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[Doof]

Per Jim's request, I'm putting this into a seperate thread.

This is sort of about MJ's GUI, but not quite.

Basically, I'm looking for a really quick and easy way to access Favorites. Navigating through menus to get to them is almost as time consuming as just navigating the tree to get there.

I've been a proponent of using the Outlook bar as a means of easily navigating MJ. Matt shot the idea down by pointing out that it's mainly clutter, and doesn't really reflect the same depth that the tree provides.

While I understand that point, I just wanted to point out that the Outlook bar, in the manner in which it is used in Outlook does far more than just give you another icon to click to get to Media Library or Playlists. It's basically a place where you can put a shortcut to anywhere within the application.

So what to do? I don't know. While a Favorites menu alongside the other menus would be step in the right direction, I'd much rather see some sort of toolbar design, so there could be one click access to these things. I mean, after all... they're not in my favorites list for nothing.

[nila]

I definitely agree with this. Right now MJ has tons of features - full credit to everyone who works for them for doing a great job making them.
Too many of them aren't on the surface or are hidden inside of two or more sub menu's. A real pain and makes these great features easy to forget about and harder/slower to use.

Favourites is a great idea. But it has to be an easily accessible idea otherwise it does totally defeat the purpose. Right now it's just been added to the right click menu as all MJ features seem to do.
While it might be nice to have it there AS WELL, I'd like to see it brought to the surface.
- I think the easiest compromise would be to add this as a pane in the 'properties' box which for now somewhat seems to reflect a LOT of what everyone would like done to the left navigation pane.
- A dynamic toolbar (seperate from the main one which can be turned on or off) might be another idea so that all favourites appear here and the user can choose icon for each favourite if they want.


- I'd like favourites to be more customisable, having the path show as the favourite name is very functional but I'd rather be able to rename it to whatever I want.

- add to favourites and organise favourites should be at the top not the bottom as they will soon require a lot of scrolling to access if a person has a lot of favourites.

- organise favourites requires an up and down button to move favourites positions - cant they just be made draggable for position? So much easier and more natural a way of doing it.

[JimH]

Right now MJ has tons of features ... Too many of them aren't on the surface or are hidden inside of two or more sub menu's. A real pain and makes these great features easy to forget about...

Nila,
In the future, we hope to be able to anticipate the user's next possible actions and emphasize them by auto-illuminating or enlarging them to 72 point type.  Would that help?

Jim

[nila]

It would but I'm a realist not a dreamer.

I dont mean to sound like I'm trying to put down the program because I love it, otherwise why would I waste so much time and effort with it.

This is the Beta stages and so I presume you want us being vocal about our thoughts etc. They're in no way meant to be in a bad way but hopefully constructively.


One thing about MJ though is that no matter how many new features you guys add, and you do a great job and add tons, the GUI never changes to reflect these. A few new buttons to reflect some great feature you've added would be so nice. Just make them THERE, in our faces, accessible in one click. Something that jumps out at us and says: Oh Look, nice new shiny powerful feature you can use! We can remove it from the toolbar if we want by choosing to do so and for people that aren't clued up enough to do this it's just as well you made it visible to begin with or they never would be able to

As I said once before, MJ is like Linux: Powerful, stable, reliable, trustworthy, everyone loves to praise it's power and stability yet windows which everyone slags off constantly is the dominant OS. Why? PURELY because of the GUI, not to do with reliability or stability or feature set.
They've finally realised this after years and Linux has over the last few years had some amazing GUI's made for it but it took them a long time to realise that people were that pathetic that when there was so much power they cared about it looking good or being clickable by pretty buttons in our face.



I'm not trying to put down MJ. Since the day I first found it when I had spent years looking for a Good Jukebox and tried over 15 other progs, I've loved it and stuck with it ever since and have recommended it to a large number of my friends.
I love the fact you guys interact with us and ask us for our opinions and you all seem like nice, friendly guys with lives other than just this and you listen to our requests and often implement them.

I know the GUI is a BIG job and so cant just be changed randomly but I think you have seen from this forum that almost all your users, including ones that have been around for years, your forum moderators, etc. think that the GUI needs updating.

[Matt]

My proposed solution:

1) all tree items should be draggable to the toolbar to create a shortcut

2) favorites should be visible in the regular menu, and there should be a keyboard shortcut to show the favorites

[Doof]

Ok, first of all, I really wasn't trying to start another GUI debate. Nila, I hope you understand when I ask that you please try and stick to the topic that I started in this thread. I'm trying to propose a specific, relatively simple, interface change, and when you come in here and start going on and on about the entire GUI, it does nothing to help anybody's cause.

Matt> I love that idea. Can I expand it a little by suggestion that maybe there could be two toolbars? The main one we have now, and a Shortcuts toolbar that is there strictly for our shortcuts? I'm thinking that way, we could drag them to two different levels, thus reducing the amount of clutter on one line.  

Currently, I have 16 buttons on my toolbar, and even with small icons with no text, I don't think it could handle too many more.  I'm a huge toolbar user, which is why I brought this whole thing up to begin with.