Yesterday, I spent a number of hours coding the routine to force the DURATION of a library holding into a searchable format – in this case hh:mm:ss, then I spent more time using the same forced format whenever the user queried the Duration.
It was important to have this capability, because I can foresee music directors asking for tunes that are, among other things, shorter than # minutes, or longer than ## minutes, to balance their programs.
Initially, I set these up to test for that format, and simply show an error message and instructions if the entry didn’t fit that format. But I noticed, when typing in test values, that it was quite awkward and inconvenient to have to type numbers-colon-numbers each time, and I also realized that the vast majority of music library holdings will not be as much as an hour long.
What I really WANTED to do was simply type in a 6 and have it appear as 6 minutes, which is formatted to 00:06:00. So why should I have to type eight rather awkward characters when all I wanted was to enter 6 minutes.
So today, I got to work again, and now it works as I wished it would yesterday: if you just type in a number and nothing else, that number will immediately be formatted as a number of minutes. If you type in number-colon-number, that entry will be formatted as minutes and seconds.
Much, much easier than before.
But I didn’t do this for me. I did it for everyone else who will be using LIDA, to save them the awkward inconvenience of having to type in those eight characters in “hh:mm:ss” and have a better experience using LIDA.
Was it worth all the work I did on this task today? Yes, no question.
This is one of those little tweaks that raises any program from just “usable” into the realm of pleasing and easy.
Sure, it took me several hours to do this today, but if it saves the users of LIDA a few seconds per entry, over hundreds, even thousands of entries, times however many people wind up using LIDA, then it has been worth it.
And finally, meticulous attention to these kinds of details is always worth it. It’s part of being a professional.
If you notice anything else in LIDA we can make easier, please let us know.