This post is to clarify what I’m talking about in my Survey. These are some of the tools I have been using for a few years. I’ve handed them around to a few colleagues I have worked with over the years and they seem to find them handy.
Any tools I release commercially would be a lot more sophisticated than these. I just put these together for my own use and generally stopped coding when they stopped breaking and did what I want them to do.
- My first Find and Replace tool. I wrote it because I got sick of the 3 tab-stops between the text fields in the native one. I also wanted to manipulate more attribute properties. This version doesn’t preserve the values of the attributes when you change their TAGs. The release version would preserve them. Oh, this does text too – I left that bit out of the UI but it works. See what I mean about a little rough around the edges?
I wrote this Attribute Generator to generate series of attributes, rather than copy ... click ... edit ... copy ...click ... zzzz. As you can see I'm no UI expert. It ain't pretty but it has saved me a lot of time over the years. The settings at the top-left are for generating ACNE-compatible attributes. It also generates in the correct order so you can bulk-select them and they will be in the correct order when you make a block of them. As you can see, I lost interest when it cam to making them different colours.
LISP isn't my favourite language but I've written (and butchered) a few routines that speed up my day. Quite a few of them are modified versions of the inbuilt ones (BX-BI is ATTOUT-ATTIN with a lot less clicks). I have far more sophisticated versions in the works.
As it stands I have a ton of ideas logged in my FogBugz tracker and some of them are partially coded. I posted my survey to assess the viability of developing these with a lot more finesse to sell them, or should I just hack them together for myself?
Please, let me know by taking my survey.
