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Getting Started |
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Getting Started |
After installing Montage on your computer, you're ready to run the program and create your first montage. Here's a quick summary basic steps involved:
The simplest procedure for starting Montage is to double-click on a shortcut (i.e. a link) placed conveniently on the Windows desktop. (If you don't yet have one, it's an easy matter to create a link to Montage on the Windows desktop, or you can simply launch Montage from Windows' Start Menu, if you prefer.) Running the program, MONTAGE3.EXE, for the first time creates a new, empty Montage metafile named MONTAGE.MO3 in the Montage program directory. If this file already exists, Montage will open it and restore the previous view.
Once you've been using Montage for a while, you may find it useful to have several separate montages, which can be stored wherever you like. You can put links to montages anywhere in the filing system, e.g. on the Windows desktop, or you can create a Montage Shortcut to one montage inside another. In either case, double-clicking, pressing Enter, or right-clicking and choosing Open Target from the context menu on a Shortcut or a link to a montage opens that metafile in its own Montage Desktop window. (When you first attempt to open a file having the .MO3 extension via Windows Explorer, it prompts you to point it to the associated program.)
A new montage contains only an empty Montage Desktop window (and various default option settings). Your first action typically would be to position and resize the Desktop window, also selecting a suitable background image (wallpaper) if you are creating a graphical montage. You can immediately begin to populate your montage with Shortcuts, by dragging and dropping files, folders, links, and hyperlinks from Explorer (e.g. the Windows desktop) into Montage.
Another way to create new Shortcuts is by using the New Shortcut menu command. This opens a Shortcut Properties dialog, where you can enter the parameters of the new Shortcut directly, with greater control than dragging and dropping. You can use the File, Properties command (or right-click and select Properties from the Shortcut context menu) to open a Shortcut's Properties dialog at any point, in order to review and change its settings.
Note that the icons appearing in Montage always represent Shortcuts to applications or documents, or more precisely, to ways of launching and initializing applications or openings of those documents. A montage does not physically contain icons, application programs, or the data that those programs act upon. The amount of information actually residing in a Montage metafile is relatively small, even if it describes a complex view.
One of the main points of creating Montage Shortcuts is to give yourself a more convenient way of launching applications. Once you've created a Shortcut, try double-clicking on its icon to open a document or run a familiar application. Assuming you have a valid Shortcut definition, the application should run exactly as you would normally expect. The only immediate difference you should see (compared to launching through a Windows link) is that the Montage Shortcut is highlighted while the application it launched is open. If you close the application, its Shortcut soon reverts to the un-highlighted appearance. The next time you open this Shortcut, however, you may notice another difference: the application window automatically is restored to its previous sizing, placement, and zoom state, even if that is not its normal behavior when launched directly from Windows.
Open a few Shortcuts simultaneously, and arrange their target windows in some manner that suits your taste and the limitations of screen space. (Note that you can quickly activate the target window of a highlighted Shortcut by double-clicking on the Shortcut, as an alternative to using the Windows Task Bar.)
It's no more difficult to launch an application through Montage than it is to launch it through a conventional link on the Windows desktop. The main benefit of launching applications through Montage shows up later, when you close and reopen the Shortcut, or when you close and reopen the montage that contains it.
A Shortcut not only can launch an application, but also gives you a quick way to tell whether the target is currently open, based on its highlighting. The current window zoom state is indicated by the color of the Shortcut's border (red = normal, green = minimized, blue = maximized).
An additional mode of highlighting, called auto-detection, displays a gray background around the Shortcut when its target has been already opened by something other than this Shortcut. (An alternate, but equivalent highlighting style is used for transparent Shortcuts.) This is especially useful when dealing with exclusive documents, for which there can be at most one opening, but where there may exist any number of Shortcuts to that document (e.g. a Word document or another montage). When a Shortcut is auto-detected, you can instantly activate its open target window by double-clicking on the highlighted Shortcut.
Using the Shortcut context menu, you can open, close, activate, minimize, maximize, normalize, or put the associated application window behind all other windows. These features provide a more convenient and versatile alternative to the Window Task Bar, integrated into the Shortcut itself. The net result is greater convenience and economy of screen space.
Through its menus Montage makes it easy to save and restore either the entire view or just the configuration of an individual Shortcut. You don't need to perform any special action to see Montage's automatic state-saving and restoration at work. When you close and reopen an application through its Shortcut, the target window is restored to its previous size and position, even if Windows' normal behavior would have been to put it somewhere else. (Sometimes Windows remembers this information, but in general Windows is more limited and unreliable in this respect. The Windows Calculator, CALC.EXE, is an example of one of those pesky applications that never seems to stay where you put it.)
More interesting than closing a single Shortcut is what happens when you close a montage containing several open Shortcuts: not only does the Montage Desktop window close, but also the external application windows associated with each of its open Shortcuts. By default, closing an instance of Montage automatically captures and saves its final state in a Montage metafile. Reopening a montage restores its previous state, including which Shortcuts were open and the sizing and placement of their respective target windows.
In addition to saving and restoring the configuration of the Montage Desktop window and the layouts of external application windows, Montage has a certain amount application intelligence, i.e. it knows about about some application-specific properties. For example, Montage is able to save and restore the view mode of an Explorer window, i.e. the choice of Large Icons, Small Icons, List, Details, or Thumbnails. There is a separate page devoted to application-specific properties in the Shortcut Properties dialog. (The extent of Montage's application intelligence is evolving, based on user feedback and technical considerations.)
Normally when you exit from Montage, e.g. by clicking on the Montage Desktop window's close box, it automatically saves the view. (This default behavior can be modified through the More, Auto-save options of the Desktop context menu.) Also you always have the choice of Abandoning a view, meaning that you wish to exit leaving the previous montage intact.
You can create any number of separate montages and have any number of them open at the same time (subject the the limits of your PC hardware, of course). Montage supports some Windows command line options for ways of explicitly creating a new metafiles, but the more common procedure is to create new montages from within a running instance of the program, e.g. via File, New Montage... or File, Save View As.... It is also possible to integrate Montage into the Windows Shell, so you can right-click and use New, Montage from an Explorer window.
When Montage is launched without explicitly specifying the name of the montage to be opened, by default it looks for a montage named MONTAGE.MO3 in the current directory. If no such montage exists, it is created. This is the typical way that your first montage would come into existence, after performing a Montage installation.
Tip: Create a template montage configured with whatever choice of default Montage Desktop options and window layout you prefer. If you like, create an assortment of such templates, and put links or Shortcuts to these somewhere convenient. When you want to create a new montage, open the desired template and perform a Save View As..., specifying the new montage name and location, and immediately close this montage. Create one or more convenient Shortcuts or Windows links to the new montage, and use these to open and manipulate it. Also you can double-click directly on a .MO3 file through Windows Explorer to open it, after allowing the required association to be defined.
The first thing to do is start small, for example with a main montage to open the applications you use most frequently. See how you can save yourself a little time by launching individual applications through Montage, or even starting up a number of applications all at once, rather than the usual routine of opening them one at a time and manually putting each into its customary arrangement. If you shy away from opening multiple applications concurrently, be bold, and see how you can do things more easily this way, provided that the windows are consistently and automatically rearranged into a precisely reproducible configuration.
Once your primary montage grows too crowded, it's time to think about ways of breaking it up into logical sub-units. For example, there may be clusters of Shortcuts that tend to be used together, primarily in connection with some particular project or activity. Creating separate montages makes it easier to switch between disparate activities, reducing irrelevant, distracting screen clutter. Because montages are files, you can use the full power and flexibility of Windows Explorer to store them in the filing system along with the documents to which they refer, accommodating a virtually boundless amount of information.
As the number of your montages grows, consider ways of organizing them into an informal hierarchy or logical network, bearing in mind that a montage may contain Shortcuts to other montages, which in turn can refer to others, and so on. This organization of logically nested montages is quite different from a traditional filing system or database, because parent-child relationships between montages are not constrained as they are in a conventional physical or hierarchical organization. For example, multiple Shortcuts to a given document or montage may exist within any number of possible parent montages. Two different montages each may contain a Shortcut to the other, but at any given time only one (or neither) can be the other's current parent. A special mode of highlighting, called auto-detection, makes it easy to distinguish between these cases. (Circularities are avoided, because Montage is an exclusive document application.) Experimentation is the best way to discover the possibilities.
Review the Montage Knowledge Base (MKB) to become acquainted with known limitations, problems, and potential points of confusion in the current implementation. If you are using a local copy of the Montage Help file, you should occasionally check the online MKB page for any updates to this information, and see the online Version History page for news about the latest available Montage program updates available for downloading. (Note that some downloads are available only to registered Montage users.)
In most cases, you would start Montage simply by double-clicking through Windows Explorer on the program, MONTAGE3.EXE, or a montage, or a link to one of those. More generally, Montage supports the following Windows command line syntax:
MONTAGE3.EXE [option] [metafile_name]
where
option: is one of the following
metafile_name: specifies the name of the Montage metafile to be created and/or opened. The ".MO3" extension is automatically supplied, if no filename extension was specified. If metafile_name is omitted, the default of "montage.mo3" in the starting directory is assumed. Invoking MONTAGE3.EXE without any arguments opens MONTAGE.MO3 in the initial directory, creating it if not found.
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Next: Metafiles |
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Montage Help page, last edited:
04/02/08 19:40
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