Thinking this through, it is all driven by the introduction of touch screens which significantly reduces the available buttons:-
Some functions are not sensitive to where you are in the menu structure, i.e. play/pause,ffwd,rew and back. and these can be managed through on-screen touch buttons. After that, there are limited actions. Touch, touch&hold, touch&slide. Slide up and down take on up and down (or rotate knob anti-clock and clock repsectively. Slide left and right are genrally not used (though Pippin uses well on the Now Playing screen but not in menu structure). That only leaves *two* actions: touch and touch&hold. Compared to *six* pre-Touch: centre(right arrow), centre&hold, play, play&hold, add, add&hold. Pure consistency can only be maintained at expense and rationalisation of past functions. In order to access functions at least one of the touch options muts be a context menu. Hence you can see the logic of centre, play and touch = play plus and touch&hold = context menu Understanding the design constraints, I'd then like to try and be positive and constructive:- *In non-touch use*, there are still many buttons available which should be configurable as short cuts. Note these buttons are on the latest devices (SBC and Radio) and so this benefit is not specific to SB3 and earlier. If configurable shortcuts are accepted, then it should be acceptable to configure back to the "+ is add" schema of pre-7.4 Configurable may mean a few limited options rather than configuring every key. (e.g. a "+ is more" v. "+ is add" check-box). *For touch use*, there are still some possible improvements. Some of the original 'play wipes playlist' seems to have come from modelling the 'Play' button of a traditional CD player. The Touch doesn't have a 'play' button so this constraint is lifted. I think that having some sensitivity to the current playing status may help:- if track is actively playing, then touch brings mini-context (play, play next, add to end, cancel) which is similar to the previously debated (are you sure you want to wipe current playlist). if playlist is paused or stopped then touch is play. touch and hold is always full context An option could then be provided to have the mini-context either always off, only if playlist playing or always on. -- DigitalMitch 2 * SB3, 1 * Boom, 2 * SBR, 1 * Radio controlled by IR, SBC and iPeng on iPhone 7.4 running on WHS on HP MediaSmart (EX470) http://www.last.fm/user/digimich ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DigitalMitch's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=15999 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=69471 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
