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Author Topic: Very weird tree view!  (Read 2819 times)

Jaguu

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Very weird tree view!
« on: September 20, 2006, 10:55:16 am »

Have a look at my current tree view in MC12:

MC12 Tree View

It's a view that is technically possible to configure! Doesn't it look quite weird? Don't know whether J River realizes that you can configure such as thing with the current view schemes ::).

Personally I don't feel that the changes made in the tree in MC12 brought any substantial benefit compared to MC11.1. To have Audio/Images/Video lined up horizontally is for me not very practical. I definitely prefer all menu items lined up vertically. I am sorry to admit, but the horizontal line up looks quite ugly for me.  I always have the impression that you want to give us some configuration freedom, but not too much of it.

I like the clean look without icons, but then it should be done consistently for the whole tree, also in the Action Window and in the sub-menus of the tree. Could be an on/off option!

I also would like to be able to rename Audio/Image/Video as they are too general for me and I need more specific view scheme names.

Generally I am still waiting for some tab-oriented interface. In your implementation for Televisa you included some tab-driven interface. So it means you know how to handle the technology.
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marko

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #1 on: September 20, 2006, 11:09:56 am »

I took these out of my bug report, figuring it was by design rather than a bug. Like you say though, doesn't look too hot does it!!

--------
Tree Stuff:
Any root view scheme alphabetically lower than 'audio' can still displace the 'tabs' from their top-level resting place. <--- You fixed this? looks much better now
not fixed. placement now differs depending upon which icon is chosen for the viewscheme. "scheme" achieves the desired result. choosing any other wrecks the tree.

Removal of the tree icons has not helped this problem:

--------
Playing Now is also still wandering around within the tree window as things are expanded/collapsed. This often makes it quite hard to locate quickly.
--------

I never look for playing now in the tree now. It's just too hard to find most of the time. I placed the button on the toolbar to get me there, or use alt+2, making the tree entry more or less redundant.

-marko.

glynor

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #2 on: September 20, 2006, 11:26:40 am »

I posted this in the 12.0.73 build thread, which is related somewhat:

Tiny annoyance... I have my "Startup Postion" set to Playing Now.  On my HTPC when I first start up MC12, because it selects Playing Now (which is no longer at the top of the Tree of course), and because of my slightly larger fonts, it scrolls the Tree down so I can't see more than the bottom of the Audio, Images, Video tree items.  This is a little silly because the Playing Now (the whole tree in fact) can be seen at once with the top items still on the screen, it just seems to want the Playing Now choice to be "centered" in the Tree View for some reason...

Any way this could be modified to only scroll the Tree if it has to (when otherwise the selected item would not be visible)?

It's a tiny thing, but it confused my wife.  She opened it, and was like, "where's the video button?".   ?

BTW... Even though I don't like the new Audio/Images/Video "button" style tree as much, my wife's reaction to it (other than above annoyance) has been extremely positive.  So, I guess I'm overruled!   :o

It really makes no sense that "autoselecting" Playing Now at startup is scrolling the tree downward in this case.  Yes, when Playing Now is expanded with my font size, it does force the Services & Plugins tree item off of the screen, but only that item!  For some reason, MC12 insists on scrolling down to make Services & Plugins stay visible, at the expense of the Audio/Images/Video choices at the top.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have MC try it's best to keep the tree scrolled to the top on startup, unless that would force the actual selection off of the screen (like if I had it start up with Services & Plugins as the Start location, if that's even possible)?
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RobOK

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #3 on: September 26, 2006, 08:48:21 pm »

Have a look at my current tree view in MC12:

MC12 Tree View


Jaguu.... your art images look great..... can I ask where they come from and/or what you use them for?

I use the Images section mostly for my own images but I can see great possibilities in loading in famous or not-so-famous works of art.  Very cool!!
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glynor

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #4 on: September 26, 2006, 09:38:42 pm »

Jaguu.... your art images look great..... can I ask where they come from and/or what you use them for?

I'm curious too... Are they scans from your own books or something more freely available?
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joshhuggins

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #5 on: September 26, 2006, 11:12:25 pm »

Bare with the beta noob please while he gets up to speed on things ...  ;D

Are the icons in the toolbars supposed to be white until you hover over them in the noire skin? They are a little hard to make out when you have quite a few icons all lined up. Maybe take the highlighted image and lighten it up a bit for the overmouse image. Taking a lead from glynor, I added the tree groups (is that the proper name for playing now, podcast, playlist etc. ?) icons to my toolbar too as they end up down at the bottom of the abyss of mainly my populated audio view schemes. The new tree style seems like they are leaning more towards try to get users to use the panes system on the right side of the screen, and have our tree used more for listing non-populated view schemes. Which I can understand since the have put so much hard work into getting the panes more dynamic and more of a imaged based system than list based. It's got me using the panes a bit more for sure. I just wish there was a way to keep all the tree groups from going beyond the action window. Force them to stack down on the action window and let us scroll in space in between if its to be more of a secondary tree system. And I still wish us old hands could get a setting so the action window would stay minimized until we need it. I think I will try to unpopulate my view schemes and use the panes to see if it saves scroll time vs. mouse travel time navigating the panes. Thanks for listening to me ramble while I get a better feel of things. I'll try not to nit-pick too much and stick to bugs and such.
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Thanks!

Jaguu

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #6 on: September 27, 2006, 09:12:11 am »

Glynor, RobOK

thank you for your interest in my art collection and sorry for the delay, I simply missed your posts.

The tree view displayed shows my art collection consisting of more than 16'000 paintings.
Where did I get them from? It started when I was searching for some information about an artist on the internet a few years ago. I realized that there were many artworks on the internet and quite a number of great sites. Unfortunately it was very tedious to enjoy them. You always had to click on a thumbnail to get a large display of an image, then the next thumbnail and so on.
I just felt it would be easier to download the files to my hard disk. Around that time J River started developing MC9 and added the handling of images and a very flexible tagging system allowing to define user specific fields.

The main difficulty is that an image alone without inofrmation is quite useless, so I had to download the accompanying information as well. Technically it meant to download html files and extract the needed information. I developed a number of scripts that extracted the information to be used in tags and converted it to MPL playlists which got then imported into MC9/10/11.

One of the reasons I do not use MC12 exclusively is that the import of MPL playlists does not seem to work any longer, which is a very easy way to import external tag information.
Also statistics was much better and more flexible in MC9/10.

Usually I store the following information: period, artist, title of the artwork, paint year, paint size, paint style, gallery, country of the gallery, sometimes a few things more like typical periods of an artist. Currently I have over 16'000  paintings of 142 artists hanging in 954 galleries, museums and private collections located in 86 countries. The top runners are Van Gogh (2153 paintings), Renoir (1280), Monet (1249), Pissarro (832), Gauguin (650), Degas (627), Cézanne (587), Manet (274), Picasso (257), Dali (240), Rembrandt (188), Rubens (127), Kandinsky (86) and many others. The periods range from Gothic Art, Italian and Northern Renaissance, Rococo, Classicicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Abstract, Dadaism etc. Quality is not uniform and ranges from 800x600 upwards. The images display very well on a 1024x768 beamer and on my 1280x1024 screen, wide screens and notebook screens.

Scanning images from books is quite a tedious task, as you never get the original colors with a lot of extra work. Personally I do not care much for exact color reproduction as I can easily identify myself with an artwork.

One of the amazing things of such an art collection is the slide show effect. Watching the paintings of an artist sorted by paint-year gives a very profound insight in the artistic development of an artist,  You can ask things such as "Who painted what in a specific year?" or things as "which paintings are hanging in which museum?" - good for planning city trips, and for art parties!

I sold the collection a few times to art lovers. I do this by installing them a trial version of MC that they have to buy themselves.

The two main things that MC lacks to be a perfect instrument for my art collection are:
1) better and more configurable display of caption information
2) configurable framing of images

And of course:
1) Ongoing support of import of MPL files or any other easy import mechanism
2) Better statistics (some SQL similar feature: search and count)

If you want to know more, you may email me!



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glynor

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #7 on: September 27, 2006, 09:26:03 am »

The main difficulty is that an image alone without inofrmation is quite useless, so I had to download the accompanying information as well. Technically it meant to download html files and extract the needed information. I developed a number of scripts that extracted the information to be used in tags and converted it to MPL playlists which got then imported into MC9/10/11.

And just think... Imagine what this system could do for pr0n.  If you collected that and sold the collections (copyright violations and all) you could be a millionaire.   ;)

But seriously... That's amazing!  I'd love to have the collection, but that seems to be a labor of love (it probably took a serious amount of work).

Scanning, of course, would be a nightmare.  The color problems though can be solved by using scanning software that doesn't suck (VueScan rocks!) and, most importantly, making sure your monitor (and scanner) is properly calibrated.  So many times I'll send people graphics files with exquisitely calibrated color and they respond "it doesn't look right"....

Yeah.  It doesn't look right on that 1995 Gateway monitor that's half-way burned out (which incidentally also has the brightness set to 100%, the contrast set to 3%, and the color temp set to 7500 Deg).  Oh yeah, and your computer thinks it's still attached to that Compaq monitor you threw away 2 years ago when you bought your new one at that Tag Sale.  Grrrrr...

(At least I'm not bitter.)
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AoXoMoXoA

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #8 on: September 27, 2006, 10:02:23 am »

I have two questions:

How did you get the Media buttons to move down the tree?

Is it possible to remove nodes that are unused, such as Podcasts or TV Channels for example?
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Jaguu

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Re: Very weird tree view!
« Reply #9 on: September 27, 2006, 10:19:15 am »

Quote
How did you get the Media buttons to move down the tree?

Edit View Schemes>Tree Position: Up or down

I had all Media buttons set to down and all others to up! But that was before this post.
I think Matt fixed it, as now the media buttons only move left to right and right to left!

Quote
Is it possible to remove nodes that are unused, such as Podcasts or TV Channels for example?


Options>General>Advanced>Features! You can remove quite a number of items (such as podcasts), but not everything you may like ;D
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