Who is the Muse of Programming?
I believe I was visited by the Muse of Programming today. I've been adding all these cool new functions to wmamp but I couldn't think of a good way to make them available without requiring the user to do even more navigation (at least in some cases). I've been struggling with this for days now because I had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that there was a way to do this and make the "action tree" shallower(?) instead of deeper. I know this feeling - it's very similar to the feeling I get when I am looking for a bug and know I should be able to see it but can't. The thing to do in those situations is walk away and do something else for a while. I have been hoping that eventually the answer would come to me, and it looks like maybe it has.
It's so simple (now that I have thought of it), and I can't believe it didn't occur to me earlier. After selecting a server, the next screen has four "tabs" at the top: Playlists, Artists, Albums, and Genres. The left and right arrows move between these, and the rest of the screen is populated with items based on the active tab. If you have UI experience, you can start laughing now, but this is a real breakthrough for me.
Besides, I was right: this does make the tree shallower. The tabs populate quickly, even though I'm dumping the contents of the old tab and loading the new tab every time left or right is pressed. If this becomes an issue with large song collections, it should be possible to keep the lists in memory to further speed up the process. The typical scenario is now to select a server, select a category, then confirm your songs. That's only three screens, instead of the four it used to be, and a far cry from the five screens I had anticipated might be required in some cases. I figure that the worst case would be if you selected an artist, and then an album by that artist, and then confirmed the songs. This would be four screens, but that selection method isn't available right now (selecting an artist shows all their songs immediately, there's no capability to do album selection by artist), and it's probably not necessary anyway given that album selection can be done directly. I can only envision this being desirable if the user wants a specific album but only knows the artist and not the name of the album they're interested in. Is this a scenario that's likely to occur often (or at all)?
I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. It was remarkably easy to put together and it doesn't break from the old interface too badly. The one thing that has changed is that on the "tab" screen the left button is no longer a synonym for the "previous" button, and right isn't a synonym for "select". I think the added functionality is worth it, but I should make the behaviour consistent across all screens as much as possible.
It's so simple (now that I have thought of it), and I can't believe it didn't occur to me earlier. After selecting a server, the next screen has four "tabs" at the top: Playlists, Artists, Albums, and Genres. The left and right arrows move between these, and the rest of the screen is populated with items based on the active tab. If you have UI experience, you can start laughing now, but this is a real breakthrough for me.
Besides, I was right: this does make the tree shallower. The tabs populate quickly, even though I'm dumping the contents of the old tab and loading the new tab every time left or right is pressed. If this becomes an issue with large song collections, it should be possible to keep the lists in memory to further speed up the process. The typical scenario is now to select a server, select a category, then confirm your songs. That's only three screens, instead of the four it used to be, and a far cry from the five screens I had anticipated might be required in some cases. I figure that the worst case would be if you selected an artist, and then an album by that artist, and then confirmed the songs. This would be four screens, but that selection method isn't available right now (selecting an artist shows all their songs immediately, there's no capability to do album selection by artist), and it's probably not necessary anyway given that album selection can be done directly. I can only envision this being desirable if the user wants a specific album but only knows the artist and not the name of the album they're interested in. Is this a scenario that's likely to occur often (or at all)?
I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. It was remarkably easy to put together and it doesn't break from the old interface too badly. The one thing that has changed is that on the "tab" screen the left button is no longer a synonym for the "previous" button, and right isn't a synonym for "select". I think the added functionality is worth it, but I should make the behaviour consistent across all screens as much as possible.
Labels: hacking
posted by zar' at 22:16
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