Moving back to the general point of improving Treeshare, it is clear that I should have gained a bit more experience of RM9 before posting my comments. Most of the proposal still applies, but I have some RM9-specific comments.
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I like the RM9 main screen for updating/adding/deleting people and items. It looks good, the < signs are clear and the screen responds promptly to your clicks. Good.
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In his post @russhart pointed out that I was wrong about the ‘update all’ tickbox. I apologise again for getting this wrong. RM9 has now solved a problem introduced in RM8. Good.
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My original post also referred to some entries seemingly requiring update although nothing appeared to have changed. This is the same point made here by @rwh. I am now in a parallel run between RM9 and RM7. I can see many items which appear to need updating in RM7 but not in RM9. (Even if you update them in RM7, they still show that they need an update.) I have done quite a bit of testing and RM9 seems to have fixed at least most of the problem. Very good.
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@JOSO asked in this thread for the screen to indicate whether or not an item had been amended. RM9 seems to me to have fixed this too; the < signs now disappear from the RM9 screen after you have clicked on them so that you are never likely to action the same item twice. Very good.
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RM9 has a system option ‘clear on accept’ to remove items from the changed list after clicking ‘accept changes’. It can’t be bad to give the user a choice, although it is not that good either; the problem is that we all need to remove some people from the changed list after accepting changes (because there is nothing else to be done) but not others (because there is). I still think that the system should work this out. However, a possible small and useful improvement would be to put ‘clear on accept’ as a toggle at the top of the main screen. If I then actioned 10 people in a row with nothing else to do and another 10 who also had marriages etc to add, then I could manually switch between the two modes. I don’t know whether the system is written in a way that would make this possible, but if so it would be very good.
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In this thread @gallde refers to a problem where the focus moves to the top of the screen after dealing with an item. I think that this may be a new problem in RM8/9 and that it may not have been understood. The problem arises when there are so many lines on the screen that scroll bars appear at the side. In RM7 the screen returns where it was after you process each line. In RM9, the screen moves not to the top, but to the middle. I had just processed an item right at the top of the screen before it moved here,
This slows the user down and is annoying. Not so good. -
There is a similar new problem in how the the index behaves when you switch from ‘only show changed people’ to ‘view everyone’. In RM7, the focus stays on the same person, but in RM9 it moves back up to the top of this list. Every time I deal with someone with a marriage, I have to make this switch, so I need note the person’s name and type it into the screen to find them again. Not so good. (Moving the ‘clear on accept’ option to the main Treeshare screen would largely remove this problem.)
So in summary, RM9 has fixed one fairly significant issue introduced in RM8 and a few other longer-standing problems raised by users. It has also introduced two new problems of middling importance.
I hope that my comments and suggestions here are seen as constructive. That is certainly how they are intended.
Alan