From: <mik...@al...> - 2001-07-03 17:02:29
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I've been using db for well over a year and a half, and it has become the 2nd most used app on my Palm (after the date book!). I've also just finished preparing a large database of astronomical deep sky objects which comprises sort of my life's list of things to chase with my telescope. (I'll make it available if others are interested.) Because it is large and complex (728 records with 24 fields per record) it's given me a good opportunity to exercize db - mostly version 0.3.1, but I've just now tried 0.3.2b2. Following are a list of bugs, mis-features, feature requests, and random thoughts that have cropped up over the last few weeks. I don't expect any of these to be implented soon, nor am I even really looking for a response. I present these merely as food for thought for some misty future version, in no particular order. 1) In the view editor, it would be nice to have the first line or two of the database displayed to give visual feedback to the spacing changes as they are being made. 2) The new "modify" button is nice, but it would be useful to be able to lock certain fields on top of that. Example: the name of an object in my database will never change, but a checkbox for whether I've observed it or not will. It would therefore be nice to set the "name" field to uneditable. 3) I'd like to be able to cut and paste multiple records in one operation. 4) I was shocked to find that the size of the pdb file was almost the same as the csv file (129,000 bytes vs 130,000 bytes) after a csv2pdb operation. This implies that the booleans are stored as "true" and "false", rather than "0" and "1". That's a tremendous waste of space. Even as integer 0 and 1, over 50% can be saved. Is this really true? (I haven't browsed the code, since I'm not much of a programmer.) 5) I have a number of checkboxes to indicate whether an object is a member of a certain catalog or not (6 of them, to be precise). Having some sort of "bit field" would let me drop these in one entry, rather than six. I'd still like to be able to sort on individual bits - "sort by presence in Messier's list (boolean), then by Right Ascension (string)" 6) For a field with a "date" type, there should be a way to indicate "no date". One of my fields is "date observed" - since I haven't yet observed 618 of the 728 objects on my list, I have to give this a "string" type for now, otherwise the day I created the database is entered. 7) It would be useful to be able to clear an entire field with a single command. E.g. set observed flags for all objects to unobserved. 8) When editing views, it would be nice to copy a view to a new one, so that minor variations can be made to the new one. E.g. display all the same stuff as the default view, but the last column should be size instead of magnitude. 9) Bug in 0.3.2b2 - the "modify" button protects checkboxes when viewing an individual record, but they are editable when in the general list view. This should be made consistent. 10) I would like to be able to set a field to a "float" type, with a specifiable number of digits to the right of the decimal point. I've mentioned this to Tom Dyas in the past - I'll take the liberty of suggesting it again. Thanks to Tom and Marc for a wonderful, useful program. BTW, for those who want to squeeze a 10th line onto the main list view, but don't want to recompile DB as suggested in an earlier message, you can use the shareware app RsrcEdit (look it up at PalmGear) to modify db directly on the Palm. Fire up RsrcEdit, open DB, then open tFRM 1002, then Gadget 1000. I set the "top" value to 17, and the height value to 124. No recompiling required. I don't know if the values are "correct" per se, but I get my 10 lines :-) Mike -- Mike Ressler mik...@al... OK, I'm lame: I don't have my own website ... |