Saturday, April 30. 2005amaroK, complex?I’ve spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I’ll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I’m always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying “amaroK is a joy to use!” than “amaroK sucks!” Which is very rewarding. Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don’t object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What’s scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It’s funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way. There’s always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK’s life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can’t remember. Recently I’ve heard a surprising amount of “how do I put music in it!”. I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me: It’s the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I’m going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It’s funny, but once you’ve cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, “wow that was easy to install!” I’d like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks! Saturday, April 30. 2005amaroK, complex?
I've spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I'll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I'm always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying "amaroK is a joy to use!" than "amaroK sucks!" Which is very rewarding.
Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don't object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What's scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It's funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way. There's always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK's life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can't remember. Recently I've heard a surprising amount of "how do I put music in it!". I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me: It's the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop to the playlist (it's even labelled "the playlist" in big letters on first-ever-run), or use the usual shortcut for open, CTRL-O. We even added a help text for 1.2.0 that shows in the playlist the first time you run it, it explains how to add music to the playlist. Probably it needs improvement. I really want XP style bubble help tips and have half written a cool class to do this. Then I'd add these to all the browsers, and widgets that have cool hidden features, and to stuff that could do with some further explanation. When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I'm going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It's funny, but once you've cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, "wow that was easy to install!"  I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that's human nature really.I'd like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks! Saturday, April 30. 2005amaroK, complex?I’ve spent maybe 30% of my coding time for the last 20 months trying to make amaroK usable, simple, clear and logical (I’ll break down the other 70% some other time). And I spend maybe half of my amaroK thinking time contemplating how amaroK could be made more intuitive. This is why I’m always pained to hear people describe it as the opposite. Especially with the launch of 1.2.3 I find it ever harder to understand what it is that people find difficult, unclear or complex about it. Not that everyone finds it sucky; nowadays it does seem that there are more people saying “amaroK is a joy to use!” than “amaroK sucks!” Which is very rewarding. Hearing JRiddell say that #gnome-hackers think our startup wizard is scary is interesting. I assume they don’t object to the wizard itself; being a music-library application it would be pretty non-intuitive to expect the user to use his own initiative to set up the library. What’s scary about it? Is there too much text? Because we were trying to be thorough and helpful. It’s funny how you have to be perfectly concise or people criticise you either way. There’s always some issue that gets the most talk at any stage of amaroK’s life. Pre 1.2.0 it was bugginess, pre 1.1.0 it was non-intuitiveness, pre 1.0.0 it was getting the damn thing installed, pre that I can’t remember. Recently I’ve heard a surprising amount of “how do I put music in it!”. I find this difficult to understand as it seems pretty obvious to me: It’s the first menu item in the first menu, or use the filebrowser, or drag and drop When questioning these people I have found many of them are used to using JuK and expect amaroK to be similar. Whatever, I’m going to spend some time figuring out how to make this step easier. It’s funny, but once you’ve cracked these issues you only find out 2 months later when the complaints stop coming in. When we fixed the installation issues at pre-1.0.0 nobody came to the channel saying, “wow that was easy to install!” I’d like to hear detailed arguments for what is complex about amaroK, if you have the time. Thanks! Sunday, April 24. 2005Friday, April 22. 2005GHNS
Frank from kde-look.org kindly accepted my request for an amaroK section on the site! How exciting.
This means that we have our own GHNS provider, and I have just committed it to 1.3-CVS.  Sunday, April 10. 2005 |
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I just noticed one day that I was spending a lot less time helping people fix their amaroK. But when you think about it, that’s human nature really.
