Over on The Green Button forum, JimH asked me to bump or post what's missing in Theater View for recording functionality, so here' s a thread dedicated to the topic. In addition to recording functionality, it probably makes sense to include any other TV functionality that can be handled in Standard View that's missing from Theater View. Not sure how open you are to suggestions on the implementation, but perhaps that can be covered here as well.
I'll start by listing some of the items that are missing when editing a subscription:
1) There's no way to select / deselect channels. You can accept the current list of selected channels or select all channels.
2) There's no way to edit the Rules, including no way to make use of the and/or functionality that Yaobing recently added. Admittedly, this one will be tough to design a Theater View UI for, but I think it's worth striving for.
3) There's no way to edit the Rule name.
4) There's no way to change the anchor time when the subscription time mode is a setting other than "All Showings".
5) There's no way to edit the "apply these tags" settings.
Additionally, I'm not a fan of how the Theater View mode UI is designed for accessing these features, as it just doesn't feel user friendly to me. Here's how I would propose to re-work it:
- When the user selects the Configure a Subscription option in Theater View, present them with a list of the settings that can be edited, along with what the current values are (truncated as needed) and visual controls to navigate to and click on to change the settings (fields that can be navigated to will be placed within square brackets):
Edit Subscription for: [NHL Hockey Boston Bruins]
Channels [7-1 WHDH-HD, 576 NESNHD, 578...]
Use exact name match [Yes]
Search all fields by name [No]
Subscription time mode [All Showings]
Record reruns [No]
Do not record programs that have been recorded in the past [No]
Start recording early by [-] 2 Minutes [+]
End recording late by [-] 90 Minutes [+]
Priority [-] Medium [+]
Cleanup mode [-] Delete after 10 days [+]
[Edit Rules]
[Save Changes]
[Cancel Changes]
- The Up arrow and Down arrows should move to the next or previous item in the list and Right and Left arrows should move left/right to controls within the currently selected row.
- Pressing OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on the subscription name allows the user to type in a new name with the keyboard and/or provides a popup keyboard for editing the name
- Pressing OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on the channel list would popup a window with all the channels and provide the user with a way to scroll through and select/deselect the channels they want. Once the user is done, this popup window would have a Done option to select that closes the popup window and returns to this list.
- Selecting OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on the Yes/No fields would toggle between the 2 options.
- Selecting OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on the Subscription time mode field would toggle between the 4 options (- and + options could be used here instead)
- Selecting OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on the [-] or
- fields would decrease / increase the value associated with it.
- [Save Changes] saves the settings as they currently are
- [Cancel Changes] aborts any changes that have been made
- I'd try to come up with a shorter label for "Do not record programs that have been recorded in the past"
- If "Do not record programs that have been recorded in the past" is set to Yes, then the 4 fields that can be chosen should show up below it, each having a Yes/No option or a checkbox that shows X when selected and nothing when not selected. If set to No, those 4 fields disappear from the list.
- Selecting OK on the remote (or enter on the keyboard) on [Edit Rules] would bring up a popup window for editing the recording rules. I'll be adding a post below that gives my thoughts on how this popup window should work.
I believe this would give the user easier access to edit just what they want and would be more intuitive to use.
I hope it's easy enough to visualize how my proposed changes would look in Theater View. If not, perhaps I can mock something up that's a bit more visual.