At some stage it would be good to concentrate to details, usability and quality control. This could be the right time for that (assuming the major development goals are now accomplished).
There are lots of small things that could be smoothened/bettered/finalized/etc, including the documentation and website.
For example, some features would benefit greatly of things like a more logical placing of the controls (right-click items, buttons, etc), a more harmonized appearance, and additional feedback (status messages, tooltips, etc). Many of the new and changed features are not included or explained in the wiki. Or like I reported, the plugins & skins site does not contain MC13 at all.
I admit that giving finishing touches isn't a very exciting task, but it should be necessary. The development of MC12 already didn't quite continue to that stage and there is now even a bigger need for polishing up.
As discussed elsewhere, one of the difficult areas is to make potential new users understand the beauty and power of MC. It may well be that occasional test runs during the 30-day trial period are not enough for that.
We, who know our MCs thoroughly, may not always realize how different the user experience may be when you are a newcomer. And I am not speaking about grannies who have never used a PC before. I mean newcomers that can be quite computer literate and have mastered other programs for years or decades.
A somewhat more polished and better documented product could be one step towards that goal.
We could help JRiver by pointing out the places that need polishing. JRiver could help us to do that by specifying the areas they are working on, preferably one at a time.
For instance, it could go like this:
-- JRiver announces here that they are now going to polish the CD ripping features.
-- Then the beta team members would continue the discussion by posting suggestions and observations, either new findings or things that have been discussed elsewhere, but not yet fixed or revised. These comments should be mainly limited to existing features, not feature requests. Regarding CD ripping my first reply would be as follows:
It isn't enough that MC can connect YADB more reliably and gets existing data when available (I hope that problem is fixed now).
In my tests I noticed, that a newcomer would have very difficult time understanding when and how the submission occurs. No one can easily find the "tree > CD icon > right-click > ..." command. And when it is executed the interface does not provide any feedback. A message like "Thanks for successful submission" would be appropriate.
Also I don't see that any automatic submission occurs and in any case it is not clear when it is supposed to happen (at least my firewall does not indicate a connection attempt when I add or change tags in the ripping details window).
In any case, in order to obtain correct data, the decision to submit should be up to the user. I'd like to see a message like:
"Would you like to submit your added or changed info now? Please verify that all fields are correctly filled. Thank you."
If the submission system is not working logically and properly YADB is doomed to be worse than it could.
-- And while the ripping interface is tweaked we could check how well the related documentation in the wiki works and suggest or make changes and additions.
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Topic: I'm bored....whats next? (Read 3900 times)