Open Random, Semi Recent Files
I realized today that I’ve been accepting this notion of “Open Recent Files” for quite some time. The idea is simple. In my mind, as an end user, it means that I should be able to open a file I was working on yesterday or perhaps one that I’ve saved and closed in the previous 5-10 minutes, or hours. Whatever the case may be, for as long as I can remember “Open Recent Files” doesn’t actually show a list of the most recent files I’ve worked on. Perhaps on some days it works as desired, but most of the time it shows something I worked on several days ago, or in this case lists the same file “GenericPoster.ai” 5 times. Now I know for a fact that I worked on other things in this particular program after I worked on the Generic Poster. And, I haven’t opened that file in a week. So, this morning, I went to “Open Recent Files” in Illustrator in an effort to open a file I worked on last night, and of course, it’s not listed. I somewhat recall a similar phenomenon when working on Windows XP, however I’m not completely sure.
I’m a believer in creating reasonable expectations in order to avoid the frustration of unkept promises. So maybe it should say something more like “Open Random, Semi Recent Files” to clear up the confusion. Okay, I think “Semi Recent” should have a hyphen, but I don’t want to fix the jpg. That was probably the attitude of the programmer, so I guess I’m not one to judge. Also, is it necessary to repeat the file multiple times? Absolutely not. This software isn’t cheap, and neither is the hardware, or the operating system. Its nearly 2006, we’ve cloned things, and we haven’t worked this one out yet. Interesting.
21/12/2005 at 5:38 pm Permalink
Jason. You’re funny. The driest ever. I love your title too. Although I’m pretty sure I’m right, actually.
03/03/2006 at 4:25 pm Permalink
I don’t know if it’s true or not but in my experiences i’ve found that’s its purely the last files you “opened”. So for instance if you open “test.jpg” it will show up, but if you save an edited version as “test1.jpg” it won’t be in the list because you haven’t actually opened that file yet, you just saved it. And images created from scratch also won’t show in the recent files because you didn’t open those either. Again just from my observation.
More than a little late for a comment…
29/03/2006 at 12:29 am Permalink
Hmm..I’ve never had a problem with opening recent files that I had actually recently worked on. You are right though..there are usuallly files I haven’t looked at since 5 days ago. That’s probably because there’s a queue that needs to be filled or something?
04/04/2006 at 7:09 pm Permalink
Astute observation :)
I’m a Windows user and maybe this is just my hairbrained way of explaining away Illustrator’s idosyncracies, but it seems to me that you have to use the File > Open command in Illustrator (or whatever) for the Recent Files to pick it up. I have the habit of often browsing directly to the file/directory I want and opening it from there, which doesn’t register with Illustrator as a “Recent” file. Bummer!