Last couple of weeks were really slow. Had lot’s of troubles getting infrastructure stuff up and running. Had to get rid of my Exchange server, needed to switch to Team Foundation Server because I’m really sick of Subversion and the latest challenge was to get the Royal TS 2.0 to compile against .NET 4.0. Let me tell you, it’s not that easy as you might think!
Anyhow, I’m back on track and I think I will be able to finish the Options dialog by the end of the upcoming weekend.
2 Sections of the Options dialog are done already:
The “General” Section:
”Application Start” will allow you to set one of three options which are pretty self explanatory:
- Do not open any documents
- Open documents from last session
- Open a selection of documents (see screenshot)
The option “Application Close” moved from the main window’s “Tools” menu to the options dialog and will prompt for confirmation before you close the application if any connection is still active.
“Theme” works pretty much the same way as before except for one small detail: changing the selection will “preview” how the theme will look like by temporarily change the theme.
Royal TS 2.0 will have some informational popup-banners which you can hide and some prompts with a checkbox option “Do not show this again”.“Reset Warnings and Messages” will reset all those dialogs and popup-banners which may annoy you.
The “Encryption” Section:
This section is exactly the same UI element you can find to encrypt and password-protect your documents. Because Royal TS 2 will allow you to store credentials in your application settings, this makes sense. The general idea is, that you do not have any credentials defined in your documents – you still can, but you should define your credentials in your application settings and just reference them in your documents. This way you do not really have to encrypt your document (again, you still can if you need to). It makes document sharing much easier. I will post a detailed blog post in a couple of weeks how document sharing and referencing credentials will work.
One important question, I would love to get your feedback:
I’m considering to reduce the priority or maybe drop one feature present in Royal TS 1.x for the first Royal TS 2.0 release: “Minimize to Systray”. It seems that Windows 7 changed the game a bit and the “Show Desktop” function and the new task bar integration seems to cause weird behavior. I originally planned to keep at least every Royal TS 1.x feature in the 2.0 release but this could delay the release date a bit and I was wondering how important that feature might be for you. Please leave a comment or drop me an email…