Whew, didn't expect this to generate so much activity! Glad to see
people are interested in this feature; I'd worried that it had sat for
two years because nobody really wanted it. =)
Let me hit a few of the great points people have raised in message order:
Melinda:
* Clearing the list: I was thinking about adding a new button to the
Preferences panel, probably under Network (since there's already a
"clear cache" button there) that says "clear login history".
("Clearly" this will require i18n translation; maybe this is a good
time to ask how that's usually handled for the project?)
Mike:
* Auto completion: I was a bit torn on whether or not it would be a
good feature since a number of people with multiple accounts probably
have the same first name and multiple last names. (At least, I know
several who do.) At the very least it probably couldn't hurt to
implement.
* Ordinal settings entries: I considered this, but I worry that it
runs the risk of bloating the settings file and increasing potential
lookup speed for other entries. It probably won't ever be enough to
significantly hamper performance, but something about it sticks in my
craw a bit nonetheless. Parsing a single setting seemed like a more
compact way of handling it with minimal side effects.
Celierra:
* Serialization: I did notice that in the coding standards, but wasn't
sure if tokenizing a string would be considered a "new serialization
format", since that seems project-culture dependent. Finding out was
one of the reasons I elaborated in such detail in the initial message.
I'll look into LLSD; I knew it existed from reading the standards page
but didn't know what its capabilities were.
Tigro:
* Merging first/last name: I tend to agree with Bill that there's a
significant user training issue associated with this. As Dzontas said,
from a developer's standpoint, it's a breeze, since first and last
names aren't allowed to contain spaces, but the interface-shift shock
value to the less-technical residents may be pretty severe. This may
be mitigated somewhat by auto-completion of their last-used login
name, but it seems a bit iffy to rely on that. Maybe after the first
implementation of this feature is tested, we can do a second-phase
version in Snowglobe with the unified fields and see how people like
it?
Thanks again for everyone's comments and criticism. Keep it coming!
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