First Impressions ... I like the changes.

[Kelly]

I have been working with the beta for a couple weeks and overall I like what I see.

1. I love the full edit feature. Thank you for finally adding that!

2. The tabbed view is a welcome change.

3. The collapsed vs hidden concept in the filtered view is great. I love being able to get context as needed for just the difference that I am looking at.

4. I think the folders for organizing the sessions is good. I am a little frustrated at losing the ability to quickly select a session by keyboard by simply typing the first few letters.

5. Suggestion: I think it would be helpful to have an easy way to expand all folders in the session manager.

6. Thank you for getting the hex view option included in the 3/12 release.

7. Suggestion: When moving a file format up/down in the list, scroll the window to keep up.

8. Issue: I am missing the option for session revert. I frequently use a session as just a starting point. I will change the base folders, drag and drop in a new folder on one side and then revert back to the base session.

9. Issue: The "Open with" section of the options needs a way to clear the shortcut. As I was adding an option, I accidentally assigned a shortcut key and found that I had to abort adding it to avoid having a shortcut assigned.

10. Bug: I saved and then moved a session into a new session folder that I just created. When I exited the session manager, I got a warning that the session doesn't exist on disk.

11. Complaint: I'm not happy with text compare colors options. BC2 was much easier to configure. The change overview bar (on the left) shouldn't be controlled by background of main view. I prefer to have the main view color the text not the background. I liked the BC2 color coding in the overview bar of gray for missing, blue for unimportant and red for important.

Kelly

[Michael Bulgrien]

I liked the BC2 color coding in the overview bar of gray for missing, blue for unimportant and red for important.

Thumbnail colors have come up several times during this beta, but we never seem to get very far with it.

May 9th, 2007 at 5:31 am
Currently the gaps look almost like the areas with no changes - namely they are always painted with the same (background) color. BC2 painted them with a different color, and that worked much better for me.

I find this important because glancing at just one half of the thumbnail view doesn’t give a good overview of a file - the areas where the text is unchanged blend with the areas where there is no text at all. It takes extra effort to consider whether there are any red pixels on the other side of the thumbnails to determine whether the background color stands for no-change or gap.

May 9th, 2007 at 7:40 am
In BC2, gaps were painted gray, lines on one side only are blue.
In Cirrus, gaps remain the background color, and lines on one side only are colored according to their importance (red for important differences, amber for unimportant differences, etc.)

The problem occurs when you ignore unimportant differences. BC2 continues to display gaps (gray), but the Cirrus thumbnail does not if the code opposite the gap is unimportant (such as a comment block). While it is arguable that ignoring unimportant differences might mean you don’t need to see gaps in the thumbnail, I agree that it is useful to know where they are.

I've also suggested that the yellow gutter reflecting unsaved changes is too narrow to be seen clearly, and would be be more useful if it appeared on the side of the thumbnail where the changes reside:

May 9th, 2007 at 7:57 am
BC2 also showed unsaved changes as Yellow. Cirrus shows color of importance (due to the dynamic recompare) with a yellow gutter. The yellow gutter in the thumbnail is hard to see (easy to miss)… Also, the yellow gutter does not reflect on which side the change occurred. Consider adding a right gutter to the thumbnail for unsaved edits in the RHS.

In build 446 the thumbnail still shows yellow only on the left side even for unsaved changes in the right pane. My desire, as stated almost a year ago, is to see the return of gray gaps and propose that the same gray extend into the change gutters to increase the contrast around yellow sections, like this:



I also agree with Roman and Kelly that the importance of the changes is much more difficult to see in Cirrus. Even though unimportant differences are orange/amber, it all looks red! BC2 blue was much easier to read.

[Tim]

Thanks, Kelly.

7) Maybe difficult, since this isn't our own control, but we'll look into it.

8) You can revert a session by selecting it from the Sessions dropdown (and picking No when prompted to save changes). We'll consider brining back the Revert command.

9) This will be fixed in the next release.

10) It's working as designed: If you have a session open and then delete, move or rename it in a separate Open Session view, the loaded session warns you that it's been disconnected from its stored location. IOW, it's best to close a session before moving it to another spot in the sessions tree.

11) I agree. I hope to have improvements to color selection and thumbnail painting soon.

[Kelly]

Tim,

Thanks for the updates. 7 & 10 are not big problems, they were just things that weren't intuitive. In terms of session revert (8), I am a very keyboard centric user and I find it much more convenient to be able to revert by a keyboard shortcut.

In terms of thumbnail painting (11) I would hate to suggest more configuration options, but I think that its colors need to be disconnected in some way from the main view colors.

Thanks for a great product and for the continuing effort to make it even better.

Kelly

[Roman Starkov]

My desire, as stated almost a year ago, is to see the return of gray gaps and propose that the same gray extend into the change gutters to increase the contrast around yellow sections, like this:

Yes, that looks way better and more useful. Can we have that please please pretty please?

I also agree that blue is better for unimportant changes but fortunately that's something I can just change in the preferences. Still though, my own personal opinion is that orange is not a good default, and I believe strongly in good defaults - makes it a lot easier for newcomers.

[Tim]

I agree, and this has been on my TODO list for a long time. I plan on releasing new color handling soon - in a week or two.

[Michael Bulgrien]

Just curious, Tim... are you considering my suggestion of putting the yellow gutter color on the right for the right pane? I see that text changes in right pane still color the thumbnail on the left-hand side in build 450.

[Tim]

Yes, I am. I didn't get a chance to work on the thumbnail for build 450.

[aid9035]

Any Resolution to The Thumbnail Color Issue?

I found this thread searching for some way, within the BC3 Thumbnail Overview, to restore the grey color to represent "missing" blocks of code, as in BC2. Has any such method been enabled yet in BC3? Using the "Tools", "Options", "Display" dialog, I can see how to adjust the compare and merge colors, but I don't see how I can adjust anything about missing text. What am I missing?

TIA,

Jerry (BC3 eval 3.0.4 build 8855)

P.S. In general, I agree with Michael's and Roman's suggestions about Thumbnail color presentation as stated earlier in this thread.