Sunday, December 24, 2006 - Sun, 24 Dec 2006

While implementing the saving of Tag files into new files, I realized I was not consistent in the way Behold does all its Open and Save dialogs. It seems like a good time now to fix this up.

The first thing I wanted to fix was the way the initial directory is set before the dialog opens. I looked at Microsoft Word as an example. I do trust Microsoft for a good first idea about how to implement something because they spend a lot of effort trying to come up with an intuitive design. But I was a bit surprised by what I saw here.

In Word, when you use a Save As command, it starts you off in the directory where the file came from. That makes sense. This will also set the directory for Open commands, so the next time you use the Open dialog, if you previously used Save As, it will start you where you saved. The Open dialog will just set the initial Open directory because Save As is entirely based on where the file came from. Again this makes sense.

But what surprised me was that opening Recently Used Files or executing a Save command did not change the initial directories. I initially had thought they should. But after thinking about it, it made sense to only change the directories when the user actually sees a directory selection window in a dialog.

So I changed the code to match this idea. I think it will be hardly noticeable because people never think about this. They just expect something to happen a certain way, and the way is usually what they’re used to, and what they’re used to is usually Microsoft’s standards. I’ll try it. If it doesn’t feel natural and it needs modification, I can always change it.