From: Paul Louden <paulthenerd_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:40:16 -0500

On 10/26/2010 6:26 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
> RaaA has shown that the grid mode makes Rockbox appear broken as a
> whole, while a few broken screens appears as "ah, this particular part
> isn't done yet". This is what the various articles, blogs and comments
> have shown.
>
> From LWN:
>
>> Running the application is likely to be most confusing for the
>> unprepared user, though. The traditional top-level Rockbox menu
>> appears on-screen, but the result of tapping a menu entry is not what
>> one would expect; indeed, the application's response to touch events
>> seems to be nearly random. After digging in the forums, your editor
>> stumbled across this bit of helpful advice
>> <http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=14177.msg171653#msg171653>:
>

And this would be solved by a visualization of grid mode as well,
without the 'oh some areas are incomplete' stigma.

>
> I cannot understand how anyone can consider it usable.
>
> The grid mode is not usable

You and I seem to have a different definition of "usable." Can we step
back for a moment and settle on the English definition of "can be used"?

> because there's no visualization of the borders or even its existence.

These aren't a requirement to use it, though they would be a clue to its
existence for those who haven't read the manual, and are already
something proposed in this discussion and something I've spoken in favor
of, so I don't see the point of this at all.

> And even if the borders were shown, then you still need to guess
> wildly what cell is doing what. This trial and error situation is
> hugely uncomfortable for people because (and this commonly happens)
> pressing the wrong cell potentially leads to bad things and major
> annoyance.

Do people really need to guess what up, down, left, right, and select do
on the joystick for other targets? Faded icons or otherwise could be
visual indicators of what things do as well. This is not an unsolvable
problem by any stretch.

>
> I actually used the grid mode for some time because there was no
> cabbie for RaaA. I didn't consider it usable at any time during the 2
> or more weeks because I was still constantly doing the wrong thing.
>
> There's a lot more to usability than just "it works".
There's a lot more to degrees of usability, yes. But whether or not it
is usable is binary, since you're placed it as an "is" vs "is not" and
you can't argue that it's impossible to use by any stretch, which is why
I've asked time and time again we stop with the hyperbole.
Received on 2010-10-27