This took me a while to digest, until I figured out you are referring to Cells when you said Tokens.
Ack! You, of course are correct. I tried to be precise with my language, too.
I don't always think of ways to improve it because I don't really do a lot of layout design.
Totally understand. I'm the same way with tools I support in my day job. Rare that developers have the same experiences as end-users.
Basically you had to add a new Property Set to all of the Cells that were displayed in your layout. The Property Sets were essentially the same: use these [same] Conditions so the Property Set is displayed at the appropriate time, and use this Global Property Set to define how the cell looks.
Add a new Property Set to all Cells on a layout display, each firing under the same Condition. I actually had different a large number of Global Properties of formatting to apply to these new Property Sets, but there's nothing wrong with having the option to apply a specific Global Property to all. It would also have been fine if it had just copied the Global Property which had been used in the Cell's default Property Set.
So you had to edit a Cell, add a new Property Set, set the Property Set's Conditions, set the Property Set to use a particular Global Property Set, set the Property Set's Contents, and finally move the Property Set to the appropriate position (order within the other Property Sets). Repeat for every Cell (10 or 20 times, I would presume). That, most definitely, is tedious.
My display has about 50 Cells, with roughly a dozen different Global Properties spread amongst them. I spent two hours to get half way done, lost all work due to a TD3 crash without save (ran out of memory), then spent about 60 minutes to recreate what had been done and to apply my changes to the remaining Cells. I also have two Screens within my Screen Set which upped the total number of Cells. (I also have an iframe which accesses a web page on my local server which uses Brandon Fuller's "
Now Playing" script which generates a XML file containing data of the song currently playing in iTunes, which then generates an HTML page through PHP -- which required some changes to match the formatting.)
One difficulty is that the Cell's Contents will be different, and another is that the Property Group might be in a slightly different order for each Cell (but likely similar if not the same). Regardless, just getting the new Property Set to every Cell would be a big win. I wonder if it would be enough to add a "Copy Multiple" button on the Cell dialog that allowed you to pick all of the Cells to which you would like to copy the current Property Set. There could be a shortcut for selecting all of the cells on the current screen (for example).
That's a great implementation idea. Make it a toggle to just copy the default Global Property for each cell. Put the new Property Set at the top of the stack (as it's likely to fire under the most restrictive conditions of any of the Property Sets within the Cell.
Let me know if I got that right. I'll have to explore it a little bit to see if it's feasible.
Boy, I sure hope you can implement something like this in 3.3, that'd be fantastic and I'd be tempted to say (again), "You're the best, Corey."