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Subject: Re: feature ideas... plausible? desired?

Re: feature ideas... plausible? desired?

From: Michael T. Kupietz, wearing a pointy hat <reginald_at_kupietz.com>
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 20:51:11 -0700

At 8:22 PM -0500 5/25/04, Randall L Wolf wrote:
>2) Utilize the user as a quick binary search processor. :) ... if you're
>like me and I hope you're not... you have a huge list of directories. Use
>"double-click" of up and down to skip half-way through the dir list from
>previous position in the direction clicked. This would require being able
>to
>double click, of course, I don't know if this is even possible. Also need
>to
>"remember" previous position in the list for some time period then forget
>that previous position after some time (to allow a new search to start) --
>or some other means of clearing the previous position. Would this even
>work?
>Would be very useful if it could be worked out. Binary search is fast...

...but conceptually complicated if you haven't taken a programming class,
because it is more efficient from an algorithmic point of view, but it's
thinking like a computer thinks, not the way people usually think. There's
too much comparison and variable storage involved... asking yourself "Is
what I'm looking for higher, or lower, or is this it? Will I be closer if I
scroll halfway back to the last place I was, or halfway past where I am as
compared to the last place I was, or by scrolling row-by-row with
single-clicks?" over and over again. That's a lot more convoluted thought
process than simply scrolling unidirectionally through a list looking out
for a specific value.

How about a compromise: double click to move by screen in a certain
direction instead of by line. Kind of like "page up"/"Page down".

#2) I'd also like to see an setting to control the speed of the vertical
scrolling.

#3) And a setting that ignores the invisible "._filename.mp3" and
".DS_Store" files that Mac OS's file system leaves all over any FAT32
volume it touches... the Mac GUI can't see them, even with the Finder
preference for showing invisible files enabled, but Rockbox sees them and
it includes them when it generates playlists, which in turn causes a bug
where the 'while playing' screen shows the current info for a different
song than the one that is playing.

At present the only answer for us Mac heads requires some technical
expertise: we have to delete these files from OS X's command-line Terminal,
either one-by-one or with a very complicated (for a beginner)
find-all-and-delete command line. Very annoying. (If anybody's curious, the
find-all-and-delete command line to remove all those "dot underscore" files
from your jukebox drive is "cd /volumes/jukebox; find . -name ._*.mp3 -exec
rm -v {} \; find . -name .DS_Store -exec rm -v {} \;". At least, that's
what works on my machine. Your mileage may vary, try this at your own risk,
etc., etc.)

The presence of these weird files, and their effect on playlists, was
difficult for me to troubleshoot. My friend with no technical experience
whatsoever? He was almost ready to throw his Archos out the window until I
figured out what was wrong with it and how it happened. Be nice to have a
system that doesn't require Mac users to have their technically-inclined
friend come over and spend 6 hours figuring out what's "wrong" with their
unit before they can use it properly.

For the record: this isn't the fault of Rockbox or Archos, it's an
inadequate Apple kludge to preserve Mac metadata about files and folders,
one of the zillion tiny things Apple got wrong. (Probably thought up by the
same genius who came up with the perfectly round mouse.) But Rockbox could
remedy it - which would also give Rockbox one more bullet point in the
chart of things it does that Archos' own firmware doesn't.

#4) Also, a utility to delete (and/or rename) files from the Rockbox F1
menus, without having to connect to your computer.

By the way, sorry to sit and babble my opinions at you... I wish I could
just tackle coding these myself and contribute to the next revision, but my
programming days are about 16 years behind me at this point, a lifetime ago
in terms of the technology. Thank you guys for all your great work so far!
Looking forward to future revisions whatever they are!

Mike

>
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-- 
The great thing is, over the internet, nobody knows I'm a dog.
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Received on 2004-05-26

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