Is there a way to add “profiles” to the software? When members of a family are using it, one movie could be marked “seen” for one user and “unseen” for others. Only a few things have to be changed (“seen-unseen”, “Rating”…) That could be stored in separated textfiles.
I wonder how common the situation is where two or more users want to share the same database, but do not want to share their "viewing data" (i.e., seen flag and date, rating). What might be more useful for the typical "family user" would be the ability to record multiple "viewing events," whereby at least the date and viewer(s) are recorded for each. This way, the information is available to all family members. That may have a bearing on when an with whom one plans to view a movie, or who to ask for a review.
Although not automatic and therefore somewhat error-prone, it is possible to accommodate the recording of "viewing events" using custom fields. One could be [Viewed by]—a multi-select field for recording the family members attending the last viewing (i.e., it's associated with the existing [ViewDate]). Before recording a new viewing, the previous viewing would be added to [Viewing History]—another multi-select field where viewing events are recorded in the form "YYYY-MM-DD Viewer1 Viewer2 ..."
The mass editor is great but lacks a “replace function” to allow for example to replace “himself” in actors field by “lui-même” (French traduction), or delete double spaces or empty lines in descriptions and so on.
That would be handy. I'm not sure how it would work...Perhaps a button that would toggle the "Value" box to "Find" and add a "Replace with" box. Or easier—given the toolbar environment—those boxes could be fixed, and the default value for the "Find" box could be {Entire Field}.
While the screens are getting wider it’s always a waste of space when adding a ribbon style interface...
It seems to me the new interface makes better use of space—with respect to presenting tools and commands. But I suppose you mean if the program can be used in windowed mode on a wide screen, there's room for separate tool boxes to be placed outside the program window. True, but that doesn't address the efficient management of tools (i.e., which are active, where they're placed, etc.) as the current interface attempts to. On a more practical note, I don't think nostra is willing to revisit the interface question until version 10 or so.
I think a better use of surplus screen width—or a second screen—would be the ability to display the Movie and People panels simultaneously.
Or may be add a light version of the software with only filters and a “play” button? It’s not always a good idea to have the whole interface when you have children messing around. And it could be helpful when you want to "distribute" your collection to friends too.
There's already a
Permissions system (on the "Administration" menu) for this purpose.
