bklaas;564443 Wrote:
>
> Thirdly, I should say that the principal motivation for the CM-driven
> design for this feature is to support menu *reordering*, which I've
> been given as a 7.6 requirement. CMs certainly have their UI drawbacks
> (the biggest one IMO is discoverability), but one thing they easily
> provide is a scalable interface for doing different tasks on an item.
> Hide, add, move to top, move to bottom, up one, down one, etc. The
> previous interface in Settings->Home Menu was crippled in comparison to
> this. Another way of putting it, if I'm adding menu reorder functions to
> a context menu, it follows that the add/hide items should also be
> there.
>
> Lastly, the big checkbox menu to add/remove from the home menu...I can
> put it back easy enough, but none of you thought of that menu as a UI
> disaster? I wrote it and have long thought it was an embarrassment...
>
As I said earlier, I actually prefer the old Settings/HomeMenu, it's a
lot easier to hide/enable several items that way compared to using the
context menus. I would also prefer to somehow handle the reordering
through that, maybe getting into a special mode inside "Settings/Home
Menu/Reordering Items" where the selected item was moved(changes order)
when turning the knob/wheel on Radio/Controller or dragging on the
Touch. But I suppose since you don't want to support dragging on the
Touch, that won't happen in 7.6. Anyway, I think I'd still prefer to
have the context menus on the items in "Settings/Home Menu/*" instead
of having them on the items in the main interface. It still doesn't
make sense to me to change settings through context menus in the main
interface, changing settings should IMHO be done through the Settings
menu. The context menus in the main interface should only be used for
stuff you typically do as a normal user when using the device for
playing music.
bklaas;564443 Wrote:
>
> so...what I could do is have a menu of a few items under Home Menu
>
> Settings->Home Menu->
> Restore Defaults->
> Edit Home Menu Items->
> Restore Hidden Items->
>
> ...something like that. Alternatively on the Restore Hidden Menu Items
> I could instead just call it "Hidden Items", and the user could access
> those items directly there, or re-add them back to the home menu via
> CM. That would allow access to seldom-used items without having to add
> them back to the home menu first.
>
I like the idea of being able to access the items directly under a
"Hidden Items" menu, but I would still prefer that the "Hidden Items"
menu wasn't placed on the Home Menu. Placing it inside Extras or inside
Settings/Home Menu would work for me.
bklaas;564443 Wrote:
>
> 7.6 is a ways off yet, so there's time to iterate on this a bit.
>
As I said in my previous post, I really think it's time to think a bit
about who is going to use this and when they are going to use it. The
reason that's important is that if you don't do this there is a risk
you won't solve the real problem.
As I look at it, this is a one time configuration per player, there are
three main reasons to do it:
1. You want to move some items to the home menu to make them easier to
access
2. You want to hide some items to make the device easier to use for kid
or spouse, although you might still want to be able to access these
hidden menus yourself for example through "Extras" or "Settings" menu.
3. You want to hide all configuration menus to make sure a kid or
spouse can't accidentally or intentionally reconfigure the device. This
point isn't supported currently since there is no way to hide the
Settings menu and there is no way to disable these new context menus.
Based on the usage scenario, you can decide what's most important to
implement now and what can wait for a later release. I have no idea if
it's the case but I get the feeling that you select what to implement
based on how easy it is to solve instead of what's most important. As
Phil says, being able to move apps into Extras, My Music or Internet
Radio might be a lot more important than being able to reorder menus.
Another idea, which I'm guessing some people won't like, is that the
ordering could be automatic based on most used functions. Compare with
Windows start menu or with the third party Context Menu plugin by
peterw for the IP3K devices. This makes the most used items easier to
access by automatically ordering/moving them to a position where you
will get to them faster. We also have the favorites concept which also
is used to make it easier to access commonly used things. I'm just
trying to say, that it's really important to think about the usage
scenario because I'm starting to feel that we are creating several
solutions but none of them really completely solves the problem.
bklaas;564443 Wrote:
>
> Finally, Erland you're correct there are no hooks for 3rd party
> applets. Apologies for that, but it really didn't make a lot of sense
> here.
>
No problem, my issue is just that I'm pretty sure it will make sense to
some third party developer eventually, as you know some of them tends to
come up with things no one thought about when developing the initial
software. However, I understand that you need to prioritize and that
it's hard to make an API if you don't see a specific need. As you are
saying, this is probably not a problem as far as no third party
developer have found some cool function they like to integrate in these
context menus. So I basically agree with your prioritization, there are
other things that are more important to solve.
--
erland
Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info))
(Developer of 'many plugins/applets'
(http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer
helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum
and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always
appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate))
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