From: Kjell Ericson <Kjell.Ericson_at_haxx.se>
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 22:57:21 +0200 (CEST)

On Tue, 26 Aug 2003, CombThins wrote:

> > No, we should keep the cancel function, and make it consistent.
>
> For what it's worth I vote for keeping the cancel function. To me, it is
> entirely consistent with cancelling out of one menu level to go back, and
> pressing play is entirely natural to "OK" the setting. Pressing STOP to
> mean "OK" would be daft.

Thanks. I felt like an odd person for a time here... :-)

> - Can't press PLAY to accept settings that change in real time (volume,
> balance etc.) For settings like that which change as you are pressing the
> buttons, and you mostly need to listen as you make the change, there is no
> need for a cancel function. We should just make both PLAY, STOP, and MENU
> do the same thing - and yes, I know that is bad UI design according to the
> books :-)

I haven't looked in the code yet, but I was very suprised to see that the
volume, balance etc didn't have play/ok and stop/cancel. It must use totally
different code, because other settings (like scrolling) also change while
pressing.

I think we should be consistent everywhere. If we add a setting changing stop
between ok or cancel then we could leave it to argue what the default should
be on that setting - which is much easier discussion.
Although I'm not 100% happy with small silly settings, I prefer this before
not having the cancel-possibility.

> And on the player the file name editor thing is pretty whacky.

Buuuahaaa! I'm responsible for that too.... :-) (with Mats Lidell though)

> It took me days to work out how to use it, and I can still never get it
> right first time

Me neither :-)

...I don't even manage to press ON+PLAY to enter the editor. That is bad UI
design for me to have double press, which always will be unintuive and more or
less hidden.

> A few years ago I made a product with a similar thing but I think we had the
> luxury of seven buttons, and maybe no cancel function. I'll try to remember
> how it worked.

Hope you remember and find a logic UI. It was very hard to find any solution
at all with only 4 buttons and 2x11-chars LCD. We tried our best to make it
possible to edit at all. It takes some time to edit a filename right, but
thank God that you can cancel the entire text change :-)

  // Kjell
Received on 2003-08-26