E
Extravagan
1. Randomly sometimes when typing in a tag some sort of popup appears
briefly and then vanishes again, too quickly for me to see what it
said. It seems to have no negative effects when this happens though.
This could be related to a long-standing issue with Explorer rename
(since XP or earlier) that acts similarly: a ding and a balloon popup
that comes and goes too quickly to see what it said, while typing in
the new file name.
2. There seems no way to copy a pre-existing tag's text to the
clipboard.
3. While typing in a tag, it sometimes suddenly acts as if enter was
hit, or the mouse clicked to the left in the image area, when neither
had occurred. This is accompanied by another brief popup, but this
appears in the image area rather than near the input field.
This one is more severe, since it interrupts your typing and you have
to find the half-written tag, delete it, and retype it. The partial
typing up to the point where you got interrupted is unsalvageable due
to bug #2 in this list.
Making matters worse is that this particularly seems to happen when
you switch rapidly between two images copying some tags from one to
the other. You enter a tag, hit left-arrow or whatever, read a tag,
hit right arrow, start typing, and bam! it prematurely acts like you
hit enter. If the tag text was at all complex, by the time you've
found the half-written tag and deleted it, you've forgotten enough
that you need to switch images again and reread the source tag. And
then the odds of the bug being triggered a second (or nth) time are
quite high, since it seems related to switching away from the image
you're tagging and back to it, hardly ever happening under any other
circumstances.
4. "The changes to the tags, etc. etc., could not be saved."
This one is easily the worst, because it can cause substantial data
loss, e.g. if you added a number of tags.
The (undocumented anywhere) workaround seems to be to open the
affected image in Photoshop and re-save it, but that can cause a loss
in image quality. Otherwise it will keep happening consistently with
that particular image.
There is no prior indication that the edits won't save (it doesn't
say "why can't I edit..." in the bottom right corner, for instance),
and no way to try to preserve your changes; it just discards the
changes without any "cancel" option or other alternative presented
to the user.
This one is the one in the "fix it now!" category. (#3 would be the
next priority after this one is fixed.)
Put in other words:
If I'm logged in as system administrator and the file is a jpeg and
is not read only, I don't ever want to see that particular message
again. Have I made myself clear?
And don't release software that can unexpectedly discard changes
without providing some means for the user to save them, ever again.
Bad, bad Microsoft! Short of a crash or power failure, savable
changes should NEVER be discarded without giving the user a prompt
with at least one option that preserves the user's work as well as
at least one that does discard it; this is software design 101.
(And it would be nice if there were more options for preserving
session state of various kinds. Open Explorer windows, for example,
are forgotten if the system crashes or the power goes out, or if
Explorer is manually restarted without rebooting the computer. This
was true with XP and hasn't improved under Vista. Having the
open-window state auto-saved every few minutes in the background
would fix this easily and would probably be all of five minutes'
work. What apps and documents were open is a bit more complex, but
could be preserved for documents that have double-click associations.
Since the standard file-open dialog is integrated with Explorer, even
opening files from inside applications could be tracked by Explorer.
Apps like browsers that remember their own session state just need to
be remembered as having been open, and restarted. The tricky area is
closed files; if you open and then close a file and it doesn't have a
separate instance of the editing application, the open can be logged
but not the close. But the GDI can notice if an application window or
sub-window is created shortly after the file is double-clicked, and
can notice if the same window is subsequently closed.)
briefly and then vanishes again, too quickly for me to see what it
said. It seems to have no negative effects when this happens though.
This could be related to a long-standing issue with Explorer rename
(since XP or earlier) that acts similarly: a ding and a balloon popup
that comes and goes too quickly to see what it said, while typing in
the new file name.
2. There seems no way to copy a pre-existing tag's text to the
clipboard.
3. While typing in a tag, it sometimes suddenly acts as if enter was
hit, or the mouse clicked to the left in the image area, when neither
had occurred. This is accompanied by another brief popup, but this
appears in the image area rather than near the input field.
This one is more severe, since it interrupts your typing and you have
to find the half-written tag, delete it, and retype it. The partial
typing up to the point where you got interrupted is unsalvageable due
to bug #2 in this list.
Making matters worse is that this particularly seems to happen when
you switch rapidly between two images copying some tags from one to
the other. You enter a tag, hit left-arrow or whatever, read a tag,
hit right arrow, start typing, and bam! it prematurely acts like you
hit enter. If the tag text was at all complex, by the time you've
found the half-written tag and deleted it, you've forgotten enough
that you need to switch images again and reread the source tag. And
then the odds of the bug being triggered a second (or nth) time are
quite high, since it seems related to switching away from the image
you're tagging and back to it, hardly ever happening under any other
circumstances.
4. "The changes to the tags, etc. etc., could not be saved."
This one is easily the worst, because it can cause substantial data
loss, e.g. if you added a number of tags.
The (undocumented anywhere) workaround seems to be to open the
affected image in Photoshop and re-save it, but that can cause a loss
in image quality. Otherwise it will keep happening consistently with
that particular image.
There is no prior indication that the edits won't save (it doesn't
say "why can't I edit..." in the bottom right corner, for instance),
and no way to try to preserve your changes; it just discards the
changes without any "cancel" option or other alternative presented
to the user.
This one is the one in the "fix it now!" category. (#3 would be the
next priority after this one is fixed.)
Put in other words:
If I'm logged in as system administrator and the file is a jpeg and
is not read only, I don't ever want to see that particular message
again. Have I made myself clear?
And don't release software that can unexpectedly discard changes
without providing some means for the user to save them, ever again.
Bad, bad Microsoft! Short of a crash or power failure, savable
changes should NEVER be discarded without giving the user a prompt
with at least one option that preserves the user's work as well as
at least one that does discard it; this is software design 101.
(And it would be nice if there were more options for preserving
session state of various kinds. Open Explorer windows, for example,
are forgotten if the system crashes or the power goes out, or if
Explorer is manually restarted without rebooting the computer. This
was true with XP and hasn't improved under Vista. Having the
open-window state auto-saved every few minutes in the background
would fix this easily and would probably be all of five minutes'
work. What apps and documents were open is a bit more complex, but
could be preserved for documents that have double-click associations.
Since the standard file-open dialog is integrated with Explorer, even
opening files from inside applications could be tracked by Explorer.
Apps like browsers that remember their own session state just need to
be remembered as having been open, and restarted. The tricky area is
closed files; if you open and then close a file and it doesn't have a
separate instance of the editing application, the open can be logged
but not the close. But the GDI can notice if an application window or
sub-window is created shortly after the file is double-clicked, and
can notice if the same window is subsequently closed.)