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TBH - I kinda like that app! It's obvious what it can do and how to use it. I don't need to read a document, guess gestures and have everything hidden away in favour of the almighty whitespace. I suspect every box on there was added because it was needed. I suspect the result of people who do say the thing on the left is a barren app and a claim that "we have a study showing that people don't need to number their files". Long-live the right side!

related https://uxdesign.cc/how-white-space-killed-an-enterprise-app-and-why-data-density-matters-b3afad6a5f2a

Long-live the right side!

The big downside in that approach is that accessibility suffers. Think of the people with vision problems who need to increase the font to be able to read or even use VoiceOver with that kind of app. I imagine even if VoiceOver works there, the navigation is probably close to unusable

It has the strong smell of a VB app. The positives are that it will support tabbing between controls and OS standard system accessibility like using system fonts/contrast settings and supporting screen readers and voice automation so is probably actually pretty good on a lot of that compared to e.g. a sexy electron app.

that is probably true, but there are multiple points here: • information density • productivity • that app is ugly and it increasingly looks like resolving the last point is required but not sufficient for building a successful productivity tool that could be positioned as "forward-thinking". This is what the original picture was trying to illustrate I guess

For a bit different take on file renaming, there is the bulk rename functionality in macOS. 🙂 https://t.co/6IzIQBMaPL

I'm going to keep defending it 😄 I suspect it's productive to use. Especially once you get used to the layout. This type of task is just messy as a gui. It's actually a really good example for FoC because you need so many permutations of features to support a general name transformation that it's best addressed with a programming language or regex and even then, particular goals can buckle under complexity and you start wanting third party support libraries for character-sets and padleft (lol) etc. We should bear in mind it is a successful productivity tool. It's been around for 20 years and has an active forum even in 2019 https://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk Take a look at a less-ugly alternative e.g. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/file-renamer/9nblggh68201?activetab=pivot:overviewtab# And you can immediately see there are dozens of transformations that BulkRenameUtility can do that something pretty cannot. I do think the joke is off-target because the real issue in RHS is what we always used to call "Developer Design". The features are useful and successfully implemented but kind of thrown together to be easily accessible (as in right-in-front-of you). Yes it's eye-bleach at a first look but on your 100th complex rename, you need features not lining up all the boxes. It's the classic solo-dev look whereas LHS is a team of people who blow the budget creating customer personas.

Many different ways of solving similar problems and for different types of users. I doubt the “Bulk File Renamer” is a globally optimal solution, but it is definitely in some local optimum 🙂.

Incidentally, I have my own bulk rename utility... lol. It's a command-line tool with two commands -

dump

and

update

. It dumps out a text-file of file-names which I munge in a text-editor using both manual edits and regex and then save.

update

then changes all the file names. I use it for cleaning up file names of downloaded files that I am keeping e.g. correcting episode numbers and such. It has an option to dump to a csv for breaking down paths into cells so I can reorg directory structures in a spreadsheet. Data cleaning is kind of an interesting problem given interplay between automated and manual actions.

I tend to forget how the multi-cursors work and end up using search-replace instead. 😛

I know what you mean 😄 It's a different interaction/chord in each editor so it's always takes a couple of attempts. It's useful for when you can't match against something e.g. adding text, variable text (guids, timestamps, sequence info etc.) or replacing something that has loads of other matches you don't want to change but it's still like 100 things so hammering "replace next" would be painful.

Something can look perfectly clear to someone with experience, and yet completely uncomprehensible to someone new. People are very bad at remebering how it felt the first time they saw something, especially once they have put in the effort to learn about it. Programmers think text-based programs are easy to read, because they spend years of their life looking at them. Sometimes a complex messy interface is what people need, because it solves their problem. Have you ever looked at facebook's interface? It's a hot mess, and yet... it works.