Rockbox General > Rockbox General Discussion

Proposition: SimpleBox

<< < (3/18) > >>

Llorean:
All I said was that I didn't know if you would be checking this often, or soon. Your post said that all updates would be at MR and that you only posted here to increase exposure, so I was unsure if you intended to follow up much here.

bazmonkey:
Looking at the proposal, this would be a very complicated undertaking for essentially a new UI and less features.  And with you having no coding experience (or, as you said yourself, a willingness to even get online often), you're going to have a very hard time finding someone to, uh, do it for you, basically.

Specifically, though, what don't you like about Rockbox's UI?  You scroll through your filesystem to what you want to play (be in a playlist, movie, image, or music), and play it.  It's not pretty and graphical, but it's not unintuitive.  Really, is starting in your filesystem and navigating to the file you want to play (or through tagcache to the artist/album/track you want to play) really easier than hitting a little music note button that says "Music" on it, and then navigating to the file or track you want to play?  

And just out of curiosity, on a device out of which you want to squeeze as much battery life as possible, why would you want to use energy running a screensaver of any sort?  

I do agree that the settings, while a major feature of Rockbox, could scare away some people.  I think a lot of the frustration there could be fixed by different/better default settings.  Turn on dircache (why does anyone with a newer player *not* want that on?), tagcache, crossfeeding, etc.  Enable what most less-than-technical people would want running on their so that while it leaves all of Rockbox's features, less people have to play around with them.

nls:
I dont't like the idea of a "simplified" ui those often end up making things more complicated and less flexible, also saying that rockbox adds features to the OF makes me wonder if you've grasped the concept of rockbox.

I do however agree that the userinterface could be a little better, prehaps as mentioned many times before a bigger default font for players with big displays, nicer looking standard wps, saner defaults on some settings. But please not the "Everything on" approach especially sound altering stuff like crossfeed. And as to why anyone would not want dircache, ask amiconn ;-) or copy the HVSC to your player and wait for it to update...

Also I think most usability "problems" could be solved by having a really big "MANUAL -- read it" link covering at least half the front page and flashing and playing some anoying sounds or something because we have a IMO pretty good manual (albeit not in very good shape for the h10 yet) and it seems it is very difficult to find it...

Febs:

--- Quote from: nls on September 20, 2006, 03:20:00 PM ---we have a IMO pretty good manual (albeit not in very good shape for the h10 yet) and it seems it is very difficult to find it...

--- End quote ---
Do you really think so?  There is a link to "documentation" on the navigation panel on the left.  From there, it's just two clicks to the manual for your specific platform.

bluebrother:
I really don't understand why it's so difficult for users to find that "documentation" link on the left side or the "manual" link below each daily build. Really, I don't get it. Seems a bit to me as most users are thinking "it's open source, so there is no documentation". Strangely as most bigger open source projects have really good documentation (even if it is sometimes really hard to read, and does not necessarily include the code itself).

How about distribution a couple of cfg files with rockbox that get installed in, say, the root directory or /.rockbox. Then we could state "try the shipped configurations, if none matches your need just look into the manual and build a configuration yourself". That way we could have a "most users.cfg" that uses iCatcher as wps, turns on tagcache, selects a font that is suited to the screen size etc. Another option would be a README.txt in the root folder -- hopefully most users will open that first and this would be the perfect point to tell "try the shipped configuration files first" and "download the manual".

But I'm getting OT. To simplebox itself: I don't like the idea as it's useless IMHO. Also, starting that argumentation on the h10 feels a bit strange as the h10 port is the newest working port and thus it's the one that I consider most incomplete of all working ports. A lot of other arguments have already been posted so I won't repeat them. Nevertheless, doing such a fork would be a really huge task. This shouldn't get underestimated at all.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page