Daz Install Manager (DIM) 1.4.1.69, Now Available! (*UPDATED*)

Richard Haseltine

bytescapes said:

Is it just me, or did DIM 1.4.1.19 completely break the "Order Date" sorting? The other sort orders seem to work pretty much as expected, but if I choose to sort by "Order Date", what I get is utterly unrelated to the actual order date.

Or not utterly unrelated. At the top of the list, I get a series of more or less random products in alphabetical order, including some really ancient ones from old, old orders. If I scroll far enough down through the alphabetically-ordered selection, it finally starts showing items in something like the order date.

For example, today I bought the Agma Bundle, New York Tenements 2, and 1920 City Street. When I choose sort by "Order Date: Descending", I get "12K HDRI Maps - Forsaken Factory 1 of 6" (followed by 2 of 6 etc.), and then "1920 City Street". After that it shows random products in strict alpha order until I get to "Zombie Snow Plow" and then, immediately after that, I get the two "Agma" items that I didn't already own (I bought one separately a long time ago), followed by "New York Tenements 2", and then the rest of my purchases follow in the correct order.

Just for clarity, these are undownloaded products: the first chunk of alphabetically-ordered items is not the "Product Updates" section that usually appears at the head of the list, but is actually part of the "Products" set.

It's rather weird (and impractical) and I don't know if it's a data error on the back end, or if the sorting algorithm has just gone insane. Or if it's DIM's way of telling me that I buy too much from DAZ, and it can't keep up any more.

This is on Windows 11, by the way.

Sorting has not been touched in this build, it was changed in soem previous builds - when was the last time it was working for you? Order Date looks OK for me in ready To Instal, and as far as I can tell (from a very small sample, mainly hidden items) in Ready To Download.

xyer0

murgatroyd314 said:

I'd just like to say that I absolutely HATE the change from checkboxes to colored boxes.

Please tell us why. I was up to the E's redownloading & installing my library on my new 8Tb SSD, and I was notified that I would need to update in order to continue. After clicking thousands of checks/ticks, each of which I had to visually confirm, I was pleased to find bold green squares that I could quickly scan over for confirmation. I've been bullish on Daz updates because they often spoil something that works, but I approve and applaud this one. 

kervala

Thank you so much for fixing the issue I had with a dark theme, products list was written in black on black :D

memcneil70

Just found the update to DIM. I was in the middle of reinstalling 10,500 appx. items to my library that had been on my old drive. So I just killed the 'refresh packages' and DIM, reopened it and found why DIM got stuck. Now to wait for an hour for DIM to reconcile itself with my library.

I hope everything works okay after it comes alive.

 

murgatroyd314

xyer0 said:

murgatroyd314 said:

I'd just like to say that I absolutely HATE the change from checkboxes to colored boxes.

Please tell us why. I was up to the E's redownloading & installing my library on my new 8Tb SSD, and I was notified that I would need to update in order to continue. After clicking thousands of checks/ticks, each of which I had to visually confirm, I was pleased to find bold green squares that I could quickly scan over for confirmation. I've been bullish on Daz updates because they often spoil something that works, but I approve and applaud this one. 

Maybe it's just my brain, but a checked box instantly registers as "this is selected", while a green square is just a green square. 

Richard Haseltine

memcneil70 said:

Just found the update to DIM. I was in the middle of reinstalling 10,500 appx. items to my library that had been on my old drive. So I just killed the 'refresh packages' and DIM, reopened it and found why DIM got stuck. Now to wait for an hour for DIM to reconcile itself with my library.

I hope everything works okay after it comes alive.

It shouldn't take that long in these recent builds. What security software are you running? Are there other lowlevel disc tools active (e.g. file indexers)? What hardware hosts the content and packages?

bytescapes

Richard Haseltine said:

bytescapes said:

Is it just me, or did DIM 1.4.1.19 completely break the "Order Date" sorting? The other sort orders seem to work pretty much as expected, but if I choose to sort by "Order Date", what I get is utterly unrelated to the actual order date.

Or not utterly unrelated. At the top of the list, I get a series of more or less random products in alphabetical order, including some really ancient ones from old, old orders. If I scroll far enough down through the alphabetically-ordered selection, it finally starts showing items in something like the order date.

For example, today I bought the Agma Bundle, New York Tenements 2, and 1920 City Street. When I choose sort by "Order Date: Descending", I get "12K HDRI Maps - Forsaken Factory 1 of 6" (followed by 2 of 6 etc.), and then "1920 City Street". After that it shows random products in strict alpha order until I get to "Zombie Snow Plow" and then, immediately after that, I get the two "Agma" items that I didn't already own (I bought one separately a long time ago), followed by "New York Tenements 2", and then the rest of my purchases follow in the correct order.

Just for clarity, these are undownloaded products: the first chunk of alphabetically-ordered items is not the "Product Updates" section that usually appears at the head of the list, but is actually part of the "Products" set.

It's rather weird (and impractical) and I don't know if it's a data error on the back end, or if the sorting algorithm has just gone insane. Or if it's DIM's way of telling me that I buy too much from DAZ, and it can't keep up any more.

This is on Windows 11, by the way.

Sorting has not been touched in this build, it was changed in soem previous builds - when was the last time it was working for you? Order Date looks OK for me in ready To Instal, and as far as I can tell (from a very small sample, mainly hidden items) in Ready To Download.

Sorry, I should have said that while the problem is present in this build, it may have pre-dated it. I don't remember exactly when I first noticed it, but I think it was before the new look and feel came in (which would put it at 1.4.1.15 or before). Sorry not to be more precise, but after not touching DIM for a while, I think I may have got a bunch of updates in fairly quick succession, and I wasn't really paying attention to version numbers.

memcneil70

Richard Haseltine said:

memcneil70 said:

Just found the update to DIM. I was in the middle of reinstalling 10,500 appx. items to my library that had been on my old drive. So I just killed the 'refresh packages' and DIM, reopened it and found why DIM got stuck. Now to wait for an hour for DIM to reconcile itself with my library.

I hope everything works okay after it comes alive.

It shouldn't take that long in these recent builds. What security software are you running? Are there other lowlevel disc tools active (e.g. file indexers)? What hardware hosts the content and packages?

Hi Richard,

It only took about 25 minutes to tell me I had to reinstall some of the basic Genesis files which had also been uninstalled yesterday, so since then it has been chugging away happily. Down to 8297 files to go.

My zip files are stored on a 5Tb Seagate External Hard drive. I had problems with a LaCie 5Tb external drive where the My Daz 3D Content lived. It crashed bad when the MacBoodPro updated from Monterrey to Ventura. So I now have everything on a LaCie 8Tb hard drive.

But the majority of my files still pointed to the old 5Tb La Cie, and I found empty folders yesterday morning, after figuring out the issue, I decided to uninstall all the files that pointed to the old drive, and reinstall them with to the new 8Tb. 

This is only half of my products, I have been picking and choosing what to install gradually. 

And I am working with Customer Service to try to get my Release version of Daz Studio to accept the new drive directory. It freezes and crashes when I try to change it. But the Beta is working great. DIM is not giving me issues either. 

Both of the computers, Win10 and Apple, which have saved zip files have that long wait time. The Win10 laptop, w/o zip saved is fast. After this process is done, I will reboot and see what the timing is like.

Mary

namffuak

bytescapes said:

Sorry, I should have said that while the problem is present in this build, it may have pre-dated it. I don't remember exactly when I first noticed it, but I think it was before the new look and feel came in (which would put it at 1.4.1.15 or before). Sorry not to be more precise, but after not touching DIM for a while, I think I may have got a bunch of updates in fairly quick succession, and I wasn't really paying attention to version numbers.

If you are like me, you will have some number of items that always sort to the top because the order date is always the current date. This information comes from the companion .dsx file that downloads with the zip of the product. As near as I can tell, this file is created on demand from the product library. In my case, the items with the current date show in my library without an order number or date and have been manually added to the library.

 

xyer0

murgatroyd314 said:

xyer0 said:

murgatroyd314 said:

I'd just like to say that I absolutely HATE the change from checkboxes to colored boxes.

Please tell us why. I was up to the E's redownloading & installing my library on my new 8Tb SSD, and I was notified that I would need to update in order to continue. After clicking thousands of checks/ticks, each of which I had to visually confirm, I was pleased to find bold green squares that I could quickly scan over for confirmation. I've been bullish on Daz updates because they often spoil something that works, but I approve and applaud this one. 

Maybe it's just my brain, but a checked box instantly registers as "this is selected", while a green square is just a green square. 

Makes sense. In my case, surveying 25,000 boxes for checks takes longer than seeking white in a row of green. 

Taoz

DIM said there was an update when I started it this morning, so I clicked OK to update.  It was then running for several minutes without anything visible happening (it has started to do that recently when it is updating it seems), and then it finally showed my products so I thought it had updated. 

Then I noticed it was still 1.4.1.18.  I've tried to restart it a couple of times, but it doesn't say there is an update.  I don't recall seeing the Windows UAC dialog at any point during the whole process, I was doing something else on another PC while waiting for it to update so maybe I didn't notice it.  I seem to recall that DS skips an attempted update if you don't click OK on the UAC dialog fairly quickly, so I wonder if DIM does the same? 

Richard Haseltine

Taoz said:

DIM said there was an update when I started it this morning, so I clicked OK to update.  It was then running for several minutes without anything visible happening (it has started to do that recently when it is updating it seems), and then it finally showed my products so I thought it had updated. 

Then I noticed it was still 1.4.1.18.  I've tried to restart it a couple of times, but it doesn't say there is an update.  I don't recall seeing the Windows UAC dialog at any point during the whole process, I was doing something else on another PC while waiting for it to update so maybe I didn't notice it.  I seem to recall that DS skips an attempted update if you don't click OK on the UAC dialog fairly quickly, so I wonder if DIM does the same? 

ctrl-click the refresh button to force it to do a version check, I think.

Taoz

Richard Haseltine said:

Taoz said:

DIM said there was an update when I started it this morning, so I clicked OK to update.  It was then running for several minutes without anything visible happening (it has started to do that recently when it is updating it seems), and then it finally showed my products so I thought it had updated. 

Then I noticed it was still 1.4.1.18.  I've tried to restart it a couple of times, but it doesn't say there is an update.  I don't recall seeing the Windows UAC dialog at any point during the whole process, I was doing something else on another PC while waiting for it to update so maybe I didn't notice it.  I seem to recall that DS skips an attempted update if you don't click OK on the UAC dialog fairly quickly, so I wonder if DIM does the same? 

ctrl-click the refresh button to force it to do a version check, I think.

Yes, that worked, thanks!

xyer0

In Sort Order, what do Busy First and Idle First mean? If it means what I think, shouldn't Idle First be the default?

Richard Haseltine

As far as I know Busy means being in the queue to be or actively being processed, Idle means not.

xyer0

Richard Haseltine said:

As far as I know Busy means being in the queue to be or actively being processed, Idle means not.

Ahh... thanks again, Sir Haseltine.

mostlyhuman

I think it would be much easier on the brain to move the release column to the far left or at least left of the package name (the column with the yellow beta tag icons), I have to scan back and forth while scrolling down when I want to look for beta updates and it feels visually uncomfortable. Far to the left to look at the name then back far to the right to check the release type.

Another idea would be to overlay the yellow tag icon on top of the gray package icons, this would eliminate having to have a dedicated release column altogether

RiverMissy

Ok, so in order to get the thumbnails we have to right click on each item and tell it to download them individually and then they are so tiny and blurry I don't know what I am looking at.  I couldn't find anything anywhere in settings to show thumbnails.  Am I missing something?

namffuak

RiverMissy said:

Ok, so in order to get the thumbnails we have to right click on each item and tell it to download them individually and then they are so tiny and blurry I don't know what I am looking at.  I couldn't find anything anywhere in settings to show thumbnails.  Am I missing something?

Hover your mouse over the entry - you'll get a popup with the product order detaills and the full size thumbnail. And I select all the new items, right-click on one, and select 'download thumbnail -> all selected'.

Richard Haseltine

namffuak said:

RiverMissy said:

Ok, so in order to get the thumbnails we have to right click on each item and tell it to download them individually and then they are so tiny and blurry I don't know what I am looking at.  I couldn't find anything anywhere in settings to show thumbnails.  Am I missing something?

Hover your mouse over the entry - you'll get a popup with the product order detaills and the full size thumbnail. And I select all the new items, right-click on one, and select 'download thumbnail -> all selected'.

You can click the master checkbox in the header to select all in view, or check individual items.

memcneil70

After reinstalling about 10,400 files since I last posted on the 17th, it finished around 4pm this afternoon. I rebooted the computer, then it took about 20 minutes for DIM to come back, wanting me to reinstall a program. Then it let me install the new Beta and purchases. And yes, the sort by recent orders is toast again. Sigh. So I sorted by Highest ID and then looked up the older items by names. 

Tomorrow I will deal with the Win10 computers.

Edit to add: delays in reinstalling due to the MacBook Pro putting all work to sleep at night by itself.

xyer0

memcneil70 said:

After reinstalling about 10,400 files since I last posted on the 17th, it finished around 4pm this afternoon. I rebooted the computer, then it took about 20 minutes for DIM to come back, wanting me to reinstall a program. Then it let me install the new Beta and purchases. And yes, the sort by recent orders is toast again. Sigh. So I sorted by Highest ID and then looked up the older items by names. 

Tomorrow I will deal with the Win10 computers.

Edit to add: delays in reinstalling due to the MacBook Pro putting all work to sleep at night by itself.

Hi, Ms. Mary, what do you mean "the sort by recent orders is toast again?" I'm in the midst of reinstalling 20,000+ files, and at the current rate, it could take another 60 hours. I just want to know what to expect, since DIM has been taking several minutes (20 sounds about right) to load up each of the last two days it's made me download an update and restart.

memcneil70

I am back to A - Z when I ask for sort by the most recent orders on the MBP. Which was disappointing because they had it correct on the last version. But I keep my copy of my shopping cart and my email so I search for the older items by name. The order that was backed up waiting for the reinstall to finish had 9 older products, along with 5 new ones.

I only installed half my library, some items were bloat fill from bundles, others I just haven't got around to yet, or are materials that I haven't matched up to their main product. I have found that a lot of names have changed, either in DIM or how they show in my Product Library from when I bought them. I have had to go to my copy of the promo pages to verify I have the correct item sometimes. And I am not installing a slew of characters that I will never use, have well over 2000 and counting.

But I found that there was a new Beta release when I opened my Win10 laptop yesterday and opened up the Beta and it asked me if I wanted to install it. I remembered in time that it would mess-up the reinstall going on the Mac.

I also had to babysit the Mac to keep it awake. Swiping my finger on the pad so it kept active. Drove me a bit nuts. I didn't close it at night, tried to let it work as long as it would.

The Mac and my desktop Win10 computer have saved zip files, so that is part of what causes my DIM to open more slowly. But in that case it also saved me from having to re-download the files all over again, over a six month period as I have a 1.2Tb limit/monthly. 

Good luck and I hope you don't have an interruption from software updates to your OS in the meantime!

Mary

memcneil70

Opened up the Win10 laptop and DIM and downloaded its update. When it reloaded, the new Beta was first, then the new items I bought yesterday and today were all there up front and in 'Order Date: Recent First' sequence. So that works on the Windows version of DIM, but apparently not for the Mac version. (It seems to alternate between the versions.)

 

Edit to Add: 0658: Well it looks like the Mac needed to sleep on the update first and when I finished the Win 10 updates, and woke the Mac up, the sort order was correct and 'Order Date: Recent First' did show this mornings new items, only one was brand new, the other two were older products. So, a reboot of the system was needed.

johndoe_36eb90b0

Latest DIM update changes user interface which is frankly a welcome change.

However, in doing so it seems to ignore some accessibility guidelines.

Namely, there doesn't seem to exist support for the dark mode and the colors are all over the place -- blindingly bright background in the list, dark tabs, different shades for different pats of background which look distracting, and finally when you mouse over something in the list the item highlight color contrast against bright list background makes it impossible to read for older people or people with visual impairments.

I'd like to point Daz developers to this resource:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/

Even though it says it's for web, it should apply for application UI too (especially considering most applications today use HTML to render UI).

WCAG 2.1 requires a contrast ratio of at least 3:1 for graphics and user interface components (such as form input borders).

WCAG Level AAA requires a contrast ratio of at least 7:1 for normal text and 4.5:1 for large text.

This site can be used to check your UI colors to see if you are following those recommendations:

https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

I'd really prefer if there was dark mode, but failing that if the current colors were toned down (i.e. less contrast between different background colors).

xyer0

memcneil70 said:

Good luck and I hope you don't have an interruption from software updates to your OS in the meantime!

Mary

@memcneil70 Thanks for letting me know and for always being so helpful and pleasant. 

xyer0

If I delete an item from Ready to Install BEFORE installing it, will it return to Ready to Download next time I start up DIM?

Richard Haseltine

xyer0 said:

If I delete an item from Ready to Install BEFORE installing it, will it return to Ready to Download next time I start up DIM?

Yes

murgatroyd314

memcneil70 said:

I also had to babysit the Mac to keep it awake. Swiping my finger on the pad so it kept active. Drove me a bit nuts. I didn't close it at night, tried to let it work as long as it would.

Open a Terminal window, type caffeinate, and hit enter. That should keep it from going to sleep from inactivity.

xyer0

Richard Haseltine said:

xyer0 said:

If I delete an item from Ready to Install BEFORE installing it, will it return to Ready to Download next time I start up DIM?

Yes

Thank you, Richard!