Simplified mode for non-technical users

Would you like Bulk Rename Utility to offer new functionality? Post your comments here!

Simplified mode for non-technical users

Postby Link_timeout » Sat Jan 28, 2006 11:44 am

While BRU is a great tool, it is unfortunately almost impossible to use for nontechnical users. Please, no flamewars about "My grandmother can use it so there!", try sitting an average, non-geek user down in front of it and see how long it takes them to rename their holiday photos from DSCnnnn.JPG to "My holiday pictures mmm.jpg", where nnnn are the arbitrary camera-assigned numbers and mmm is a more obvious sequence 1, 2, 3, ...

It would be nice if BRU provided a simplified mode for non-technical users that just wanted to rename their holiday pix or some similar task. Putting on my UI design hat, what you'd do is simplify the file window to display only the "Name" and "New name" columns, along with a text box to enter the new name pattern, which automatically gets a counter value appended to it to create unique names. In other words if the user selects a collection of (say) photos DSCabcd.JPG and enters "Holiday photos" in the text box, they'd get renamed to "Holiday photos 1.jpg", "Holiday photos 2.jpg", ...
So the sequence is: Replace the name with the user text, add a counter if there's more than one file, and lowercase the extension (since things like photos typically come from FAT-formatted media).

Functionally it's pretty primitive, but it'd satisfy the needs of many nontechnical users without intimidating them with the current user interface.
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Postby Admin » Sat Jan 28, 2006 9:37 pm

I'm not so sure about this.The nice thing about BRU as that you only need to use the controls which interest you, and I try to emphasise this in the help file. Not interested in autonumbers...don't use them, etc. I agree that lots of people get intimidated by the number of controls on the screen, but the very first item in the "tip of the day" screen tries to put minds at ease.

Lots of people email me and say "at first I was totally daunted by it, but within 5 minutes I loved it" etc.

It's hard to strike a balance between power and functionality, and ease of use.

I'm not dismissing your suggestion, I'm just not sure that the horrendous amount of development work involved can be justified at this point.


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Postby Greg152 » Tue Jan 31, 2006 2:06 pm

http://www.prismaticsoftware.com/Utility/Utility.html

Check out batch rename...it is the photo renaming utility I would give MY grandmother.... :) It doesn't get any simpler than this.
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Postby spambait » Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:20 pm

I understand what you're saying, but I don't want to use a util that was designed for grandma. There are other commercial apps out there that wrap limited functionality in a warm, comforting, yet surprisingly cumbersome interface. I much prefer the way BRU is now: everything at your fingertips and done in one pass.
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Postby Admin » Wed Feb 08, 2006 3:26 pm

My thoughts too.

And you hit the nail on the head - commercial. BRU is a hobby, written by me in my spare time, and therefore will always be subject to various resource constraints.

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