The best feature was not intended

One of my hobbies is working on my own open source project, the EA Navigator, an add-in for Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect.

In the release 2.0 I added a graphical user interface as a docked window in EA to make it more user friendly to navigate.
The selected element is put into a treeview with each menu option as a subnode.

Getting the navigation options this way is indeed a lot easier then having to right click, and select the correct menu option.

It also saves some clicks because it doesn’t show any popup windows that need closing.

So I promptly installed the new Navigator on my office machine and started using it throughout the day.

After half a day using the new docked Navigator window I realized that the best feature of this whole Navigator add-in was one that I didn’t plan for.

Sure, being able to navigate between all those different things is useful, but the sole fact that it keeps a history of elements I was working on is something I’ve used a lot more.

Usually when you are working on a diagram, or an operation, or an attribute, you quickly need to check on how exactly those classes are named, or what exactly the multiplicity of that association was.
The annoying thing about that is that you always lose the thing you were working on, and it takes an effort to go back to that one operation or attribute.

Now with the EA Navigator I can simply scroll down and double-click on the element I was working on before as it keeps the last 20 elements in the tree.

This “history” feature was never intended, but it is definitely the best feature of them all.