SHIELADIXON Thanks very much for your support and suggestions, jlaro, and to everyone who's sent suggestions and encouragement. This is exactly what I hope to get from putting out an early beta, and I've had a much bigger response to this app than anything I've done before. The save location is an interesting one. It was quite a conscious decision to leave out the standard save dialogue, and one I thought about long and hard. I settled on the way that I've done it for two reasons: 1. My mum isn't technically-minded at all, yet she gets a huge amount out of her mac - photos, music, email and internet. For ages she was blissfully unaware of files and folders. I think it was a clever move of apple to take that stuff out of apps such as iTunes and iPhoto - it makes them far more usable, and I can see Gates following suit. The flip side of this is that people like you and I like to be in control of where our stuff goes and I can see where you're coming from. 2. I wanted to be able to see a list of saved routes and switch between them with a single-click for comparison - the neat answer to this was to store all routes in the same place and display a simple list of all routes (like the library in iTunes or iPhoto). I certainly do take your point - and as I store more routes, I'm going to need some flexibility here too. My suggestion is that I allow the user (in prefs) to specify where the routes are stored (as iTunes does), and also allow some kind of categorisation (sub-folders, if you like, or like the albums in iPhoto and playlists in iTunes). It's really interesting that you've asked about the presets including the tracing window. That's the way that I had it working when I started to build in the presets. I can't explain why I didn't like it - it felt a bit confusing and messy. I've also thought about a separate preset on the window settings. I'm open minded on this and welcome further input. I love the idea of being able to save your own presets - I've had this in mind already and will put it on the 'definate' list! You're quite right about the prefs window staying on top - I tried it both ways and the reason for bringing the tracing to the top is a long and boring one involving drop shadows which isn't an issue any more. For the record, other things that I'm thinking about putting in before the first 'real' release (v1) will be a 'twistable' scale - so that you can calibrate using a vertical scale, or any other known distance regardless of orientation (several people have suggested this). It'll also float on the tracing window - I hate the current separate scale window. Also the ability to attach comments on the route, in the form of little sticky notes or pins or something. I'm also thinking about some kind of option to take a snapshot of what's under the tracing window and saving that with the route. Further feedback will be much appreciated! (Version 0.4) |