There are many really wonderful things here — thank you DOpus for such fine work — and my apologies in advance for the misunderstandings that I will be displaying below. But: where is the backwards compatibility that is such a significant feature of Windows? I installed DO11 and immediately "restored" from my previous DO10 configuration file, hoping that I could then go through the very long list of changes at my leisure and pick out what I wanted. No such luck — after three hours of fiddling about and trawling through the list of changes, the new configuration is still a mess. In particular:
I can't work out how to turn on the hotkeys in the menus of my main (non-floating) toolbar.
My main floating toolbar, which I have set up with a global hotkey as a Start Menu replacement, used to be a vertical list. Now it is in three columns, and I can't get it back into one column. At least I can turn on its hotkeys. Similarly with another floating toolbar.
My carefully saved layouts and formats don't work properly. In particular, the widths of the panels have changed.
There is a new, sixth, attribute, indicating whether the file is online, but this has changed the required column widths. I don't use online files at the moment, and I can't work out how to turn this sixth attribute off.
Cosmetics:
— In the new headings at the top of each panel, the pale coloured backgrounds of the paths look drab and clash with other things. I can't work out how to change their backgrounds back to white (or, preferably, revert to the DOpus10 design).
— Non-coloured icons, like the three on the right of the path, would be preferable for the icons on the left of the path. The blue background of the arrows, and the yellow favorites star, clash with most colours, and are also far too prominent on the screen.
I'm not a happy chappie. Three hours is far too long to spend trying, and failing, to sort out a new version of software that one is already quite experienced and confident with — and I reckon I'm reasonably good at reading instructions!
Recommendation: Make the next DOpus11 Beta backwards compatible. I am really keen to implement the many, many beaut new things, but I want to start with my previous configuration rather than a mess that I can't fix.
It is backwards compatible, in that you can get back to what you had before if you want to.
It is also a beta of a new major version. We are months away from the final stable release. There may be issues and you should expect at least some, because it is a beta version.
If you don't want to be faced with the possibility that you might have to change a few things, or some things may not be ideal or may even be broken at this early stage then please do not install the beta; wait for the final release is ready instead.
This would also have been better as one question per thread, but let's see how we get on keeping it all together. If the thread turns into unreadable spaghetti then I might split things up.
[ul][li]Hotkeys in lister toolbars work identically to in Opus 10, except where noted below.
You shouldn't need to turn toolbar hotkeys on, they should just work, as long as the toolbar itself is turned on in the lister. (And the hotkeys don't clash with other hotkeys, and there's isn't a bug nobody has noticed yet which there could well be as this is a beta).
Have a look in Customize -> Keys.
Note that each window can now have independent toolbars, and the Customize -> Keys list will show you the hotkeys for the most recently active lister. If you turn on toolbars and want them to be the new default, you need to save them (e.g. using Settings -> Set As Default Lister).
And also note that the Keys list is now grouped by type, so the Toolbar hotkeys will be lower down the list in the Customize window than before.
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[li]As far as I can tell and know (Jon may correct me if I'm wrong as he did the new toolbar code), the way floating toolbars are resized has not changed. You may need to set the toolbar into Vertical or Horizontal mode if it's not in the one you want, however. The change notes explain the new system for modifying floating toolbar settings.
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[li]If you give us some examples of things which have changed size we'll see if they can be made the same size as before.
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[li]One extra character in the attributes column does not seem like the end of the world, but I guess it could be made optional if enough people feel the same.
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[li]You can change the file display toolbar background colours via exactly the same place as the file display border colours were configured in Opus 10.
You can also change back to the old file display border, but I recommend at least trying the new way for a while. (It takes a while to adjust to it, and I wasn't sure at first either, but I much prefer it now.)
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[li]The current icons are temporary. I'm not a fan of the blue icons on a blue background either. (I'm using green icons.) We are months away from the final release and icon changes are planned.[/li][/ul]
Maybe there's some confusion here that the Opus 11 public beta is like the betas for minor updates to Opus 10 were. It is not. This is the type of beta we used to give out privately to handful of testers & iterate on for months before a big release. This time we figured we'd do it in public and let anyone who wants to try things and provide feedback. A lot of things have changed, a lot is still to change, and you shouldn't install the betas (at least this early in the process) if you're expecting a finished product. It's very much a beta version.
Thanks, Leo, for making the point about DOpus11 being a "real beta" at this stage — I had been mistakenly thinking of it as one of the usual DOpus betas. This reply will now be in the proper spirit of beta. I will separate my remarks about the five issues that I raised, so that you can create separate threads if you want to.
I still recommend that the final version of DOpus11 be fully backwards compatible — meaning that a "Restore" from an OPUS10 configuration file should yield exactly what was there before — or you are going to have a lot of confused and irritated users wasting time trying to get back to where they were.
ACCELERATOR KEYS AND HOTKEYS: Here are examples of the problem.
— In both DOpus10 and DOpus11, with the main (non-global) toolbar showing, pressing "Alt+H" drops down the "Help" menu, because its title is "&Help".
— — I have retitled one of the standard buttons in this Help menu "&R. Resource Centre", and it goes to the URL "http://resource.dopus.com". In DOpus10, pressing "Alt+H - - > R" brings up the Internet site. In DOpus11, however, pressing "Alt+H - - > R" toggles the tree in the right panel!!! This is because I have written such a button somewhere else and given it the hotkey "R" (and if I turn off this hotkey using "Customise - - > Keys", then "Alt+H - - > R" duly brings up the website).
— — So in DOpus11, the hotkey is taking precedence over the accelerator key in a toolbar menu sequence, which is the opposite of DOpus10. This, of course, makes it quite impossible to write buttons with accelerator keys if one has adopted the very convenient procedure of using ordinary letter-keys as hotkeys. Presumably it's a bug.
— On the other hand, in my two DOpus11 floating menus, whether or not "Enable hotkeys" has been ticked, the accelerator keys take precedence over hotkeys, just as they did in DOpus10. This seems to confirm that the situation with non-floating toolbars is a bug.
FLOATING TOOLBARS — SOLVED: After writing out the details (now deleted), I experimented some more. I turned off "Vertical" on the first floating toolbar and moved the un-columned toolbar around the screen, then turned on "Vertical" again. After several attempts, the items went into a single column. Similar experiments with the other floating toolbar also brought success. I would, of course, have preferred that the floating toolbars had never changed their shape in the first place.
SAVED LAYOUTS HAVE THE WRONG PANEL SIZES: The column widths within each panel, and the tree widths, have come over correctly from the DOpus10 configuration. The problem is the positioning of the right-hand tree between the two panels. The left-hand panel comes up as 4.1cm wide instead of the previous 11.6cm
and the right hand panel comes up as 19.2cm instead of 11.6cm (note that 4.1 + 19.2 = 11.6 + 11.6). Another possible bug?
THE SIXTH ATTRIBUTE: Hardly earth-shattering, but I will have to go through all my formats and layouts and add a few pixels to the attribute-column width. It would be easier if I could just turn the extra attribute off, because I have no intention at this stage of using online files.
COSMETICS OF THE PANEL HEADER:
— I can't find anywhere in "Preferences - - > Display - - > Colours and Fonts" where the background of the path can be changed to white, or to anything else, from the drab, pale version of the solid colour. Perhaps the item isn't there yet — I notice that there is still an item specifying a colour for the "File display icon".
— I'm blind. I can't find how to change back to the DOpus10 file display border (but I'm now prepared to be patient and experiment with the new border).
— I have removed the arrows and favorites icons to a switched off "Temp" toolbar because they are the things that look really bad, but I understand their cleverness, in particular in applying now to the destination panel rather than having to switch focus first.
— The DOpus 10 lightbulb icon to the left of the path, with its configurable colour, is very elegant. Perhaps leave it there, and make it clickable to reveal a drop-down menu with the arrows, the Favorites, and anything else that the user wants to place there. Users who like to use the mouse would quickly fill it up with all sorts of useful things, like a link to their favourite Christmas carol.