10221 "Check for files changed on disk" failure

[chrisjj]

"Check for files changed on disk" doesn't check while BC has the focus and is doing nothing e.g. while I'm just watching for a file change from a background app.

Could this be fixed, please?

[Zoë]

No. Polling when your app is idle causes unnecessary network/harddrive activity and can eat laptop battery life. It's also not very common for a Windows app to do this, and I don't think we should be trail blazers in this area.

[chrisjj]

> No.

Er, OK. How about putting a warning of this failure in the docs, then? Offering to check and then secretly not doing so just wastes user time.

> Polling when your app is idle causes unnecessary network/harddrive activity

Incorrect, actually - such activity /is/ necessary for the function to work as offered.

10secs after the event, and still BC had not responded. That can hardly be justified in terms of conserving HD life.

[Zoë]

Our "Check for files changed on disk" works exactly like every other program I've seen, and exactly like it's intended to work. It's not a bug, it's not an oversight, and it's certainly not a failure. I don't care whether it conserves HD life or not, I said it eats battery life, which, given the proliferation of laptops, is a more serious goal. It also works the way it does because having it popup confirmations or automatically reload every time a file changes could be very annoying, especially if the file is a log file that changes frequently.

Now I could lie and say thanks, we'll stick it on the wishlist, but I'm sorry, I won't. The feature is working as intended and I don't see that changing.

[Lutz]

UltraEdit has an option to check changed files frequently since several versions.

You can configure a global check interval in seconds and then mark individual files to check for changes in that interval. You also can activate automatic scrolling to the end (i. e. to observe log files).