Over the past few weeks, while on vacation and with family up visiting, I had the opportunity to use MC in a number of atypical ways (for me, probably not for others).
Throughout the experience, I've had two major complaints from myself and from others using MC. The first of these is that MC seems to like to pop up error dialogs, even during file playback. These pop-up dialogs must be actively dismissed with a mouse (and sometimes the focus seems to get messed up so simply hitting OK on the remote doesn't work), and do not time out and disappear on their own, and aren't always very important. Certainly not important enough to pop up and distract us in the middle of an intense scene in a movie! One time, my poor 2 1/2 year old niece was trying to watch Cinderella (which she REALLY loves) while we were all working on a project, and I didn't realize that the error message was up until the poor kid was 1/2 way through the movie. (The second issue I'll address in a separate thread.)
The one I see the most often is the "tagging failed" message. The files that fail have been 100% of the time Podcasts that MC was downloading itself. I'll assume the downloads were interrupted (because my wireless connection failed, or I quit MC, or whatever) before enough of the file was written to be used. Who knows... I always just delete the offending file. Either way, this is obnoxious for two reasons:
(1) Already explained, pops up unprompted and disturbs my video, photo slideshow, or visualization. In fact, quite often I get more than one of these, minutes apart. I dismiss one, it goes away, and then 1-2 minutes later (just as I'm satisfied that everything is right again with the world) another one appears! Boo!!
(2) The error dialog is entirely useless! It doesn't allow me to delete the offending file, it doesn't allow me to find out what is wrong with the file, it just says "this didn't work" and waits for me to say "OK". Double BOO!!
There are other occasional error messages that pop up as well (I can't think of them right now but I'm sure one will come up sometime this week), which are equally unimportant. They are all things that it would be valuable to know about, but there is certainly no need to know so urgently that it should interrupt playback!
Can't we come up with a better way to alert users of problems like these without disturbing playback? I think the only time a "must-dismiss-with OK" error message should come up, at least while files are actively playing back, is when the error is extremely critical (playback failed or MC crashed). Otherwise, I recommend this:
My top choice would be to do a tooltip error messages in the Notification Area (task tray), just like Windows does for Windows Updates messages, device connects and disconnects, and even things like Delayed Write failures. The tooltip would be "attached" to a MC error tray icon (whatever icon you want -- I'd use the MC icon with a red, circled X over part of it), and the tooltip should fade after a standard delay. The errors should NOT exit you out of Full Screen playback, or disturb Full Screen playback in any way, other than possibly a tooltip sound. However, once the error has occurred, leave the error icon there in the Notification Area until the user dismisses it. Clicking on the tooltip (or error icon after the tooltip fades) should bring up a dialog where you can actually attempt to resolve the issue (delete or locate external the offending file, etc) or at least get more details about the issue.
I really think this would be the best solution. It is the error methodology used by many applications nowadays, and it is the least obtrusive method for non-critical errors.
If this doesn't work for whatever reason, I do have some alternatives:
A) Do much the same thing in the Action Window area. Don't disturb playback, but open a new "error" AW.
B) At the very least, put an auto-dismiss timer and a "don't show these" checkbox on the dialogs, if you insist on keeping them.
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Topic: Obnoxious Pop-Up Messages (Tagging XXX File Failed and Others) (Read 2295 times)