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Old 06-09-2012, 04:21 PM
schferk schferk is online now
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Join Date: 11-02-2010
Posts: 151
So it's a good thing to explain here that my scripting approach has TWO elements, one, explained before, being the making available of a file superstructure, i.e. providing that "super-tree" kinook has refused here a year ago or so - again, UR, now much better indeed with 200 favorites, should at the very least consider to leave the original tree unchanged, in tab 1, whenever you display / expand sub-trees (= displayed "hoisted", and the parents of which are "favorites") in other tabs: That would make a BIG step in the right direction.

And element two being the choice of a rather shallow outliner, just what's available on the market, even from Russians who's responsiveness is "less than zero", but ActionOutline letting me "script on it where I need it", without it interfering with my scripting work.

In fact, ActionOutline has so little inherent quality on its own, except for the fact that it's perfectly insignificant and unintrusive - but which is a quality in itself, in some contexts - that some day, I might again rebuilt another outliner, not with MS Allen's stuff again, but from components: a tree component, which will also provide for many additional list panes (remember I currently use a file manager as one of these, and which is in fact the real heart or brain of my system), a text editor, a menu component... and scripting, in-between.

But when I say, unintrusive, well, ActionOutline does NOT allow for "full row select", whilst UltraRecall does. What's the difference? As explained elsewhere, in my own outliner, late Nineties, mouse clicks and mouse right clicks acted differently, depending on the horizontal position the mouse was clicked within any list, my program calculating these positions in percentages of the current full width of that given list / pane: first 20 p.c., last 15 p.c., and all the middle space.

If you never had the chance to trial such a system, you'd be afraid, oh, what's when I click on the border 20/21 p.c., or on the 84/85 p.c. limit? First, the programmer can leave some per cent without reaction, triggering functions from 1 to 15, from 25 to 80, from 90 to 100, but that's not even necessary: The user will only click, within the first part, around 10 p.c., for the last part, around 95 p.c., and for the "normal" commands, in a large part around the centre.

But it's even possible - I tried, and it worked smoothly - to cut the line in four parts, instead of three : near the beginning, near the end, first half, second half. All this, with ActionOutline, where you must click within the text of an item to make it react, is not possible, so I'll have to use weird devious means in order to do the same here (virtual grid overlay, i.e. your script measuring the control's current width, then calculating your click's percentage point, then sending the command you want to trigger (but must read the list's entry, without triggering the "normal" command there - but then, I'm not so mouse-centered anymore as I had been in my time...).

You see, ActionOutline isn't but a dummy for me. As a standalone applic, it's worthless in my opinion, as is any other such rudimentary outliner on the market.

On the other hand, with programs like UltraRecall, most of highly valuable work has already been done, and just SOME more efforts would be needed to make them really outstanding and highly useful suddenly, but these additional efforts ain't applied since the market wouldn't honor them.

Or so their developers think, falsely extrapolating from the only relative success of half-baked simili-solutions to "predictable" fails of real ones.

Back to ActionOutline and other lightweight / basic outliners. As said, I'm approaching my 600 files, heavily sorted / grouped / cloned within projects and other referential material's bunches. It's in THIS fact you must seek for the core part of my concept.

Because, after having made a 20 years' voyage thru outlining in every which kind, including writing one of the very finest outliners of its time then, conceptually-wise, I've come finally back to that concept 99 (?) p.c. of all pc users apply: The concept of separate files, grouped then (hopefully) into various contexts (I know that for most people, that's a flat file tree, without clones, hence their interest in tagging utilities for complicating things - for them, these tag tools rather "sort things out" then).
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