I’ve uploaded a new version of the BaseElements today, which brings this to version 3.0.9. This release has been a while coming and although it seems to have only a few minor fixes, they’re not as small as they seem and there is another more significant one in there too.
Most of the time spent so far has been sorting out issues with imports. Because of some new additions to the free BaseElements plugin, which now handles unicode filenames much better than before, and also some more work in auto detecting errors we’ve been able to resolve all of the outstanding issues – I believe. As always post a bug report if you have any trouble.
The additions to the plugin are mostly to do with handling unicode, but they also add new functions. I’ll be documenting the plugin and doing a larger public release now that this version is complete, so that will be coming soon.
Highlights
One of the new features I like in this update is the ability to highlight text within a calculation, script or step. Whenever you put text in the quickfind, even if you don’t perform the find, the text in there is used as a highlight option for these items. This is a great way to locate the text you were looking for in the first place.
The reason that this is only in the calc and steps is that it requires an additional unstored calc field to display the item. Plus the extra overhead of changing the layout to add one more field on top of the original, and also altering the enter on browse mode or find modes for these fields. It would be much nicer to have the ability to highlight text within a field as one of the conditional formatting options. I’ll have to submit this as a feature request.
Changing every layout field item to display this would take some time. A bit like the other feature that is in 3.0.9 : new windows that are created via holding down option when clicking on a link will open up 20 pixels below and to the right of the original window. This is one of those basic features that should have been there all along. But it needs to be manually coded into the GTRR settings, and only activated when the window is currently not fully maximised.
However there are currently 2448 GTRR script steps in BaseElements. And half of them generate a new window. Generally there are either 4 or 6 steps per script, and obviously lots of scripts. ( On a side note, I could reduce this to a single script if you could select the destination TO via a calculation. ) So I spent reasonable amount of time building a Quickeys macro to change these, and also not change the ones that didn’t need fixing, and then spent a considerable amount of time watching it change the scripts automatically for me. ( I love work, I could watch it all day 🙂 )
I’m not sure yet if I’ll setup the yellow highlight for other fields ( although I do thing it’s a great feature ), but if I do, some sort of automated way of altering the layouts would be great. It will take a while I think.
There’s always more
As you may have noticed the design of the website is changing. This isn’t finished yet, but I liked the basic elements enough to move away from our old off the shelf theme. There is more to come here as well, so look for a more detailed update on the changes soon. Mostly I’m waiting to finish up some sample videos to show off BaseElements basics for new users, and once that is done I’ll be able to produce the final product pages. I’m looking forward to it.