[Ardour-Dev] Set Selected Regions

[Tim Orford]

On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 09:51:51PM +0100, Chris Goddard wrote:
> Why ?
> 
> On Saturday 25 August 2007 23:29:18 Esben Stien wrote:
> > Paul Davis <paul at linuxaudiosystems.com> writes:
> > >> <selections> Should not be "undo-able"
> > >
> > > agreed.
> >
> > Oh, no; that's a terrible idea. Please make this an option. Every
> > operation should be undoable.

The history dialog UI pattern introduced by Adobe in PS5
(afaik) in 1999, is imo one of the few useful recent UI innovations. 
Having the existing undo is of course a great feature for Ardour to
have, but I'm not the only one who finds a simple Undo/Redo to
be a little primitive. Jenifer Tidwell in her Oreilly book, 
http://designinginterfaces.com/Multi-Level_Undo, 
describes Ardours current approach as:
"Confusing? You bet." :-)
Even Bash allows you to browse the history.

some undo history use cases:

*I make a complicated selection of a song section involving
regions that extend before and after the section
boundaries and overlap others. This takes several minutes 
and involves repeated auditions. Then I accidentally lose 
the selection, I go to the History dialog and unclick the 
Filter Selections toggle button that is on by default. 
I can now step back to the desired state.

*After editing track 4, I realise my previous change on
track 3 was wrong. I use Ardour 6.0's per-object history
list to revert these changes without affecting unrelated
tracks. I'm so glad i didnt have to tediously import the
track from a previous saved version.

*I'm focussed and have full flow experience using my
favourite creative tool (Ardour 8.99beta4-r3). I've tried
several tricks to try and make the mix gel, but I've run
out of time, and have to pick one of them. I tab to the
History dialog and see that the history tree has 3 recent
branches. I select the end of each branch, audition, and
see that the first one was the best (of course!). I delete 
the other branches to remove clutter, and run off the mix.
(http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/usr_32.html)

cheers
--
Tim Orford