Thursday, December 10, 2009

Pet Peeve

If you ever make a recently used file menu, make sure it's updated directly after the file is loaded, preferably between you choose to load the file and the program actually loads it!

I often use editors and tools that are in an unstable state and crashes all the time. Typically the crash is related to a particular file that makes it easy to reproduce the problem. When you are working with this kind of problem you typically make some change to the program that you hope fix the problem, load whatever you loaded last time and try to make some actions that crashes the editor again. The recently used files menu is your best friend for this kind of workflow, however lots of tools don't save the recently opened files until it does a clean exit. This means that when you work with a support case in some obscure temp directory you find yourself browsing for this file 10 times and at some point you get so tired of it so you load the file, exit the editor cleanly and open it again to make sure it's available in the recently used file the next time you open the editor.