Save Your Work or Throw It Away -- pheh -- same difference!

Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful to have open source software... I just thought I'd point this out for whoever might not have been bit in the ass by this yet:

These are the default keyboard shortcuts for CamStudio. Fortunately I wasn't bit by this... Unlike most users I checked the keyboard shortcuts before I used it (which I normally probably wouldn't have, but CamStudio is a really small program and there aren't very many options). I deliberately set ctrl+shift on the "cancel recording" keyboard shortcut to prevent myself from accidentally throwing away my work when trying to save it.

There are a number of problems with this. First, the f9 and f10 keys are immediately next to each other, so it's just a matter of being a simple "typo" that would cause you to lose all your work. Just be in a little bit of a hurry or mildly distracted and POOF! All gone.

Second the application doesn't need a "cancel recording" hotkey. When you hit f9 to stop & save, by default it asks you for a file name and there's a "cancel" button in that dialog that works just as well. Further, even if you set the preference to have it not show you that dialog when you stop recording and save it automatically with a file name derived from the date and time, all you have to do is open the directory where it saves them and delete the file. And given the frequency with which you're likely to delete your work and the fact that you wouldn't even need to unless you'd changed the preferences, I'd say that's fine.

Finally, if they really insisted on having a keyboard shortcut for "throw it away", they should have put it half-way across the keyboard or added those ctrl+shift modifiers to it by default so that "throw it away" would require a different thought process to access it. Personally I prefer the ctrl+shift modifiers because it requires 2 hands and that way you're not likely to accidentally throw it away by lazily laying your hand down on another part of the keyboard in the middle of recording. Yes you can still habituate yourself to throwing things away and frustrate yourself by doing that out of habit, but you'd at least have to initiate the habit, so it'd be like smoking. While it may not be easy to quit smoking, you never find yourself smoking a cigarette accidentally.