There are a few things I was going to comment on in the past regarding directories.
Firstly, its not good where the BrailleBlaster directory is on the Mac, possibly also on Linux although I have not checked that one. The first problem is that the directory name is not prefix with a dot (.), the unix convention of being hidden. This means it will show up with the ls command. On Windows, this probably should not be done.
The second issue as to where the directory is on the Mac, not an issue so much on Linux (I think) the directory is directly in the user's home directory, the Mac has other directories for application settings and such like.
A different issue relates to the temp files of BrailleBlaster. These are being place in non-system temp directories, therefore only BrailleBlaster can clean these up (IE. in Windows disk clean up utility will never clear temp files). Another issue with not putting temp files in proper temp directories is the potential loss of performance, on Linux (don't know about other platforms) some users mount /tmp as a in memory file system, therefore it is not slowed by disk access. Also by using the actual disk for temp files it may annoy some users as it may put unnecessary wear on storage devices, SSD being the obvious one where users may get annoyed as SSD are said to have a more limited rewrite capability.
Michael Whapples On 22/10/2012 19:54, John J. Boyer wrote:
I think that instead of having a settings directory in the user's brlblst directory we should have a complete programData directory. After all, the user may want to define their own styles, Braille tables, etc. This directory would be structured the same as the BrailleBlaster programData directory, but would ontain only things that the user had defined. It would be searched first when a file was needed. John
