From A H

Hi Nick,

this error occures every time I start the GUI-Part of your Foldertracker…
It happened immediately after adding my first folder to watch ‘My Documents’.
After this the program doesn’t start anymore, just the ‘usual’ does not work any more… Windows ist searching for…

What! This is basic functionality. I have this little diagnostic program I use to debug start up errors with FolderTrack. Before I sent it to him I tried it on my My Documents folder. The program threw an error:

 “Access to the path ‘C:\Users\John\Documents\My Videos’ is denied”. 

The problem: Windows Junctions. 

In Windows 7, Microsoft made your My Documents folder contain these sort of kind but not really links. The Explorer hides them but they are still kind of exist. There seem to be 3 of them:

• My Music
• My Pictures
• My Videos

Below is a list of directories that Windows says are in the My Documents folder. The folders in red are not really there:

3. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrack
4. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrack Builds
5. C:\Users\John\Documents\FolderTrackBuildManager
6. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Music
7. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Pictures
8. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Videos
9. C:\Users\John\Documents\My Web Sites

Don’t believe me? Go on and try to create a My Music folder in My Documents. You will end up with a goofy window like the one below saying the folder already exist.

Anyway I got around the error by using a recursive function to get the real items in the folder. If you are interested in the code download the diagnostic here and check out the “GetDirectoriesAndFiles” function.

Let me explain a few things:

What is FolderTrack?

FolderTrack is a personal version control system. That means it is a tool to help you keep track of different versions of your documents. Lets say you spent months working on a children’s book, or blueprints for your new invention. You are bound to create hundreds if not thousands of versions of your project. Instead of you saving your project under a bunch of weird names, or moving them into a bunch of folders, you can just work. Every time you save your document FolderTrack will make a copy of it and keep everything tidy and organized for you.

What is going on in this picture?

This is a list of files you are tracking for a particular project:

Everytime you make a change to a file a new one of the things below appears. We call if a “bar”.

This means that the file was changed, a similar “bar” will appear if the file is deleted, renamed, or added. The “bar” has 4 things.

1. The version number for the file. This is incremented every time the file is changed.
2. “Use” button. This reverts the file on the computer back to the respective version
3. “Copy” button. This lets the user chose a location to copy the file
4. “View” button. This opens the respective version of the file in whatever the default program is for opening the file type.

If the user clicks “Use” on a particular version. FolderTrack will change the file from its current version to the version that “Use” was clicked on. If the user then changes the file then they would have a “bar” similar to the one below:

The first time the user made a change after version 3, FolderTrack added the “bar” for version 4. Then the user went back to version 3 and made another change and FolderTrack made a bar for version 3.1.

Please critisize this UI and please ask questions

(click on the picture to get it in full size)

Wahts good about it, whats bad about it. Please comment below or send me an emal nick@foldertrack.com. Your comments no matter how negative, rude, nice, … are appreciated but I would really like descriptive ones.

Thanks.

We are working on a lot of changes to FolderTrack. We hope to make it more useful.  If you have questions or comments please email me: nick@foldertrack.com . 

New Interface

People said that the old interface was too hard to understand. I am changing to a more “individual file” interface as opposed to the “all files grouped together” interface.  Check it out:

The point here is that every time you change a file the “ ” will update to celebrate your new change! I actually want to add a “Use”, “View”, and “Copy” button to the “ ”. You will notice the weird  “ ” for TRS_CustomerNotes.docx. That is a result of the user reverting TRS_CustomerNotes.docx back to a previous version and then making a change.

Shell Integration

We are working on integrating FolderTrack into the shell. Nothing fancy because we do not want to slow down the explorer.
 

We are adding a menu item that says FolderTrack. If the particular folder or file is being tracked then FolderTrack will display a mini window of the history.

 If it is not being tracked it will start tracking it and display a notification that it is tracking.

Compare Integration

Goal: Compare different version of your files in 3 clicks or less.  The comparison utility used will be configurable by file type.

Notifications when tracked file is changed and opportunity to leave note

A way to enter a note about the current version of a file or folder that is being tracked.

“When I looked at the Blog there hasn’t been an entry since October. This makes me feel like the site is not updated, which is not great”

Well that had to change.

A friend told me about a way I could get a grant for FolderTrack by entering the Miller Coors’s (yes the beer company) business plan competition. All we had to do was send in a business plan. So we wrote, (I’ll explain “we” later) and sent in a business plan. The executive summary was actually a version of the John and Mary cartoon on the homepage.  After we sent the business plan I fasted (no food only water) for three days. I started thinking about her (I’ll explain “her” later).  She was always complaining about her teaching job.  She was a new teacher at her school and was not getting the respect she had at her previous job. Since she taught “challenging” kids at her old school, they decided to give her all of the “challenging” kids at this one. Also the schools here have some sort of scripted lesson plan that all of the teachers in their respective grades are supposed to use. As a result, she was not able to use her creativity to teach the kids they she wanted. To help her out I got this idea. But before I explain the idea I’ll explain her.

“We”  “Her”

I got married, another reason why the blog has not been getting a lot of attention. It is a long and short story at the same time.

The idea

I wrote a program to make her job easier and more efficient. That is basically what I did for like a month.

The competition

We made it to the finals. We had to fly ourselves out to Chicago for an oral interview of the business plan. We practiced a lot about what we were going to say. When we got to the interview though we never really got a chance to present what we prepared. The judges just kind of bombarded us with questions.  

Updates to FolderTrack

I am going to do another blog post just on what is new, but I basically have been fixing little things my testers or I find wrong.

Notepad

The first time I tested with Notepad I noticed something:  for one save, two file change events were sent to FolderTrack. Notepad for whatever reason saves a file twice. But the two files were the same. So I made FolderTrack do a file compare. If the “new” file matched the “old” file then it ignored the file change event. I figured I was done making program specific changes I thought “Hey, if it works with Notepad it should work with everything”. 

Wrong.

The first time I tested with Microsoft Word I noticed something:  for one save Word would

1. Save the document to a temporary file called something like ~wr4345g.tmp
2. Rename the original document to another file called ~wbnty56.tmp
3. Rename the first temporary  file (~wr4345g.tmp) to the original documents name
4. Delete the old original document (~wbnty56.tmp)

I was thought notepad was bad for sending 2 file changes events for one save. I had no idea that Microsoft Word was sending 1 add, 2 renames and a delete for every save. I did know that Visual Studio would create a bunch of files, like the executable, that a user probably would not want to keep when they compiled. So before I released the first version of the software I added a filter. The filter provided a way to tell FolderTrack to ignore a file or folder. I was so happy with the filter it takes the wild card character so a user could say filter *.tmp and ignore all those temporary files that Word created. I thought that this was a good way to deal with all programs that saved files the way Word did.

Wrong.

My fabulous friend sent me this email.

Nick,

FolderTrack is not working well with excel. It keeps getting hung up on temporary files that Microsoft creates and makes me rename my file every time I try to save it.  This is crazy.

So I sent her this email

Thanks J,

Filter the tmp extension. I included a little arrow picture thing to explain. I got to make FolderTrack automatically do this for Microsoft files.

You are the best tester in the world

I thought she could use the *.tmp filter to fix the Excel problem.

Wrong.

The solution would not work because; Excel does not use an extension with its temporary files. But even if it did, how the hell would a user know to filter the *.tmp extension to make Excel, Word, or any other program work?

So to fix this program FolderTrack has program specific filters, designed to filter out unneeded temporary files from popular programs.

This fixes the problem for at least Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Right.  (Hopefully)

We are going to break the definition down and explain each part lets begin with …

…web applications and services.”

Back in the late 50s the U.S. Military created a way for computers to share information. At first I would imagine that they only had 2 computers sharing information, then three,  them four, and now if you were to make a diagram of all the computers sharing information it would look like this      

times a couple million. That picture kind of looks like this (kind of )

(used with permission from Mark Lilliy, http://marklilly.carbonmade.com/)

     a spider web, which is how the internet got the nick name “the web”.

I keep calling the web a way for computers to share information. What this means is that a file that is already on one computer is simply sent to another computer. You could copy the file to a CD, drive to another computer, copy the file from the CD to the other computer and do the same thing. A lot of web pages you visit are just copies of a file sent to your computer. These are called static web pages. For example this link is to a static web page. It is static because it stays the same. Everytime you go to it you will get the same webpage.   These are called static web pages because you always get the same page. There are also dynamic webpages which are often called web applications because they do more then just send you a copy of some file, they do something then send you a copy of a file. For example this is a small dynamic webpage or web app. Everytime you go to this webpage you will get a diffent web page. It pulls together some information makes it look good then sends it to you. I made my web application using a platform called php. Another website that uses php is facebook.com . How facebook works is this:

On facebook’s computers they have a big file with:

Names and pictures

Mary          

Lisa           

Shaquita  

another big file with:

Names and phone numbers

Mary – 877-332-7677

Lisa – 546-345-4235

Shaquita – 534-564-2353

another big file with:

Names and birthdays.

Mary – June 8 , 1985

Lisa – August 15, 1981

Shaquita – December 32, 1980

When you log into facebook it takes your name and gets your picture from the picure file, your phone number from the phone number file and your birthday from the birthday file. Then it creates a custom web page file just for you.

So Mary’s facebook page would look kind of like this

Facebook is a web application. A weak web application but still a web application.

…platform for the creation of web applications and services.”

So you want to create your own web application. You create a big file with animal pictures and animal names. Well now you have to write software that opens that file up, then you got to write software that hooks up to the internet, then you got to write software that… You do not want to write all that software. You just want to get the contents of your big files, and put them together into a good looking web page. You want something else to hook up to the internet, and open those files and that something else is called a platform.  A platform will make stuff like opening big files, and hooking up to the internet easy. Therefore all you have to do is figure what files you want to get information from and figure out how you want to present your web page on the internet.

…powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.”

There are a variety of platforms out there. Facebook happens to use php but there is also coldfusion, asp, jsp, and many more. These platforms have one thing in common: they are weak. They really are only good for opening up big files, making a pretty webpage, and sending the pretty webpage to the user. Azure is powerful! Lets say you wanted to make a web application that created screensavers, or let you type a message and had it call a bunch of people and read it to them then you better use Azure because php aint gonna do that.

…reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.”

Azure is not just software to help you create web applications it is the computers your web application run on too. Microsoft actually has a bunch of computers just to run your Azure application. If your web applications gets a lot of users, Azure starts a lot of computers automatically. The computers are protected, backed up and everything. They are supposed to almost always be up which makes them reliable. Or at least they are supposed to be.

“an intuitive, reliable and powerful platform for the creation of web applications and services.”

If you learn how to write php your skill is only really good for writing php. The same is true for cold fusion. Sure there are things that are similar but for the most part you will have to learn a whole new computer language. Azure uses the same languages that is used to create desktop applications to create web applications. Therefore your desktop developer can easily be a web developer. Developers all ready know how how it works because it is intuitive in theory.  During one of those boring Azure presentations the presenter wrote a little Azure app and it did not seem intuitive at all but hey I hadn’t read this blog post at that time.

Windows XP did not come with the .NET framework. The .Net framework came out about 4 months after XP. In fact a barebones copy of XP does not even have the software needed to install .NET. But if you write you application in .Net you almost have to support it being installed on XP because there are so many XP computers still out there. At the 2010 Worldwide Partner Conference Microsoft said that XP is still on 74% of all business computers. You might as well asume that the majority of those computers will not have anything above .Net 1.0 and that only because .Net 1.0 was included in a service pack. Therefore if your application requires a verision of .NET above 1.0 it is up to you to install it. You could write down in a readme file or something that they need to have .Net version blah blah blah on their computer but your users are stupid. They are going to think that your app does not work. The goal of this article is to make it easy for you to make it easy for your users to use your .Net application on XP.

To deal with this .Net XP fiasco I needed to write a “Bootstrapper” for FolderTrack. A BootStrapper is a term used to discribe something that can help itself. Something that can pull itself out of a hole. The Bootstapper for FolderTrack had the following goals:

• Install the software needed to install .NET if needed
• Install .NET 3.5 if needed
• Install FolderTrack
• Run on a computer that did not previously have .NET

That last bullet about running on a system that does not have .NET requires that the installer be “native”. By native I mean able to run on XP naturally, out the box no additives needed. I also wanted to communicate to my uses that I needed to update their system and I did not want to do this through the command prompt. Therefore I had to make a native application with a GUI to install FolderTrack. Visual Studio 6 was the last piece of software Microsoft released that out the box let you easily create native GUI apps. Nenad Stefanovic created this thing called Windows Templete Libary and it can be used in Visual Studio 2005. This blog post will show you how to use Nenad’s WTL to create a native gui bootstrapper for your .Net application.

To use this post download my sample bootstrapper. You will have to compile it first and then you can make it install your files instead of mine.

Setting up the Native Gui

Perquisites:
Visual Studio 2005

1. Go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/wtl/
2. Download wtl ( At the time of writing wtl was distributed as a file named WTL80_sf.exe)
3. Run the file you downloaded. A dialog box should appear with a Unzip to folder text area
4. Set the “Unzip to folder” to a location of your choice and take note of it
5. At the location specified in the above step there should be a WTL**\AppWiz directory
6. Go to the above folder. Run the setup80.js file, there is a setup90.js that may work for Visual Studio 2008 but I have not tried it
7. You may have to run it a couple of times
8. Start Visual Studio 2005
9. If everything worked, when you do a File -> New->Project you should get a ATL/WTL Application Wizard. You may have to select Visual C++ to get it.
10. Select ATL/WTL Application Wizard and give a give the project a Name
11. Click Ok
12. Click Next on the second screen of the Wizard
13. On the next page of the Wizard there are options for the type of Application you want to create. For this example chose Dialog Based
14. Next Visual Studio will open the project.
15. To make it compile you will have to set additional include directories for the Project and the *.rc files by
    1. Right clicking on the Project Name and selecting properties.
    2. Select C/C++ from the menu on the left
    3. In step 4 you selected a location for WTL to be unzipped to. In that location there should be a directory called include. Add the full path of the include directory to the area left of Additional Include Directories
       
    4. Change the Configuration to Release and repeat
    5. In Configuration Properties -> General -> Set Minimize CRT Use in ATL to No
    6. In the solution Explorer there should be a file names (project name).rc . For example in the figure below the blue highlighted file is the rc file.
    7. Right click this file, select properties
    8. In the menu to the left select Configuration Properties -> Resources -> General
    9. The same location that was entered in step C add it to Additional Directories in this window
    10. Change configuration to Release and repeat
16. Click Build a Build Solution
17. Click Debug àStart Debugging
18. Hopefully a native gui like the one below appears
    
19. Close your native Gui
20. Double click the rc file.
21. A Resource View should appear somewhere
22. Open up the dialog folder and double click the IDD_MAINDLG and you should get the editor for your native gui
23. You may want to customize it latter

Adding files to your Installer

Prerequisites:

• The setup file for whatever version of .Net you want to include with your installer – Search for “.NET <version your application needs>”
• The Windows Installer – This is needed to install .NET on a barebones XP system. Search for “Windows Installer 3.1 Redistributable”
• If installing .Net  4 you will also need something called WIC (Windows Imaging Component)
• The setup files for your application

1. Double click the rc file in the solution explorer
2. The Resource view should appear
3. Right click the .rc file in the Resource View
4. Select Add Resource…
5. In the Add Resource window select Import…
6. In the Import Window that appears there is a drop down near the bottom labeled Files of type. Select All Files
7. Find your .Net setup file select it and click Open
8. A Dialog will appear called Custom Resource Type. In the text area under the “Resource Type” label give the resource a name. For example type DATA in there
   
9. Click Ok in the Custom Resource Type dialog window
10. The data from the .Net setup file will appear in the editor window. Close this data before you screw up something. Of course if you were running FolderTrack you would be able to find out where you messed up.
11. In the resource view a new folder will appear with an icon an “id name” representing the file that you just imported. Take note of the name of the file with the “id name” that Visual Studio gave it. For Example write down:  IDR_DATA1 = .net Installer
12. Repeat steps 4 through 11 but instead of using the .Net setup file do it for the files below and instead of typing in a name for the resource type in step 8 just select the resource type that you already made it should be in the list underneath the text area that has the “Resource Type” label.
    1. Windows Installer
    2. The setup files for your application
    3. WIC if you are using .NET 4

Setting everything up 

1. Download Example Installer Solution
2. In the example that you downloaded you will find code like below:  res = FindResource(g_hInstance, _T(“#232“), _T(“DATA”));
     dwRetVal =GetTempPath(MAX_PATH,lpTempPathBuffer);  StrCatBuffW(lpTempPathBuffer,TEXT(“CowboyCalcSetup.msi”),MAX_PATH);
     outNetInstall.open(lpTempPathBuffer,ios::binary | ios::out);If you add files to to the example you will have to put the currect number in the place that is red above. To determine this number double click the rc file in the solution explorer, a resource view should appear. Right click one of the folders in the menu on the resource view and select Resource Symbols you should get a window like the one below
   The number in the Value column is what you must use when customizing the example

The example is a bootstrapper for a fake program called Cowboy Calculator. You will need to customize the example to fit your needs. For minimal effort you could delete CowboyCalcSetup.msi add your setup file and rename it to CowboyCalcSetup.msi.

If you have questions I would like you to post it on www.StackOverflow.com  , reference this blog post, and send me an email (nick@foldertrack.com) to the question so that the community and I can answer it. Or you could write it as a comment.
Hope this helps

I guess I always hated the .Net Framework too. The problem with the .Net Framework is that .No one has it. Just like the Java Virtual Machine and laser disk players. So why use them? Let me explain. You are hungry and want a ham sandwich. Easy enough right?  Grab some ham, some bread, and a little mustard or mayonnaise maybe. Put it all together and you have a ham sandwich. But, if grabbing some ham meant going outside and running down your pig, slaughtering it, curing it, cutting up the meat, and cooking it. And grabbing the bread meant going out into your field, gathering grain, stone grinding it, making the dough, throwing logs in your rock oven, and baking it. And grabbing the mustard meant…you get the point. All of a sudden that ham sand which is not easy enough. We don’t have to slaughter pigs. The folks at Oscar Meyer did that. We don’t have to grind grain. Sunbeam did that. Well that’s what Sun did for us with the Java Virtual Machine and what Microsoft did for us with the .Net Framework. They make the ham and bread of programs and we put everything together. They make writing programs much easier.

You are going to be a rock star! You are not going to let your stupid music company mess up you up. If they want to ship your album on big, shiny, circular, vinyl then fine. You’re shipping a record player with every album. That is basically what Java and .Net programs have to do. They must ship the Java Virtual Machine with Java and ship the .Net framework with C#. In my next post I will describe exactly how I did this with FolderTrack.

My name is Nick. My original middle name was actually St. Anthony but I changed it to my Mom’s name because she is so awesome. My first taste of programming came when I was I guess 17. I had some class in high school that let us borrow a TI-82 for the year. I don’t know how I discovered that you can program the things but when I did I would write programs all night. I eventually wrote a pong game on the thing that used the zero as a ball. 

I really did not know or care much about college. One of my friends, that was a year older than me started going to a school called North Carolina A&T while I was still a senior in high school. A buddy of mine heard that the school had these great homecomings so he and I went to go visit our friend in October for the school’s annual homecoming. I was blown away, by the women. I had never been around that many good looking girls.  I applied to A&T as soon as I got back. My Mom wanted me to go to ECU because I had a cousin that was going there. I got accepted but I did not go. I wanted the a&t that was at A&T. 

I never really got much a&t and A&T but I did get straight A’s. I landed an internship with IBM my freshman year, another one with GE my sophomore year, a research position at Vanderbilt and a fall co-op with a defense company (I don’t name them on purpose) out in Texas (I thank God I love it here). The defense contractor offered me a job my junior year and I went to work for them after I graduated. 

My first job at the defense contractor was to rewrite some radar simulation program that was written in java by my cube mate. He wrote like 95% of the 11,000 line program in one source file. A choir of java boys that went to some school in Texas who also called themselves aggies had all these design pattern, SOA, factory method, blah blah blah ideas for the program, and they wanted me to implement them in the rewrite.   

I used a UI builder… 

For you non software people a UI is a user interface. It is the part of software that you can click on and move around. Unless you printed this out you are staring at the UI for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Mozilla, or whatever browser you are using. A UI builder lets drag and drop buttons and text boxes to create a UI. UI builders make building a UI as easy as making a power point. 

…Anyway I was using the UI builder in Eclipse to build the UIs for the radar simulation program. Almost all UI builders create two files: one file you can modify and one file you can’t. In Visual Studio you can modify that *.cs file you can’t modify the *.Designer.cs file. For some reason I touched the untouchable UI file in Eclipse. The thing about modifying the UI file that you are not supposed to modify is that the program will still compile, still run, and you will think that everything is OK. Everything will pretty much work except for the UI editor. It won’t let you edit the UI ever again. 

I remember the day my boss asked me to add some button to the UI and I told him I could get it in there in like 10 minutes. I went back to my desk started up Eclipse went to the UI I was going to add the button to and saw a huge error. No UI to edit just an error.  I ran the program and the UI was there. I went to the editor UI gone. I really wanted to know at what point did this UI editor stop working but I had no way to find out.   

Writing programs was something I always did. I wrote a computer programming competition submition program in college, I wrote a password vault thing, I created another program to pull some data off of a website, the list goes on. For the exception of the program I wrote in college, no one used the programs I wrote except for me. I like other people using my software. I don’t know why I just do. 

Wanting to know when parts of a program stopped working was something I was always interested in. I wanted a program that just recorded every change I made. I figured such a  tool already existed. I goggled, yahooed, (Bing was not around yet)… nothing. Me and my co-worker, we will call him the nibulator, drew up a design on the board. At the time I was dating a girl, we will call her DeCosta.  She played competitive scrabble. There was a scrabble completion at Late Murry Oklahoma that weekend and   I went with her. While she played scrabble with grandmas I sat out on the lake and in Eclipse started writing FolderTrack using design patterns, factory methods, and blah, blah, blah.

FolderTrack could save your life, probably not the whole thing but a couple of hours of it maybe. I’m going to assume that you make things using your computer. Maybe you make requirement documents, TPS reports, menus, music,… As you create your thing you will open up files, modify them, and save them. 99% of the time this will be a good thing, but eventually you are bound to save something and want to smack yourself. Calm down, FolderTrack can help you.

FolderTrack is a live or real-time backup and versioning tool. Don’t worry about what that means. I just wrote it for SEO purposes.  Now lets get into what FolderTrack really is.

Chosing which folders or files to track

The very first time you start FolderTrack (Or by doing a File -> New) you will get the following dialog.

The point here is to tell FolderTrack where your work is. If you are working on a single File, like a word document or something, then choose File. If your work spans multiple files that are contained in folders then choose Folder,. If your work is based on two or more files or folders that depend on each other but are not in the same folder then you can keep adding folders or files till you have everything.

Tell FolderTrack what to call your work then click OK

FolderTrack will make an initial copy of your work. This initial copy will be called version 0 (zero).

Every time you add a file or folder

delete a file or folder

rename a file or folder

or make a change

in a file a new version will be created.

As you make changes you will notice that these rectangle things like the one below show up. 

You can do several things with them.

  This button changes your work back to respective revision

  You tell it where and it will put a copy of your work there for the respective version

  We will go into this in more detail later but basically you can find out more information about the respective version

 This will cover in more detail later, but this is a way to organize a series of changes.

 The text in this button actually changes, but use this to save notes about a particular version. You can also search for versions based on descriptions to. Really if a particular version is significant you probably should put a description for it.

Use this button to ignore files or folders. This will be explained more later.

Also to note the current version is

Panels

FolderTrack has four panels to search, manager, and learn from the folders or files you are tracking.

All Versions:

This is the panel you have been on up to this point.  It has two parts

List: A list in ordered by date of every version of your work that Foldertrack has.

Relationship: A graph that shows which versions came from which versions. This view is helpful when you click Use on past version then make edits.

According to this graph both version 4 and 3.1 came from version 3

The All Version panel is great for easily going back a few changes or discovering how your work got to the way it is.

Calendar Search

(As a warning Calendar Search is easy to use but hard to explain. Really the best way to understand Calendar search is to use it first then read this section.)

Calendar Search lets you find versions according to when they were created.  It consist of 5 groups of buttons and a text box. Lets first talk about the buttons

The buttons have three states:

 No preference

 Include

 Exclude

How a button behaves upon being clicked depends on the state of the other buttons.

If all of the buttons are in the no preference state

1^st Click: it is included and all other are excluded (January Clicked Once)

2^nd Click: All buttons that are excluded go to no preference, the clicked button also goes to no preference (January Clicked Twice)

If all of the buttons are not in the no preference state

1^st Click: it is included no other buttons are affected

2^nd Click: No preference no other buttons effected

3^rd Click: Exclude no other buttons effected

There are 5 groups of buttons:  Year, Month, Day of Week, Day of Month, and Hour. A version appears on the right as long as one of its date attributes is included and none of its date attributes are excluded.  For example:

Lets say you created a version on February 4, 1913.

(Old effect made using Steve Patterson’s article at http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-effects/old-photo/) 

If you click the February button, the button will turn green and your February 4, 1913 version will show up on the right. Because one of the attributes about the date “February” is included.

If you then clicked 5 in the “Day of Month” section then your February 4, 1913 version will not be on the right anymore because its day of month attribute is 4. Clicking 5 includes versions that have a date of 5 and excludes everything else.

Category Search

The category search lets you find a version of your work based on a variety of criteria

Calendar: Find a version of your work based on when you created it, for example the below graphic shows a calendar search that shows every version created in February

User Version:  Find a version of your work based on the user version that was given to it. You can select specific user versions, all versions that have a user version, or all versions that do not have a user version

Change Type: Find a version of your work according to what happened to create the change. The below example would display every rename you did in your work

Change File: Find a version of your work based on the file or folder that was modified. The example below would bring up every version where TuskegeeGold.docx and Alabama.docx  were added, deleted, changed, or renamed

Description: Find a version of your work by typing in its description. The wild card character (*) is accepted here so you do not have to make it easier to find versions. For example if description left for a version was “Harriet’s run way was experiencing a lot of traffic” you could search for “Harriet*” and this version would show up because of “Harriet’s”.

Version: You can also search for versions by the name assigned to them. Therefore if you wanted to find version 1544.3 you could. This also takes the wild card character so you could search for 3* and get versions 3, 3.1, 34 …

Explore Tab

The explore tab gives information about a particular version. The following information is available.

1.    User Versions

2.    Description

3.    List of all of the files and folders in the version

4.    List of the files and folders that changed in this version

5.    File or folder history of all files in that version

To get the file or folder history click the file in the tree and the history will appear to the right.  You can also make a copy, view, or use a past version of the file or make a copy of a past folder.

Starting with versions 1.4 a single file can be used. That way if you want to change a file back to a previous version and olny change that file you can use just that file. The use button only copies contents that were in that file to what ever the file is named now. Therefore if you happened to rename the file then click use on a verison of the file previous to the rename then it will copy the contents of that version but not the name of that version.

And More …

User Versions:

User version alows you to keep a series or group of versions organized. For example if you are creating a document and you know that a series of changes is going to be about buses. You could start a user version called busses. Every change make after the start will have the buses user version. You can stop the user version when the series is over. You control your user versions using the following dialog

Create and Use User Version

Type in the name of the user version and click create and use the version will be automatically added to the respective version of your work.

Used User Versions

All User Versions for a respective version of your work are listed in the “Used User Versions” section. Each listed user version gives you three choices.

1.    Leave it alone: This version and the following versions of your work will have this user version

2.    Click Last Use: This version will have the user version but the following ones will not

3.    Click Remove:  This version and the following versions will not have this user version. This will cause the user version to no longer be part of the Used User Version list.

Not Used User Versions

This is a list of user versions that were created but are not part of this respective version. You can make it part of this version by selecting the user version and clicking Use

Filter

Use filters so that FolderTrack will ignore folders or files that you do not want to track. Some programs produce extraneous files that you probably do not want to keep. For example Word creates a series of tmp files every time you do a save that you probably are not interested in. 

To apply a filter:

1.    In the All Version panel find a version that has the file you want to modify.

2.    Click Filter [*] (it will name part of the file or folder)

3.    A window will appear with several options to filter the file

   a.    Filter the exact path, use this if there is a particular file you do not want to not foldertrack

   b.    Parent Folder, use this if you want to ignore the file and all other files in the directory. For example if using a IDE you may want to filter the binary and object folders

   c.     Extention, use this to filter out all files that have a particular extention. For example office products create tmp file when they save. You will probably want to filter these

   d.    Custom, design your own filter. Use it to filter all directories named “Debug” or files that start with “temp”    

4.    Click Ok.

If your change in filters causes a change in what foldertrack is tracking a new version will be created showing the changes.