You say Return, I say Enter (and PS)

In the windoid database search routine – which, unfortunately takes about 1.5 seconds longer than Pan6 to set up, so I have to pause which I’ve learned to do before typing, wasted days and wasted nights… – another oddity is that I used to hit ENTER to execute the search. Now I have to hit RETURN.

Is this some new preferred way of doing things? If so, can someone explain why that would be?

And a PS on the recent topic of automatic saves. The problem is that sometimes I check into a DB and MAY make a change that I didn’t intend. In the old days, it didn’t matter, because when I exited, it asked me if I wanted to SAVE and I said no. Now I’d have to do an UNDO to see whether I’d done something I didn’t intend. PLEASE return to the far superior days of yore, Jim.

Apple changed to automatic saving as their preferred model close to 10 OS versions ago. A major priority for Jim in writing PanX was creating a product compliant to Apple standards and thus less likely be broken by future Apple changes. And also one easier for, much desired, new customers to learn. As a side benefit PanX picks up on various Apple supplied perks for free. As an indirect benefit to us, but I suspect a big one to Jim, standard code ought to be easier to maintain and extend. But as a side effect we’re stuck with whatever Apple’s control freaks dream up that we don’t like. It took me a couple OS versions to get used to Autosave in my other programs that implemented it early. Between PanX’s excellent Undo, the options at Revert to… and backups, including Time Machine, I generally lose less than when I was saving manually.

Jim has sound business reasons not to go back on this. And when changing how I do things, in a program I’ve used for a couple decades, annoys and frustrates me I recall how often over that time frame I’ve had to learn entirely new programs in multiple software categories after an “essential” program succumbed to one of the many Apple OS changes. Jim has done an amazing job keeping this huge chunk of niche software going all these years.

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