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Posts: 28 | Thanked: 28 times | Joined on Jul 2009
#5
Originally Posted by thp View Post
Let me kick this off with easyplayer - a very nice file-based music player that I have installed recently.
Thank you! Since I'm the developer of EasyPlayer I'll have to say that EasyPlayer is WIP and ideas for improvements are very welcome. I'll mostly concentrate on the program code itself, and so there is of course room for usability improvements. I have to admit that my time is limited (job and family, an old house in need of repair , so don't expect that everything will happen quick.

"Preferences" here is a window, not a dialog (should be a dialog to fit with the rest of Maemo?)
Well, I am used to C and embedded development, so Python and gtk+ are just things I am learning. So I did the preferences dialog the first way I found. I just didn't notice that most other programs do this in an dialog. I'll put this on the ToDo list - if this is really that important...[1]

"Use big buttons" does nothing or at least nothing obvious - maybe change the text to better describe what it does
and

The buttons are thumb sized - i know of other preferences dialogs that have finger-sized buttons; ideally, to create a "balanced look", preferences dialog should have the same button sizes (exceptions should be justified)
belong together. If you set "use big buttons", the buttens are thumb sized after an restart. Try it! But I want to remove that entry anyway and replace it with a switch to choose a more simpler UI - just three big buttons (Prev, Play/Pause, Next), a big progress bar and maybe a smaller TreeView widget containing the audio files.

The "Stop playing after:" and "Display remaining time until timeout" belong together somehow - they should be grouped visually (e.g. a header "Timeout" for both buttons and remove the "until timeout" from the "Display remaining time" button)
This could be done easily.

Is it really necessary to have a text input field for the "Stop playing after" selector? There are 6 elements in this list (5 min, 10 min, 20 min, 30 min, 60 min and never) and the list displays 4 elements at the moment, without the entry field 5 elements are visible
Same here as for [1]. Did it the first way I found...

Often there are choices where the user can select some interval or "never" - should this "never be placed at the beginning or the end of the list? Here, "never" is the last element, other apps place "never" where 0 would be placed (I personally prefer to have "never" sit where 0 would be placed. i.e. *before* all other items)
Well, I think that's very personal. I really don't care about that and changing this would be very easy, but will make old preferences entries faulty. Indeed, you can get around this by manipulating the code...

Besides that I recommend to send me an email if you have some kind of improvements - I really don't read everything at talk.maemo.org - I normally prefer the mailing list. I wouldn't have seen this threat if Thomas haven't send me an email.

Yours, -Klaus
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Software for handhelds: http://www.rotters.de and https://garage.maemo.org. Developer of EasyPlayer
 

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