The new view wizard is nice in that everything is in one place, but still feels rough around the edges. Here's what I'd do to finish it off:
! bold parts are for skim readers to get my main points.
1. Make use of the media type buttons at the top of the tree. Since they are almost redundant at the moment (clicking on one actually takes you to another view) I'd add some controls to them. The most obvious one I can think of
would be a nice little "plus" symbol in the corner of the media type button to allow one click creation of new viewswithout needing to "feel around" for a way to do it. You might also have a link to customize the currently selected view too.
2. As I've mentioned before, the new views dont really fit into the "sub views of the main viewscheme" past MCs. I would
remove the indent, and make each "view" item in the tree much bigger.To add some visual flair I'd separate off the views part of the tree and create a sexy animated way of switching between them. That's the kind of small polish that apple is so good at.
3. "Allow tree selection", "Support tree browsing" and "lock view" confuse the hell out of me. The frst 2 are worded so similarly I have trouble remembering what each one does. I figured out that "support tree browsing" put the first category's items in the tree. I find it ugly, and think it should be off by default.
4. "Set rules for display" is buried away, but is one of the most important parts of defining a view.5. For "View as", why bother with a drop down menu of options. Why not have a bunch of icons
showing the user what the view will look like. A simple grid of the different view styles with drop down menus for the [category] that you want to be selected by default, would be so much more elegant. (even sexier if these icons were full color and animated)
6. I think this is a bug: Sorting can only be changed on the interface at the first breadcrumb level. After that the breadcrumbs lose the drop down menu ability, so you cant change the sorting.
I think that sorting changes made in the customize view dialog should be permanant, and sorting changes made on the interface should be just for that session. We dont need the ability to create presets on the interface. We can do that in the customize view wizard. Just the presets would be fine.
7. Bottom views list header bar is crying out (or maybe that's me) for "list style" icons.
The bottom list is still and will always be the single most important and unconciously expected place for the user to want to flick between thumbnails and details.
And now that we have grouping, even if you dont give us the ability to change the "group by" out on the main interface, you must must must (please
) give us the ability to toggle grouping on and off in the bottom list with a simple button.
I'd even put a fly out sorting menu in that header bar too (just the presets would be enough).
Doing these 3 things woud put a little of MC12's flexibility back into MC13's quite rigid view system.
8. The view picker, when you add a new view, should be split in 2 for starters. The top half should display all the different view styles you've saved to your hard drive. The bottom half should have some suggested views. These could be taken from the net and decided by jriver at first and then later, perhaps a voting system could be introduced and run by the community.
All of these suggestions are to make MC's features more apparent to the non power user, and give them a gentle push into the ways that views can be customized. If even half of them were implemented, I'm sure MC would be a little easier to use.
