I've been using .98 for a bit with the dlog off... and it's much better on my hands.. have to keep them on the keyboard and away from the mouse. Thank you very much for doing this, Jerry....

conejo23 wrote on Jan 4^th, 2010 at 12:01pm:
That's what you'll have when 0.9.6. is out.

OK, BookMacster 0.9.6 will have a "Show Welcome if no Documents open" checkbox, and the window is no longer modal.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Well, it's a little bigger now because we added the checkbox.  Not as big as Flux', but bigger than Sandvox'.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Um, not really.  As with all well-behaved Mac dialogs, the esc key is your friend!  But, I agree, that's not known by all users.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Thanks for the screenshot.  I agree it's very nice, but we're going to plead "business decision" on this one.  I believe the improvements we made today, based on your input, bring it up to Mac standards.  A beautiful Welcome would be nice, but there are other things we need to work on.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
You've got your checkbox, and one in Preferences to change it back, in 0.9.6.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Whoops -- sorry I missed this question last week.  I just pasted your whole comment into a bug report and didn't read it too carefully.  The answer is that, yes, it you want all 5 to open when you launch, then yes you'd need to set all 5 of them to do that.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Indeed, I don't believe most users would appreciate 5 windows opening all at once every time they launch the app.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Ah, the Dropbox trigger ... you see that's one reason why we're not taking all day to make a beautiful Welcome Window.

Leo of BORG wrote on Dec 29^th, 2009 at 4:50pm:
Thanks for the feedback.  We'll publish 0.9.6 within the next couple days.

Remembering that Flux does not have a feature to automatically open certain frequently-used documents at launch (which always bypasses the Welcome), I think ours is acceptable now.  And another little nicety we added is that, since the window is non-modal in 0.9.6, if you ignore it and open a Bookmarkshelf "manually", it goes away by itself.  I'm often irritated by Sandvox, when I go to shut down, that I see the useless Sandvox Welcome window (which doesn't have a button for Recent Documents – arghhh), that has been sitting there since I launched Sandvox two weeks ago.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Since most people will only have one document, we almost made BookMacster a non-document application, but didn't want to start with that limitation.

We wanted to give people some help, though.  We have received many support requests from new Bookdog users who say "I launched your app and it doesn't do anything".  The power-user in me wants to reply with "Well do you want us to splash you like a Windows app??  DUH this is a MACINTOSH.  Don't you know you're supposed to hit ⌘N?"  But many people don't, and this has been changing recently -- as you mentioned even Apple's Xcode has a Welcome window now.

We decided to go with the Welcome after seeing it used in Sandvox, which won an Apple Design Award in 2007.  Let me tout here that we made two improvements over Sandvox implementation:

1.  If you set one or more document(s) (in Settings ▸ Open/Save) to open upon launch, then you don't see this dialog.  It only displays if no document opens.

2.  You are able to choose from Recent Documents instead of getting the standard Open dialog.

But I just checked again and found that, indeed, theirs is not modal.  You are correct -- it shouldn't be modal.  Power users should not be denied the use of ⌘N and ⌘O, and the new Xcode is done better.

Thanks for the feedback -- we'll give it some more thought.