed of the program is important. If MainType can cache the results of the browse history and load instantly where it left off, then check for any changes in the background, or only if I ask it to refresh, that would help.

I think that after using MainType for some time, many users will have sorted their fonts into groups, and then changes will become fewer. It seems like a waste of time to repeatedly scan directories of hundreds of fonts that seldom if ever change.

Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 11:12 pm
by pentool
Bhikkhu Pesala wrote:I think that after using MainType for some time, many users will have sorted their fonts into groups, and then changes will become fewer. It seems like a waste of time to repeatedly scan directories of hundreds of fonts that seldom if ever change.
That's a good point. But instead implementing this for the browse history it might be more feasible to implement the caching for the favorites places, since it sounds like if a user already organized their fonts a certain way, then chances are they would add those locations to the favorites location.

Either way, I think MT beats the crap out of other managers even the way it stands right now. Erwin rocks!

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 10:42 am
by Erwin Denissen
I'm afraid I didn't make myself clear :?
I wrote:Would it be useful to restore the Browse history from the previous session?
Here I'm talking about the folders stored behind the Back and Forward buttons. It might be useful to see what folders you browsed through in previous sessions.
Image

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 11:10 am
by pentool
ohhhhhh THAT! Personally I never use the browse history, so it's other people's call...

Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2006 7:33 pm
by Wombat
It would be useful to have favourites button

But it might also be good to follow the search functionality of

http://locate32.webhop.org/

Have a look see what you think



Sigi

Favorites would definitely be useful

Posted: Wed Apr 05, 2006 8:30 pm
by Someonelse
Having a way to store and quickly access Favorites would definitely be useful (would save a lot of navigating the browse folder tree)--especially since I organize all my fonts manually before installing/loading them.

So, having quick access to the few folders i would access would still be a welcome addition that would make MainType that much more convenient than it already is.