In Punch!, all objects are equal in priority - and independent. In the early Punch! programs (before AS3000) there is no mechanism at all to enforce any ideas about commonality of object features. In AS3000 the improvement of the properties interface allowed for the implementation of a way to change default parameters. With this improvement, any object created would start off looking exactly like the last such object that was created or edited, and changes made to it in turn would be passed on to the next same-type object.
This is good but has a few drawbacks. It provides no way to edit already existing objects as a group - it only affects objects to be created in the future. It is difficult to create a one-off object and then go back to a previous set of parameters; they have to all be entered from scratch.
InSync is designed to get around these problems. Simply stated, InSync allows you to edit some or all of the existing objects in the drawing at any point in time. You can, for example, change all the window widths at once, or set all the trim textures in a single stroke. This happens upon command, not at any other time, so objects don't mysteriously change for no reason. You can, for example, change the trim textures throughout a house, and then change the textures on the trim in the utility room alone, and they will stay that way, until you explicitly command the all the textures to change again.
But there is more to it. You can create a group of all walls in the house, and explicitly remove the utility room walls from it. Once that is done, the group's trim textures can be changed at will, and it will affect all the trim except that in the utility room. Groups can be created out of any set or subset of any single object type. You can create a group that includes all the windows on the front side of the house, and another for all the window on the first floor. If the two groups control different Properties of the windows, there will be no confusion - the front side could control the number of panes in the windows, for example, while the floor group could control the window heights. This would give four zones of control - the front and the non-front windows on the first and the other floors. If the same property is set by two different groups (both groups control the windows' widths, say) then the last group explicitly commanded to be set controls that property.
Groups are given names by the user, and are thus easy to remember. They are saved in the InSync space in the plan, so they persist as long as desired. A group may be created at anytime, or deleted at any time, and it's member objects can be added to or deleted from on an object-by-object basis. A groups last settings are remembered along with a group, so those settings can be re-enforced in the plan at any point in time.
I'll be using a lot of words in this document with very specific meanings in mind, and here is a good place to give the user the meanings I intend for them.
InSync and the contents of this help file are
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