Here's one of those little-known, probably never-been-used features of the REALbasic IDE.
When you look at the window editor, on the left-hand side, you'll see the control's "palette" that contains the various controls you can add to a window. Above the palette is a popup menu that lets you pick various views.
One of those views that you can pick is "Favorites", which is basically the list of the most commonly-used controls. However, this list is modifiable too! You can add any control you'd like to the favorites by right-clicking on it in the control's palette, and selecting "Add to Favorites." You can remove it from the favorites list by selecting and and doing a "Remove from Favorites."
Now, with a show of hands (I'm watching, honestly!), who actually knew about this feature? And better yet, who uses it on a regular basis?
Me, on both counts.
I've used it since it came out and I love it. :)
I use it all the time.
The nice thing is that the IDE remembers the setting, so if I've been using Project Controls or All Controls(which I bet is even less known, being newer, I think) I always try to go back to favourites before shutting down.
Then my favourites are there waiting for me when I want them.
Don't take this the wrong way - I think the feature is cool and I use it myself. However, I think it's not cool to have functionality that's only exposed via a right click.
Most users learn by spying on the menu options and the right click is often times not intuitive. This is one of my bigger complaints with a lot of Microsoft software where you can only get to something by selecting something from the right click menu. I have a couple of pet-peeves with Microsoft Access because of this.
@Bob -- I'm with you on that one. Contextual information should always have a more discoverable user interface. However, that turns out to be highly impractical for complex projects by making use of the menu system. For instance, if the IDE exposed everything in contextual menus in the usual menus as well, it would almost double the amount of menu items shown. Suddenly the main menu becomes much less discoverable and a whole lot scarier! But... this is also why I really like the Ribbon technology Microsoft uses in Office. It's a bit more practical approach to user interface discoverability.
I knew about it and use it. With all of the plugins I use it is nice to get a subset that I regularly work with. I think I saw Geoff demo that at a REAL World.
I must admit that I am quite surprised -- I thought *no one* knew about this feature or used it. Good to see it's not nearly that obscure. :-)
Initially I thought mebbe the "Favourites" list would be populated automatically, based on the controls you used the most. However, when this didn't seem to be happening, I looked around and discovered the Add to Favourites contextual menu item.
I just look at context-menus everywhere I go as a matter of course. It shouldn't be necessary but it's surprising what you find, especially on windows. I usually try various combinations of modifier keys with left and right clicks as well.