Freighdee Katt
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
198
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Posted - 2013.06.17 20:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
(1) LET US AVOID IMPORT / EXPORT WHEREVER WE CAN
To start off, having ALL client settings and UI state stored "in the cloud" as a baseline would be a great start. This would, to a great extent, eliminate cases where you "want" to import and export, because there is no need either to import or export. BUT, this is only a good thing if we also have named profiles that we can use and clone at will, so that we can either use the same profile on more than one system, or use more than one profile on the same system.
So I should be able to get everything perfect, exactly the way I want, save all my settings into a named profile in the cloud, and then instantly select that profile and have all those setting magically applied to three or five or fifty other clients, either on the same system or on different systems. I also should be able to take each one of those systems, tweak things a little bit, and then save each of those tweaked profiles as the default for whatever system I used it on.
The launcher also should be profile-aware. I should be able to choose both my account and the profile to launch the client with in one step.
(2) WHERE WE STILL NEED EXPORT / IMPORT, JUST KEEP IT SIMPLE
For cases where we still want to export / import, the most useful thing to start with would be the Overview, because that is the tweakiest thing to set up, and the most important to get right or to get exactly the same for all players in a corp / fleet / whatever.
You might want to start with getting overview export / import working perfectly, then move on to other areas of the client settings. If you get the overview part perfect, that might actually be all you ever need to do, because most other settings are "personal" either to me or my machine, such that being able to store, copy, tweak, and select my own profiles at will probably would mean that I never need to export or import anything, other than overviews I want to share with other players.
So, two things on overview import / export:
First, ALL MEANS ALL. If I tell it to export and import ALL SETTINGS, then that means ALL SETTINGS. And when I say ALL settings I mean ALL of them. If I tell it to export everything, that means all tabs, all settings, and everything that applies to them. If I turn around and do an import of that export file, I should get an overview that looks exactly like what it was exported from in every way, including all colors, selections, and settings, window size and positioning aside. I should get the same tabs, with the same names, in the same order, with all the same settings, columns, order, width, backgrounds, types, etc. And it also should let us export and import "global" settings like the colors and backgrounds separately from the settings for each tab. And we should be able to import those separate export files in the same separate way as they were exported.
Second, the export format should be (1) plain text (2) human readable and (3) NOT XML. It should be in a format we can cleanly and easily copy and paste to an email, a blog post, or here on the forums, and someone should be able to copy it out, save as an ordinary text file, and import with zero issues, on any client, on any platform. It should be plainly readable and intelligible by humans, so that a profile that is going to be shared can be audited by those who share and use it, to make sure it is not going to do anything hinky with our view of things in space. It also should be something that I can copy into Notepad, tweak, share, and reimport, without having to use a special tool, weird formats, or a stupid XML editor.
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