Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Suggestions? Comments? Features you'd like to see?
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vondo
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Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by vondo »

After years of putting up with OceanLog I finally bit the bullet and bought MacDive. Thank you for a very well designed program!

I have a couple of suggestions, partially from trying to update tons of dives at once.

First, maybe I'm missing something, but it's kind of difficult to add Tags to dives that already have tags. For instance, if I have a mix of dives that have "Reef" and "Drift" tags (some with both, some with one) and want to add "Photo" to all of them, using the multi-dive inspector clears out the existing tags and replaces it with "Photo". In contrast, Lightroom, my photo management program shows "Keywords" with a * if they are only on some photos and I can easily do a batch add by selecting all the photos and just typing in a new or existing keyword. Also, MacDive allows gear to be handled in a similar fashion.

Second, aside from a Smart Divelog I don't see a way to quickly click and get all of my drift dives.

Finally, I go through some effort to geotag all my photos. If I add those photos to a dive, it would be great if MD could figure out the dive location on the map from my existing GPS data (or a button to do it).

Thanks!

Eric
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nick
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by nick »

vondo wrote:After years of putting up with OceanLog I finally bit the bullet and bought MacDive. Thank you for a very well designed program!

I have a couple of suggestions, partially from trying to update tons of dives at once.

First, maybe I'm missing something, but it's kind of difficult to add Tags to dives that already have tags. For instance, if I have a mix of dives that have "Reef" and "Drift" tags (some with both, some with one) and want to add "Photo" to all of them, using the multi-dive inspector clears out the existing tags and replaces it with "Photo". In contrast, Lightroom, my photo management program shows "Keywords" with a * if they are only on some photos and I can easily do a batch add by selecting all the photos and just typing in a new or existing keyword. Also, MacDive allows gear to be handled in a similar fashion.
That sounds like it would be quite handy - let me take a look at providing that.
Second, aside from a Smart Divelog I don't see a way to quickly click and get all of my drift dives.
How else would you expect it to be possible?

Perhaps one possible solution is to automatically provide Dive Logs for each Tag that is entered. But creating a smart log as a one-off isn't too difficult. Another would be to add a quick link to the Tag Management panel, though I'm not sure it's that quick. Would that help?
Finally, I go through some effort to geotag all my photos. If I add those photos to a dive, it would be great if MD could figure out the dive location on the map from my existing GPS data (or a button to do it).
I can look at doing this. Could you send me your MacDive.sqlite data file along with a few images and a description of which dives they belong to etc etc. The issue here, I guess, is that I'm not sure how useful overall this would be as for the most part, GPS data for photos won't really be that much more accurate than just knowing where the site was.

Of course I'm talking about for the majority of users, as obviously it would be useful to you - but it could be kind of cool to show these on the full site map also.

Some data to test with would help, at any rate.

cheers!
vondo
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by vondo »

Thanks for looking at being able to add tags without clearing existing ones. That's the thing that would make the biggest improvement for me.

A link in the tag panel as you suggested would be helpful. This link is a screenshot from Lightroom that does the same thing for that program as adding tags: It doesn't fit into your UI as is, but it's always good to look at how others do this:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dSLOtIWAZBs/T ... d-list.png

So in that hierarchical list, you can select any number of photos and click the check box on the left to add/remove keywords (tags) and click on the right arrow to get a collection (same concept as smart dive log) with that keyword set. (But the collection is not persistent).

I'll send you my SQLLite and a couple of images. They are all geotagged using the standard XMP tags. It's not a matter of being more accurate, just that I've tagged the images already. Actually what I do is I have my phone or GPS record a .GPX file which I then do a time correlation between the photo time and the GPX file to tag the photos. Maybe a more straightforward option from your standpoint would be to do dive time correlation from GPX? I'll send you one of those too. (Of course I leave my phone on shore or on the boat!)

Thanks for listening!

Eric
vondo
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by vondo »

nick wrote:
How else would you expect it to be possible?

Perhaps one possible solution is to automatically provide Dive Logs for each Tag that is entered. But creating a smart log as a one-off isn't too difficult. Another would be to add a quick link to the Tag Management panel, though I'm not sure it's that quick. Would that help?
Actually playing with things more, it's natural for me to click either on the word or the bar chart bar on Summary -> By Tag. Same for everything in those summary plots if it can be managed.

Thanks,

Eric
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nick
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by nick »

I've updated the next version so you can double click on any bar in the charts under Statistics to be taken to the list of dives. So that's for tag, type, country, buddy, depth, rating, etc.

I'll look at how to make tag management a little easier. I already added the ability to click on a tag and delete it from every dive. I might add a "Add to selected dives" button in the Tag Management panel and you could use that to add a tag to multiple dives without effecting what they already have set.
tdtaylor
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by tdtaylor »

nick wrote:I've updated the next version so you can double click on any bar in the charts under Statistics to be taken to the list of dives. So that's for tag, type, country, buddy, depth, rating, etc.
Nick, the new version is working well except for above. In depth, when I double click the bar, it only takes me to one dive, not all the dives in the depth range. Or it takes me to all my dives. By all the other classifications-COuntry, Buddy, tag, type- it works fine.
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nick
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by nick »

Email me your MacDive.sqlite data file with exact instructions to reproduce, including which dives you think should be visible that are not.

Actually: I bet this is probably just a unit conversion issue. Send me the info anyway.
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nick
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Re: Thanks! Now a couple of suggestions

Post by nick »

As expected, it was using the wrong values. This is fixed for the next release, but email me if you'd like a beta to play with.
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