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General Software Discussion / Re: Is this a worthwhile idea for a program?
« on: February 17, 2012, 10:03 PM »
Okay, this thread ain't dead, it just took a while before I could pop it off the stack...
I knew that! :-)
That, I didn't know. Somehow I figured you'd have to set all the options in that dialog box every time. The ability to save presets is great, and you're really providing for pretty much everything there.
Now, I'll probably have a go at it my own way, because I'm itching to do a scripting-enabled application. Today I was almost ready to start adding it to Echo, but on second thought, I'm not certain the transformations belong in it. This is because:
(a) most of the time you don't need the transformations at all. I know I only need them when doing a specific job in some app, for an hour or a few, and even then only a small percentage of everything that's copied to clipboard needs to be transformed.
(b) transforming everything (because the feature's been turned on) wastes CPU cycles and memory (esp. extenral scripts) and could add much unneeded clips to the database (assuming for the sake of argument that every clip is stored in its original and the transformed form).
(c) Switching the transformations on and off, and selecting the one to use - that's work. The functionality needs to be instantly available when needed, and absent otherwise.
I put an example here, but you gave one already, reducing 9 operations to two. That's the ideal, but perhaps not quite attainable, since you'd have to have a separate hotkey for every script or transformation you ever apply, which is unrealistic. (But you may have hotkeys for the 10 most frequent, say.) I'll be happy with four steps:
That way we've just eliminated 60% of user actions, and this is a good target. It seems to me that a dedicated app can make this process smoother, more organic. It's more like a special-purpose macro utility. In fact, I suppose all capable macro apps could be used for this purpose as well, if only I could pick one :)
cough cough..
My Clipboard Help+Spell program can do all of this already.-mouser (October 07, 2011, 03:56 PM)
I knew that! :-)
Plus it will allow you to list your saved transformation operations in a menu that you can trigger, or assign them to specific hotkeys for really quick work.
That, I didn't know. Somehow I figured you'd have to set all the options in that dialog box every time. The ability to save presets is great, and you're really providing for pretty much everything there.
Now, I'll probably have a go at it my own way, because I'm itching to do a scripting-enabled application. Today I was almost ready to start adding it to Echo, but on second thought, I'm not certain the transformations belong in it. This is because:
(a) most of the time you don't need the transformations at all. I know I only need them when doing a specific job in some app, for an hour or a few, and even then only a small percentage of everything that's copied to clipboard needs to be transformed.
(b) transforming everything (because the feature's been turned on) wastes CPU cycles and memory (esp. extenral scripts) and could add much unneeded clips to the database (assuming for the sake of argument that every clip is stored in its original and the transformed form).
(c) Switching the transformations on and off, and selecting the one to use - that's work. The functionality needs to be instantly available when needed, and absent otherwise.
I put an example here, but you gave one already, reducing 9 operations to two. That's the ideal, but perhaps not quite attainable, since you'd have to have a separate hotkey for every script or transformation you ever apply, which is unrealistic. (But you may have hotkeys for the 10 most frequent, say.) I'll be happy with four steps:
- Select the string
- Press a hotkey to bring up the app-to-be-named or just a pop-up menu
- Select script / transformation from the menu (with instant search, most recently used scrips on top, all that goodness)
- Press Enter to execute.
That way we've just eliminated 60% of user actions, and this is a good target. It seems to me that a dedicated app can make this process smoother, more organic. It's more like a special-purpose macro utility. In fact, I suppose all capable macro apps could be used for this purpose as well, if only I could pick one :)