News: More work on the Profile Manager

Friday, October 07, 2011

After some feedback from Nerocon in IRC, I have added the support for my Profile Manager to keep backups in different directories. Three types of completely optional locations are supported. The "Source" type keeps them in the same directory as the files source files. Same as before. The "Backup" type stores them in a sub directory in the Profile Managers root directory, named "Backups". The third option is just to store them in a specific directory. Each profile can store these backups in different locations. This is all done through the addition of a new ini key in the Profile.ini's profile sections. Continuing my example from my last post:

[Soandso]
BackupDirectory=Source

[Soandso2]
BackupDirectory=Backup

[Soandso3]
BackupDirectory=E:\Games\WoW Settings Backups\

The "Source" option functions the same as the "BackupDirectory" key not existing at all.

As suggested by Nerocon, this could be useful for keeping saves on a flash drive in which you transfer between computers. And probably more.

Next I added the last nifty little feature I hoped to add to this for my personal goals. The icons for the target programs will display next to the profile names in the menus. The menus look a lot better now with that. =)

Here's a screenshot of it:

I've decided to not release the next version for now. Learning from past experience with the Z-Net mIRC scripts, I know I can tend to jump the gun a bit when releasing. I have a bad habit of not always expecting errors to happen and having them handled correctly. I'm taking my time and making sure enough of that is taken into consideration. Also with my quick releases, I just plain don't test things enough sometimes. Honestly, I've mostly been done with these 2 additions since the day after the programs last release, but I've been cleaning up the code for things mentioned, redundancy and personal readability. The code is small for now, so now is a good time to do such a thing. I'd really like to wait on the next release until I can at least come up with a better name for the program, but I just don't seem to be coming up with much. Just the names I've accidentally called it here and there. Project Manager and Program Manager, lol. I'd like a name for it consisting of a single word. Heck, I might even be fine with "Profile Manager" being its subtitle, as long as its real name is something else.

For the next release I may have an installer for this, and a proper directory. I guess a readme too then. It will likely still be considered a beta, but I might as well get that stuff ready now.

Additionally, while tweaking more bits of my blog, I've learned blogspot allows 20 custom pages to be made. I swear it said 10 just even a few days ago, but it now says 20. Well, with that I'm probably going to give past projects more proper pages. And I've even setup a proper page for this latest project. I'm not sure when I added it, but I don't think I mentioned it. I setup an "About Me" page. I'm not one to talk much about myself, so its probably pretty dull. I tried to include only things relevant to projects I have or might post here, my hobbies in general, and things that help define and convey my background and personality. This page will probably be tweaked and refined much more in the future.