DonationCoder.com Software > Clipboard Help+Spell
CHS feature request: smart copy/paste of hyperlinks
IainB:
...Well, I did belatedly add "methinks I'm adding irrelevant responses today" ...
...
...But it's only useful if mouser commits to it, and he's got a myriad commitments already.
-rjbull (May 07, 2012, 05:06 PM)
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I wasn't complaining and didn't feel your response was irrelevant. In fact, your comment made me go off and double-check ClipMate later.
I wasn't thinking it needed @mouser's commitment so much as I think he could find the spreadsheet (or something similar, contributed to by the CHS users) useful, but probably only if the users displayed an interest in taking on responsibility for something like that. What I did (the spreadsheet) was a demonstration of what might be worth considering in that regard - as an aid to collecting the requirements together, for analysis and prioritisation in an orderly fashion.
rjbull:
I wasn't complaining and didn't feel your response was irrelevant.-IainB (May 07, 2012, 09:01 PM)
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I think it was more relevant to other suggestions I made in another thread.
I wasn't thinking it needed @mouser's commitment so much as I think he could find the spreadsheet (or something similar, contributed to by the CHS users) useful, but probably only if the users displayed an interest in taking on responsibility for something like that.-IainB (May 07, 2012, 09:01 PM)
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I think I feel that mouser's programs, for all their quality and "donatability," belong to a hobby-programming culture rather than to a commercial one. In such a situation, I felt it would be polite to avoid putting something that might potentially feel like pressure on him. That's just my perception, of course.
IainB:
...I think I feel that mouser's programs, for all their quality and "donatability," belong to a hobby-programming culture rather than to a commercial one. In such a situation, I felt it would be polite to avoid putting something that might potentially feel like pressure on him. That's just my perception, of course.
-rjbull (May 08, 2012, 03:16 PM)
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Ahh, I see.
Oops. I had the same thoughts, but they led me in a different direction - thinking about workflow queuing to reduce pressure and improve communication.
Well, to digress further off-topic: :)
I am well aware that @mouser is an army of one, and I wanted to help to simplify the management of the queue of workflow of potentially infinite user change requests that he might be bombarded with for the applications he has developed.
Being aware of this was why I have made so few CHS-specific requests of @mouser, and why I provided a provisional copy/paste workaround using AHK to meet one request, and told him not to give it any priority if it looked like I was the only person who seemed to have raised that particular requirement.
SpoilerFrom long experience as a programmer, and later as an applications development manager and as a project and a programme manager, I have been obliged to study and apply/devise methods of dealing with the waterfall of incoming change requests and new development requests.
The main issue is nearly always "Resources". In fact, a ROT (rule-of-thumb) in project management is:
Unless you have resources committed to the project, don't bother to plan for it.
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That's because hypothetical plans do not help you get a job done. Furthermore, they can induce a subconscious feeling of pressure that the potential future that they predict is something that must now magically be achieved. It is of course irrational to believe that you can or must achieve an imaginary or phantasmagorical future state. Que sera sera. It is dreaming, yet that is precisely the thinking trap that many people fall into (cf. Deming's 14-point philosophy re targets and MBO).
I found this simple truth difficult to grasp when I first heard Deming lecturing about it in a seminar, because it went quite against: my training and indoctrination; my belief; and the received wisdom on the matter.
Hypothetical plans are at best good for time/cost estimating, but are useless for pragmatic work/project planning.
A pragmatic work/project plan states how you actually intend to set about doing something. (That does not predict that you will achieve it.) Hence the ROT. Before you can set about doing something, you generally need to have a clear picture of the resources you actually have committed to do the work.
Always, your resources to deal with the potentially infinite waterfall are finite, so you have to prioritise the queue to help guide you as to how best to go about "eating the elephant". You then allocate the prioritised work tasks to the resources committed to doing it. However, if your resources can only give a spotty or part-time effort without definite commitment, (say) because they have already been given other/higher priority work to do, then the plan fails the ROT test - i.e., you don't/can't have a pragmatic/workable project plan, because the resources cannot be committed to it (QED).
In that spreadsheet - which I did quite a while back - I provided a prototype of a suggested approach for establishing and organising a group-accessible and documented queue of prioritised user change requests (which could include bug changes also). That's all it is - a queue.
Nowhere does (or should) that spreadsheet say "When will this work be started/completed?" This is deliberate. It would be irrational to suppose a date because (in @mouser's case) - the resources cannot be committed to it (QED).
So, in such a situation, far from putting any pressure on anyone (the developer or anyone else), the queue could do quite the reverse. It could relieve any subconscious/conscious pressure from phantasmagorical deadlines, leaving you free to focus your now less cluttered/confused attention on what requests/bugs need to be addressed first, given their priority. So priority becomes the issue - not the now irrelevant "when".
In the spreadsheet, the developer could take 3 factors to assess the queue of change requests:
* 1. The priority:
A = Mandatory ("must have").
B = Highly desirable.
C = Nice-to-have.
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* 2. The reach of effect:
Estimate of of users who potentially could and would make use of this.
--- End quote ---
* 3. Relative ease: The ease/time that the developer imagines would be achievable for implementation of a change to meet a given requirement. (It is not recommended that this ever be stated as a commitment.)
Of course, it is up to the developer, but I would recommend a Kepner-Tregoe approach where you go for a points-rating of these 3 (or other relevant) factors. They are all pretty subjective, so taking the approach of (say) ascribing a value/weight to each and then adding or multiplying them together could give you a useful semi-rational outcome (a numeric score). This might be the best (most rational) that you are likely to be able to achieve under the circumstances.
You then treat this as a task order - you pick off the work in the order of highest points-score first, as and when you have time to put some work into it.
When people can only afford to give an ad hoc (i.e., not committed/dedicated) work effort to something complex, you cannot have a real work plan (QED), and there is potentially a great deal of time/effort involved/wasted in picking the thing up each time to see where to start and what to do. So - in this busy world - this kind of approach as suggested could be very useful for minimising the "pick up" time. By doing the spreadsheet in the first place, you will probably already have put a good deal of thinking into considering relative ease of work and which to do first (dependencies), for example, in establishing the queue's points-scoring/weighting. If you have documented that, then you may only need to review it rather than do it all again from scratch each time.
For all I know, @mouser already has such a scheme in place. (He seems very much on the ball.) It might already all be done in his head, for example. In that case, the spreadsheet would then probably only be of use as a communication from developer to users as to the status of the change queue, whether in his head or otherwise.
rjbull:
It's been niggling, but I still don't have a solution to your problem as stated. I think it's to do with the way that Windows handles the clipboard, and whether target applications "know" to handle incoming clips as plain text or HTML.
I would have liked a similar system where I could copy from a Web page, and have the HTML code as such pasted into a plain text editor. Many editors can strip HTML, some can do it while preserving links, which would give something similar to what you want. Still more actions than ideal. It looks like Firefox extension Extended Copy Menu may be useful:
Provides the option to copy selection as plain text or html.
It adds a "Copy As Html" and "Copy As Plain Text" to the context (right-click) menu. It is useful if you want to copy the text or underlying html from a web page into documents, posts or other applications.
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The difference between plain Ctrl+C and Extended Copy Menu on the current DC Forum Home Page is as follows.
Plain Ctrl+C:
[General Software Discussion] Re: SrtRetime 1.1.0.0 MilesAhead Today at 03:59:46 PM
[Soap Box] FBI caught on camera 'returning' a server they confinscated. SeraphimLabs Today at 03:45:02 PM
[Soap Box] Doconian International Party: Manifesto Stephen66515 Today at 03:01:42 PM
--- End quote ---
Extended Copy Menu "Copy As Html":
<tr><td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top">[<a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=6.0">General Software Discussion</a>]</td>
<td class="orangesmall" valign="top"><a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30963.msg288198;topicseen#msg288198">Re: SrtRetime 1.1.0.0</a></td>
<td class="smalltext" valign="top"> <a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=185796">MilesAhead</a> </td>
<td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top"><b>Today</b> at 03:59:46 PM</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top">[<a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=311.0">Soap Box</a>]</td>
<td class="orangesmall" valign="top"><a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30971.msg288197;topicseen#msg288197">FBI caught on camera 'returning' a server they confinscated. </a></td>
<td class="smalltext" valign="top"> <a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=372590">SeraphimLabs</a> </td>
<td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top"><b>Today</b> at 03:45:02 PM</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top">[<a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=311.0">Soap Box</a>]</td>
<td class="orangesmall" valign="top"><a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30970.msg288196;topicseen#msg288196">Doconian International Party: Manifesto</a></td>
<td class="smalltext" valign="top"> <a href="https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=254145">Stephen66515</a> </td>
<td class="smalltext" align="right" nowrap="nowrap" valign="top"><b>Today</b> at 03:01:42 PM</td></tr>
as pasted into Notetab Pro. Using NTP's "Strip HTML Tags, Preserve URLs" feature on that, wrapped to fit on screen, gives:
[<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=6.0>General Software Discussion]
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30963.msg288198
;topicseen#msg288198>Re: SrtRetime 1.1.0.0
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=185796>MilesAhead
Today at 03:59:46 PM
[<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=311.0>Soap Box]
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30971.msg288197
;topicseen#msg288197>FBI caught on camera 'returning' a server they confinscated.
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=372590>SeraphimLabs
Today at 03:45:02 PM
[<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?board=311.0>Soap Box]
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=30970.msg288196
;topicseen#msg288196>Doconian International Party: Manifesto
<https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?action=profile;u=254145>Stephen66515
Today at 03:01:42 PM
CHS sees Ctrl+C and Extended Copy Menu clips as separate entities, as witness the screenshot. But, of course, this only works for Firefox, and Extended Copy Menu is quite old (I'm still using an old copy of FF). I presume it should be possible to used editor macros to convert URLs into BBcode or whatever.
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