JiggeryPokery wrote:Propellerhead CHOSE to remove that feature. The feature request was to take it out. It's gone. It's awful, poor decision-making, it's a massive and backwards, workflow-killing step, but that's what PH chose to do.
It doesn't matter if it was an unintended side-effect of the original implementation, and I'm beginning to suspect that suggestion is something PH have put out to cover up and justify its being removed. "Oh, it's bug, so we took it out". What, after 15 years?! Yeah, right. If that was the case why wasn't it removed when the browser was last updated, back in Reason... 4 I think it was?wikholm wrote:
As far as I know, but I may be wrong, the "preview" of the old browser wasn't ever an intended, or perhaps even conscious, actual feature, but rather a very useful side-effect of how the old browser managed memory.
Being a software developer myself, I have also inadvertently and unknowingly created a useful side-effect or two, and been surprised when my users have regarded the behavior as a feature.
Say I did an ugly hack where I temporarily stored something on clipboard, and then forgot to tidy up when done. I'd consider myself to have caused a bug, while my users enjoyed my clever "auto-copy feature". I made that example up, because reality is more complicated, but you get the point.
Perhaps we shouldn't just presume PH deliberately chose to kill a useful feature. I think it's conceivable they never saw it as anything more than a side-effect of tidying up a canceled browsing dialog, and was genuinely surprised when we started batch about it.
That said, now when that behavior is gone, we should - just as we are - keep asking for it, but let's not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance.
You'd have to go through all the marketing but if it was ever mentioned or shown in a video, then it was an intended function.
So no-one asked for it to removed because everyone liked it. People asked for drag'n'drop, not removal of preview and the ability to freely browse with a mouse. Alpha and test pilots mentioned it, PH chose to ignore it.
PH could have kept pre-load simply be allowing
a) free mouse single-click selection of patches (the R8 browser only allows browsing of consecutive patches with keyboard arrows, so it's not really a browser, because you can't actually browse, merely select consecutive patches),
b) providing a cancel button, and
c) automatically hiding the browser when the load or cancel action was completed.
By not including those three basic abilities from the previous browser, it must therefore be an intentional decision to make it harder to use.
I emphasize again how bad the R8 browser is with a mouse. Ctrl-ordered selection of samples has been removed, which is a PITA too.
Drag'n'drop is kinda cool - I do like some aspects of the new browser, but overall it just gets in the bloody way. I hit the load icon and the browser pushes the device off the edge of the screen so I can't even see the fucking patch to preview the settings. Stupid.
If something that was a single-click is now a double-click, then the workflow 100% worse. That's not advanced maths!