erland;224520 Wrote: > I think we are talking about two different things: > 1. A good user interface design and user friendly interface > 2. A user interface with a lot of customization possibilities > > I'm just saying that these two solutions might be hard to combine. It > is not an impossible task to put a great user interface on top of > SlimServer, but I feel that it would be a lot simpler to do if Logitech > choosed to limit the customization possibilities compared to today. > > ... > > But my personal feeling is still that the biggest improvement would be > if a library management application was included or bundled with > SlimServer. > > Now, I'm not saying that the SlimServer user interface is built on > great user interface design, because this is definitely not the case. > It could be improved a lot without limiting the number of options, but > I think that if we want to reach the iTunes level of user friendliness, > limiting options will make it a lot easier. > > By the way, I just saw the first time startup wizard in SlimServer 7.0 > beta a few days back, and the improvement compared to 6.5 is huge IMHO. > But this is just the initial setup, there is still a lot left to do > regarding the user interface after the initial configuration.
No doubt about it, providing more functionality means more design work and more documentation. That isn't a reason to avoid those tasks. However, I would not agree that SS provides a lot of functionality. It doesn't rip CDs, it doesn't edit tags and it doesn't provide a good interface for browsing your library. It doesn't allow you to specify what tags you want to use and it doesn't allow you to customize the UI to use those tags. (Your plugins provide additional valuable functionality but they should be integrated with SS and provided with a good UI for setting up menus.) --- There may be things that you don't like about iTunes. However, there are things to be learned from it. Many programmers have looked at iTunes and incorporated good ideas into their player s/w. --- I loaded V7 and tried it out a couple of days ago. I don't see any real change in the user interface. It still has the 1983-style menu and a highly modal interface. It doesn't show any of your files until you make a menu choice. I specified as the music library folder a directory with about 2900 files. When I clicked on "Artist", I got a blank screen - no progress indicator saying that SS is still scanning. Just a blank artist list. I had no idea whether SS was dead or what. I waited a long time and nothing ever appeared. Then I went back to the beginning menu and clicked on "Albums". Then I got an actual list of albums. A good design would have provided some feedback that SS was still scanning and when the scanning was done, would have updated the screen. Bill -- Listener ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Listener's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2508 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=38090 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
