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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2005 at 11:05 am and is filed under Business, Pleasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.