GNOME and KDE priorities [LWN.net]

GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 13:40 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
Parent article: GNOME and KDE priorities

Judging by the screenshots of the Totem movie player,
they seem to have slavishly copied all the stupid user
interface problems from all other badly designed movie
players out there:

http://www.nearwildheaven.com/GNOME/screen_thumbs/totem.jpg
http://www.hadess.net/code/totem/totem3.png

The "FF", "RW" buttons make sense on a physical
device, where it costs a certain amount of money
to include each individual microswitch. But in
software, buttons don't cost anything at all!

Why can't I have an entry box so that I can, for
example, go back exactly 5 minutes in a film (eg.
when I've just resumed watching a film from the
night before)? Or go to an exact minute:second
point? Or how about being able to go back to the
last scene change (pretty simple to determine
with MPEG encoding)?

Rich.

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GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 14:16 UTC (Thu) by niran (guest, #27560) [Link]

I think what you're proposing has quite a few more "stupid user interface problems" than Totem does. Contrary to what you've stated, buttons do cost something in software: more buttons clutter the user interface and make the program harder to use. How often do you need to go back exactly five minutes? I'm guessing not that often. The slider provides enough control for most use cases. Instead of trying to go back exactly five minutes, why not drag the slider back a bit? Every once in a while you might need to go to an exact minute:second point in a video, but the sacrifice in simplicity isn't worth it for something that can be done with reasonable accuracy with the slider.

GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 15:39 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

Actually, going back 5 minutes is useful for me since
I tend to watch DVDs in small parts (while exercising),
but I take your point that it may not be for everyone.

So let's look at the rewind issue in general. On Apple's
DVD player, rewinding happens at a constant rate (say,
2x or 16x), but to set this rate you have to go through
an awkward two-level menu. On my real DVD player, rewind
begins slowly and gets faster the longer you hold the button
down. On my PVR, you press the button multiple times
to go 2x, 4x, 6x ... faster.

None of these interfaces is especially smart. The Apple
one is the most annoying, but even the PVR interface
(which I like best of them) still makes it hard to go
from fast rewind to slow forward, which is an obvious
thing to want to do (think about when you "overshoot").

In this case, multiple buttons makes an awful lot of sense,
something like:

[Rewind slow] [Forward slow]
[Rewind fast] [Forward fast]

(I only ever want to go slowly or quickly; going at
intermediate speeds is never really useful).

This still doesn't solve the "how do I get to a particular
point on the disk", or "how do I go back 5 minutes", but
if the time counter was a simple entry form which could
be modified by typing in numbers, that would solve all of
those problems and more.

Rich.

GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 15:44 UTC (Thu) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

Oh, and the other really really stupid thing about
Apple's rewind mechanism, is that it's time sensitive.
Press the button quickly, and it goes back a chapter.
Hold down the button and it starts to rewind.

Time sensitive buttons are a usability no-no, and
bad from an accessibility point too (although Apple's
DVD player has so many other accessibility problems,
that one extra hardly matters).

Why couldn't they just have had a separate button for
"go back a chapter"?

Rich.

GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 22:09 UTC (Thu) by amarjan (guest, #25108) [Link]

Streaming media is, I think, where exact positioning is most required. If you're listening to a 2 hour lecture, for instance, and want to go back 10 seconds because you've missed the last sentence, well good luck using the slider with "reasonable accuracy". The longer the stream, the harder it is to make such small adjustments because the slider is fixed-width, so it loses precision.

Lectures tend to be recorded rather shoddily, so small adjustments are frequently required.

GNOME and KDE priorities

Posted Feb 3, 2005 14:24 UTC (Thu) by Frej (subscriber, #4165) [Link]

Button's do have a cost, complexity. ;)

I actually agree i would be nice to have a more precise way of 'goto', since today you keep fidling arround with the slider.

There is the Go->'Skip to' menu item, But it doesn't seem to work? (totem 0.101, ogg vorbis)

It isnt 100% copy of hardware players, there is no stop button, just pause.