Usability issues

[derekfountain]

In the spirit of constructive feedback, I thought I'd submit these bugs/usability issues...

When I fire up CM, the pin window (down the side) is open but empty. Odd that, since I thought when I was using the demo version it was populated with some pins. No great shakes, but I have to right click, select to open a pin file, then navigate through my file system to get the People pin file open. Given the number of times I've had to cancel and reopen CM, then go and find the pin files, it's getting a bit tedious! Is there some setting I can make to have the pin files open automatically?

Following on from that, once I've done it and make a curve, when I go to save the curve, the save file dialog box opens at the Program Files/Curvemeister/Library location, which means I have to navigate all the way back to my working directory where I want to save the curve file! Since it's on a different disk, that's quite a bit of clickity-click effort, and is also getting old! Couldn't the "Open Pin File" and "Save Curve File" dialogs have separate starting locations?

Furthermore, when I created a new pin from my image, it appeared in the pin window as expected. Since I hadn't bothered going to find the pin library file on this occasion, it was there all by itself. When I clicked Cancel on the CM main dialog, an error popped up saying something to the effect that it couldn't open pin file "" (i.e. it seemed unaware that it didn't have a pin file open and was trying to save to it anyway). Worse, when the Photoshop application lost focus (I switched to Firefox to start this post) and I then switched back to Photoshop, the error dialog box got hidden. It seems that Photoshop is the primary application and is sitting on top of the CM error dialog. The error is still there - it has a focus button on the task bar - but I can't get it back to the top of the window stack. See attached screenshot. Also note from the screenshot that the image I was working on is still open in Photoshop (you can see it in the layers palette) but the image window itself is nowhere to be seen. Things seem a little confused. :)

One more thing while I'm at it. Yesterday I put one each of all the People pins on an image, all marking the same(ish) spot. I spaced out all 9 hue clocks so I could see them, then hit "Save Sample Points." When I reloaded the sample points the points where all there, but their associated hue clocks where all on top of each other! Each time I reload this set of samples I have to move all the hue clocks around. Could the sample save file not store the location of the hue clocks as well as the location of the samples?

[ggroess]

I have noticed in the past that if you use the "Window key" + "m" short-cut you cannot right click and restore the Photoshop window when CM is open.  I have always had to use Crtl-Alt-Del and choose "switch to" from the Task Manager.

I assumed that it was a problem with CM not restoring focus to the Photoshop Program and Windows not being able to restore a program that cannot get the focus.

Mike??

[-default]

Hi Guys,

No quick answers for any of Derek's issues.  I'd like to thank him for documenting them so clearly.  I'll do some homework about the first question re the missing pins, as this seems to be the acute issue, and it has affected at least one other customer. 

The problem with the Photoshop windows sitting on top of the Curvemeister window is something that happens to me occasionally, and it would be nice to fix it, or at least understand it better.

Re the locations of the info palettes, and saving different target folders, these are good suggestions that I've added to the list for future versions.