Neil, my suggestion for the desktop, is to start by fixing an annoying problem with the current one. That is, something that I have stumbled into several times in the last few years: hitting something on the keyboard without realizing it, and losing a window, and not knowing how to get it back again. Sometimes I manage to stumble my way into finding out how to fix it, sometimes not. I would appreciate either the ability to find help on that issue more easily than you can now, or even better, make it very hard to get into that situation in the first place. Yeah, I know, it is operator error, I admit that, but it is often not obvious what I did to get into that situation in the first place. A very specific instance of this comes to mind: I will lose all the rows and columns of the DX window and/or the Summary window. I have done this several times, yet I have never figured out what I did to get into that situation, and had to ask, on the reflector, what people did to bring back the lost rows and columns. The usual suggestion I receive from the group is to right mouse click somewhere in the window and pick the Unhide Columns command which is supposed to bring them back, but it never works for me. Then I tried all the other suggestions that people sent me, which also do not work, and in the end, and I have had to do this at least a half-dozen times in the last five years, I have to reinstall the whole program to get those specific Windows to work correctly again; one Big PITA. I realize that by writing this, will bring comments like, "You should not be doing whatever it is you are doing to get in that situation in the first place, John." Those kinds of comments are not helpful. I do not know what I am doing to get into the situation, so I do not know what to avoid doing-Hello! But I really have received comments like that in the past from folks on this reflector. It also appears I am not the only one that gets into the situation. I do not know if it's being excessively tired when I operate, consuming too many "cold ones", or just being non-attentive when I am using the program. I am sure I have done all those things, at one time or another, and quite possibly several of them at once. I still think that it results from a weakness in the program, since it is all too easy to get trapped in that situation. If it happens during a contest or a heavy DX weekend, it is quite serious.
As far as general desk top aesthetics go, I would not mind having the option to run the Windows 7 Aero scheme, in addition to other layouts, as options, but not be forced to use any specific one. Most of us are pretty concerned about wasteful use of PC resources, such as RAM, and we generally turn off a lot of those superfluous little programs that we really do not want, or need, such as the Windows Side Bar programs, available in Vista and Windows 7. About all I ever run when I am running DX base, is a neat little program called DS Clock, from a place called Duality Software. It's free, highly configurable, can be placed anywhere on your desktop or a second monitor, and every hour, if you choose, it will synchronize your PCs internal "real-time clock", which often times is pretty unreal, to any one of maybe 100 or so time reference stations around the world. I believe the clock's accuracy results from the NIST, the National Institute of Science and Technology, keepers of the time standard, a Cesium-based atomic clock. My long-time buddy Walt, AJ6T, turned me onto that neat little program years ago, and I make a point to put it on every PC I own. Of course, the obvious suggestion at this point should be: why not include that function, the ability to sync to one of these NIST time standard stations, be built into the next version of DXBase? I have been keeping up with the reflector and reading all the suggestions and complaints and the general chitchat. My thoughts are: it works pretty well now, but certainly could be improved in several areas, and I made my pitch for one above. Another nagging problem I have had with DXBase is the help files. Often it seems hard to find exactly what topic you are looking for. And then if you do manage to get close to the topic you are looking for, often times they do not seem to be of much help. The third thing is– the problem with running under Vista or Windows 7, if I remember correctly, is the help files do not work at all, unless you go to Microsoft and download some fix for it. I did that for several Windows 7 64-bit machines, and I believe every time I tried to use the help function, I would get a pop-up window that said that function is not available, yet the help file topic listing would be there anyway, but again, the advice given was either too arcane, at least for me, or it just seemed to be usually not too helpful. I usually get things figured out, when I get stuck, by asking the folks on the reflector. Okay that is my three cents worth. Happy Holidays and have a great New Year, and work lots of new DX. 73, John ______________________________________________________________ Dxbase mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/dxbase Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
