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Old 23rd January 2011, 17:31   #98  |  Link
LoRd_MuldeR
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Join Date: Jun 2005
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Quite a number of suggestions

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
When I say user friendly, I'm talking about something to the terms...Put your grandma in front of the computer and tech her how to use the computer, then tell her to use your software"

You're going to teach her about the Start menu, about the menu and the fact that there will always be File, Edit, View, Help in this order (you have File, View, Tools, ? when you could have Edit to cut or delete files in the queue), so if she wants to save a document she must go to a menu that works with files titled (obviously) "File" and so on, that the Next button should always be on the right of the Previous button, that dialogues should have OK and Cancel and not Cancel and OK on them, that the interface should be easy to use by color blind or people that have to use screen readers because they're legally blind (think for a minute what would a screen reader do when your app will extract all those files in the background for a minute and will keep repeating "extracting lame dot exe dot dot dot new line extracting file : wget dot exe dot dot dot new line...)
If extracting the files takes long on your system, it's probably because of slow A/V software slowing down the process.

On my system it takes ~10 seconds with MSE activated. With MSE de-activated, the extraction process takes like ~1 second (the SSD might be helpful here).

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
Then you have the about window that I already told you about that pops with a scary grawl and is filled with a text that doesn't mean anything aka no legal value (because it's not the full GPL license, a simple scroll bar would fix the problem), the X button in the top corner doesn't work, the Accept button (aka Positive action from the user ) is in the middle while on the main form the positive action is on the left corner (Encode now) and the About button (the most useless because it's also in the ? menu) is in the middle, the center of the action) and so on...
I'm not a legal expert, but I display exactly the text that the official GPL document says that I'm supposed to attach to my application. Also many applications, that required the user to accept their license terms, do not display the complete license text during install, but only provide a link to the license text instead. As these are programs developed/distributed by big companies, which have a legal department for such questions, I assume it should be okay the way it is (in a legal sense). Most people won't read the whole license text anyway, so providing the link for those who actually are interested seems advisable to me.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
And by the way... if i decline the license once, I can't use the application ever? Maybe I change my mind. Now I can't run it the second time. And it shouldn't close just because I decline the license - the harm was already done, I've already launched the application even though I haven't actually "used" it. I have to edit C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Local Settings\Application Data\LoRd_MuldeR\LameXP - Audio Encoder Front-End\config.ini manually to remove that and make it working again (and you're using "Mulder" in registry and Lord_Mulder in app data)
Actually the application will call the uninstaller, when you decline the license. You can re-install at a later time, if you changed your mind. That of course can't work when you use the ZIP package, for obvious reasons, so the application will simply quit. Moreover there is no way to ask the user to agree to the license before he launches the application for the first time. So there's not much alternative to asking on the first startup. And that's how it is implemented in many other applications too (here Microsoft's ProcessExplorer and ProcessMonitor tools come to my mind, fore example).

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post


Why the DOS path style?
If you ask why the path on your screenshot uses "short" (8+3) names, then that's because that is the path from which you launched LameXP on your system. LameXP simply displays the path (command-line argument) that it was launched with. I assume you double-clicked LameXP.exe in WinRAR, so WinRAR did extract the LameXP.exe to the %TEMP% folder and launched it from that location. Of course I have no control over how %TEMP% is defined on your local system. But it seems for reasons of backward compatibility, the %TEMP% environment variable is defined with "short" names on Windows systems by default. However usually you would not run LameXP from your %TEMP% folder, but from something like "C:\Program Files (x86)\LameXP". And in that case you would see the corresponding (long) path...

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
Why popup with OK saying i don't have WMA, and then a second popup asking if I want to download and install... couldn't it be done in one step... The initial auto update was something like "Search for update" and "Postpone", this one is "Download & install " and "Cancel" ... why not "Postpone" to mantain consistency? Cancel would make me think the application would terminate.
Indeed, it could be done in one step.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
"Goto" Home folder ... goto is not a word.... "Save output ... " is too long to read and complicated... in Meta Data Edit, the positive action, should be on the left of Reset which is sort of a Cancel or undo... checkboxes with [x] don't exist on Windows and confuse user who will think when checked it means "don't do it"...
Well, if you have suggestions for better translations, I'm always happy. About the style of the checkboxes: These are Theme-specific.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
Compression page shows quality/bitrate min and max, but going toward min increased the quality level which doesn't make sense to a user that doesn't know technology behind - the advanced option gets it right keeping it to Low quality, average, high quality, best etc
That wasn't my idea

It's defined by LAME that "0" means best quality and "9" means worst quality. If I reverse this, it might be more intuitive for newbies, but it wouldn't be consistent with LAME's CLI/manpage anymore and thus confuse the "power" users. So I think it's less confusing to keep it consistent with LAME's docs. And from the labels it should be clear which direction means "better" and which direction means "worse" quality.


Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post


\ and / inconsistency ... and Output dir tab shows path with \ but the source files shows files with / in the panel (I know Windows treats / and \ the same but a Windows user may be puzzled by this /)...
As Qt is a cross-platform toolkit and the whole world, except for Microsoft Windows, uses "/" as path separator rather than "\", internally all paths will use "/" as separator. I should convert the strings to "native separators" before displaying them to the user. And I think that's what I did in most places. If I forgot it in some places, it should be easy to fix.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mariush View Post
Then all the frills of the QT like blue bars around text boxes, making a dotted rectangle around the buttons that are default (the OK for example if it's the only button on dialogue)... it all makes the interface "bad" for regular users...
Again that's Theme-specific. I personally like the "Plastique" style. But if you prefer "Cleanlooks" or a native "Windows" look, you can switch the theme at any time.

(LameXP will remember the selected theme for next startup)

EDIT: Maybe I should start a poll and let the users vote which style they like best. Then I can make that style the default one and nobody can complain
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Last edited by LoRd_MuldeR; 23rd January 2011 at 17:53.
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