TouchPro V6 Changes

Although there are few core changes to TouchPro for this version, some parts of the UI and its functionality have changed considerably. I’ll try to explain my rationale for the changes…

History

Until V6, TouchPro has only supported a single set of settings all stored in the user’s branch of the registry. As people have asked for more features, they were added into the current design but on reflection, these features interacted in unintuitive ways and were often only useful in a single situation.

With the request to support multiple settings, most of the previous version’s context menu options made no sense and became redundant, so this version only has one additional context menu item – to load and invoke the touch operation for a saved settings file.

For V6 I decided to revise the options comprehensively, resulting in a separation of those settings that were just for the UI, and those that were timestamp settings. The UI settings are still stored in the user’s registry branch, but the timestamp options are now stored in a custom XML file format as .tpsettings files.

Here’s a summary of what the old menu items did:

Prior version menu items	What it did
Touch with Current Time & Date	Used the last saved settings, but with the current time/date and offset mode off.
Touch with Last Saved Settings	Used the last saved settings.
Touch with the Focused item’s timestamp	Used the last saved settings, with the modified file system time of the current focused item and offset mode off.
Capture a timestamp from the focused item…	Overwrote the last saved settings timestamp with one selected from the focused item.

In all the operations, the last saved settings were ambiguous (unless you explicitly remembered them), and the saved offset mode was altered depending on which option you used.

V6 removes the ambiguity of earlier versions by not having to be aware of what the last saved settings were. You can now save any number of settings files, naming them however makes sense to you (so that you remember what you used the settings for), and you can store them wherever you like¹.

The old menu item operations can be replicated in this version by:

Prior version menu items	How to do the same with V6
1. Touch with Current Time & Date	Use the TouchPro dialog. Load a settings file. Use the drop down menu button item “Set time & date to the current time”. Click Touch.
2. Touch with Last Saved Settings	Use the TouchPro, “Touch with saved setting…” menu item.
3. Touch with the Focused item’s timestamp	Use the TouchPro dialog. Load a settings file. Use the drop down menu button item “Set time & date from the selected item’s timestamp…”. Select the timestamp and click OK. Click Touch.
4. Capture a timestamp from the focused item…	Use the TouchPro dialog. Load a settings file. Use the drop down menu button item “Set time & date from the selected item’s timestamp…”. Use the Save As button to save the settings file.

If you found operations 1 & 3 were of particular use to you, and that the new way involves too many steps, please let me know as they can be reinstated in a future version in conjunction with picking a settings file.

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¹ The newer Open/Save dialog’s remember (per-application) their last used directory so that you can quickly get to that location. I recommend you store all your .tpsettings files in a single directory for simplicity.