"View Folders should have been default.  View Categories is very annoying to people with established poser content folder structure"

Never a truer word spoken. I use View Folders As Tree and avoid the whole content Db thing. I find that it's nothing but a pain, although I don't doubt some people like it.

pjz,

I can see you're making a determined attempt to master DS, so if I may, I'd like to offer some advice. As you've already figured out, the Preferences dialog allows you to add Runtimes by content type and the Tree view lets you see them as they are on your HDD. If you're happy with that, I'ld stick with it and forget the content Db altogether. So, on the topic of library structure, here are some of the things you can do in DS which I like.

1. Right-click any folder name> Create new sub-folder / Rename / Delete / Browse to folder location.
2. Right-click any thumbnail to Load / Cut / Copy / Delete / Rename / Browse / Create custom action
3. Left-click to select any thumbnail (CTRL-click to multi-select) and drag to a new folder.
4. Use the 2 top-right arrows in the content pane to go back/forward between the folders you've browsed.

Create Custom Action

This is a great function. Let's say you create a custom action for a figure. A new menu category will appear called 'Scripts' and your custom action will be listed in it. When you click it, that figure will load in DS. You can create a custom action for anything - figures. props, MATs, poses, lights and cameras.

If you want to go even further, open the Customise dialog (Edit> Customise or press F3) and in the left-hand pane, expand the 'Custom' list. You'll see your action there. If you open the Toolbars tab in the right-hand pane, you can drag the custom action to a toolbar. You can also create new toolbars (right-click> Add Toolbar), and switch them off/on.

So for example, you can make your own toolbar (and icons of you want) and add figures or presets to it. Rather than looking through folders for frequently used figures, one click on the toolbar icon will load them.

Another thing you can do in Customise is to expand the lists in the left-hand pane and right-click an item to change the keyboard shortcut. I've assigned my own hotkeys to the entire UI and it's agreat way to speed up your workflow.

You should also take a good look through Preferences (press F2) and change a few things. It's set by default to view small icons, which I find useless, and there are a few other things you might not want, like creating a new camera for every scene.

The last thing you might want to change is the UI itself. There are 2 ways to do this - Styles and Layouts. In the menu View> Interface Style, you can choose a style and in the same menu is an option to customise some of the colors. Interface Layouts gives you a variety of options and you can save any style or layout. It will be added to the list and you can switch between them with one click.

Basically, what I'm saying here is that DS isn't exactly like Poser, but once you start to get the hang of it, you'll find that there are lots of things you can do with the UI and library which can't be done in Poser. One isn't better than the other - they're just different, that's all.

mac