As an existing user, one small thing I find tedious about installing a fresh copy of MC is restoring my backup. It would be awesome if on a first-time run of a brand new (no existing library found) copy of MC, it threw up a simple one-step setup dialog before opening the full app:
Welcome to JRiver Media Center 18! Before using MC for the first time, you must create a Library for it to use. Would you like to?
Radio 1. Create a new Library?
(Optional browse control pre-filled with the default location.)
Radio 2. Restore a backup?
(Browse control set to the default backup location, maybe even pre-selecting the most recent ZIP file in there if one that looks sane happens to exist.)
And that's it. Open and cancel buttons. You could throw a link to Interact and the wiki at the bottom if you want, or something like that, but pretty much just those two choices.
This would be handy for a bunch of reasons...
Occasionally I need to setup new never-before-installed copies of MC, when I reformat, or set up a new VM, or get a new machine... Whatever, I find myself doing it a few times a year, minimum. As an existing user, this isn't the best experience. MC opens and creates a new, blank library that I'm never going to use, and with a bunch of settings I don't like. Worse, Auto-Import starts counting down a clock on you, looking at the "wrong" places (which often keeps running while I'm stuck dealing with licensing and whatnot too). I know rationally that it doesn't matter if I ignore it since I'm just going to restore my Library and Settings all in one fell swoop in a minute anyway, but the countdown timer makes me feel rushed regardless. And then it has to close and restart the whole application to actually restore because it is already running with the library it made that I don't want or need.
I get that you need to keep the initial setup install-to-using-it time requirement very low, and generally I think you do that well. But, I also think this one single step could also serve an important educational step for new customers, and it would only be one step. Almost all new users would be able to just accept the defaults and click "Open", and it would be a clear non-confusing choice for them to make. But it would teach them, briefly, that there is such a thing as the library, and that it is stored on disk, and it shows you where. It teaches you that you can back it up, and restore it easily later. It even hints that you might be able to have more than one, and that this might be an area worth exploring. And once they click okay, they know what just happened, the process was clearly explained (without too much noise) and it makes sense that it'll open and start looking for files. That's perfect.
And, I've hit other places where this could be useful. I use MC to manage my video content at work. I wanted to show one of our web developers how he could connect to the MC Server and get some of the info he needs for linking himself (and maybe help with metadata tagging too, a bit). So I told him to download the trial and install it.
And then I had to write out a whole page of text to explain how to restore the Library/Settings backup I made and connect to the remote server. It would have been so much easier and less daunting to just attach the zip file to the email and say "When it asks, pick this backup file and restore. Then pick the Work Library Server via blah blah blah.". This would also come in handy for helping the wife set up her work laptop to connect to our home server. Restore this backup, switch the active library once, done.
A simple one step,dialog would fix these problems and would, I think, be a more comfortable experience to the first time user too.
