I've been having problems with MJ recently with playing certain tracks and having MJ just stop after them and it seemingly refusing to continue playing the playlist no matter how many times I press play or next.
I suddenly today realised that the 'sequence' column in MJ was the problem. I had re-ordered the tracks in MJ and the track it was stuck on was the 'last' in the sequence although it was not the last in the list. It was therefore not playing any more.
I'd consider myself a power user with a good understanding of computers and this took me a while to work out. The same goes for many of MJ's other features. MJ is HUGELY powerful and has tons of features, so many so that it can get confusing at times and very tricky for new users, so much so they think it doesn't work.
What I think would HUGELY help beginners to get the hang of MJ's features and therefore help turn them into power users alot faster and help them to keep using MJ would be more interactive options like those in Internet Explorer. When you enter a password for the first time it asks you if you want to remember all passwords. You then choose yes or no and it sets IE's options to remember this. The user doesn't realise it but they're at this point setting an option within IE that they didn't know existed and being made aware of it's presence. They're customising the way IE works to suit their preferances without ever realising it.
The same could go for MJ. The first time a user clicks a colum header in 'playing now' to re-order the tracks it could bring up a prompt telling them that this is simply modifying the display order, not the play order and do they want to also update the play order 'yes/no' with a check box to 'always do this action'. They could then change this setting at a later date.
The same with burning a CD. The first time a user tries to burn an audio cd, if they haven't set any CD-Text options then a little box could come up saying: 'you have not entered any cd-text information. This information can be read by an incresing number of cd players, dvd players etc and used to give you information about the cd you are playing. Would u like to enter this now'.
The same for the first time they double click a file, ask them what action they want this to do.
etc, etc. for loads of other features the first time a user tries to use certain parts of MJ.
It's above and beyond the call of duty and more than you need to do. MJ offers all these options and far more, but little things like that would help users to become aware of things that are happening that they might otherwise think are bugs and to inform them of options that exist that they can change to make MJ suit their needs more and the way they want it to work. This would help them to have MJ working just the way they want, as if they'd configured it perfectly, without them ever realising they've changed any options at all.
It might seem like a beginner feature but I'm hardly an MJ beginner but the 'sequence' order had me stuck for quite a while thinking it was a bug and I'm sure there are also alot of other users who use MJ regularly but are not aware of some of it's features. This would just help everyone become power users fast.
In the case of first time users, this gets them having MJ working just the way they want it extremely fast which means that they definitely want to pay for it so they can keep it after their trial period runs out.
To some extent this would also help you solve the problems you were having with the options screen becoming far too busy as the options screen would still have just as many options but beginners would not even have to go near these options and would still be able to have MJ working to suit their preferances.
I'm sure very few beginners have ever seen or are even aware of IE's options screen but most of them have it set to how they want it.
Just an idea that I think would really help to sell it. - Ignore me as usual
Author
Topic: Promoting MJ's features (Read 711 times)