Max Howel recently wrote about the percieved complexity of amaroK and his surprise at this.
i don't think the first run wizard is such a bad thing, at least not for those who run out and install amaroK themselves. personally, i'd change the name of it to the "Setup Wizard" (otherwise why is it there under the tools menu for use after the first run? ;) and if i were a distribution that included amaroK on the default desktop i'd ship with this wizard having been run already so that the user doesn't have to deal with it. they can always get to it via the Setup menu themselves, of course.
as for the "how do i get my music there?" question, that's a fair question and one i brought up a while ago with the amaroK developers. most people are going to want to listen to their music, period. it's a casual event. not everyone wants nor needs extreme control or an immersive experience when it comes to their media collection. the playlists, drag 'n drop, Actions menu, etc. are all nice, but requiring that the person using amaroK must interact with them means putting obstacles in the way of the most common desire: play my freakin' music.
so to that end i would simply have the "all collection" playlist be the default. if the user wishes to change that, bully! but that way the user would be able to quickly get to the task of playing their music no matter what and go about exploring the interface after having their immediate needs satisfied.
right now they have to figure out the interface first. that's an unfortunate burden to put upon the casual (majority?) music listener. personally i'm a fan of the concept of "instant gratification, gradual education".
that said, it's really great to hear the experiences of developers who are writing their software with a serious ear tuned into their user community. i think this is far more common than the negabots who like to moan about developers not listening to users would like to make out. =)
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6 comments:
'All Collection' is a great way of using >100mb of RAM if the user has a large collection (I understand this situation will resolve itself for Qt 4). And the first time they start, they actually don't have a collection yet. amaroK != JuK.
I was thinking of adding the 'add url' button to the toolbar. This is kind of silly really, but it would be what a xmms user is used to. mxcl thought it might be a good idea to have a nice friendly button to open that dialog when the playlist is empty on startup. I've since thought that having the File Browser open by default on first-run might be a good way to make things clear, since the File Browser is the most recognizable browser and doesn't rely on the collection.
what % of amaroK users use "All Collection"? what's the average song collection size? is the 100MB usage due to duplicate data structures in amaroK, or QListView inneficiencies, or?
the added links and dialogs on start up would be a compromise. they would be clearer than what exists right now, but still get in the way of instant gratification.
if you do go the way of links, perhaps one to "show all songs in playlist" and another to "create custom playlist". "add url" is a bit too technical (what's a url and what does it have to do with my mp3s? ;)
I have >17000 songs in my collection. I would really, *really* hate it if the entire thing came up by default every time I started amarok. Perhaps what comes up at start can be made configurable, akin to browsers' default start pages.
> I would really, *really* hate it
> if the entire thing came up by
> default every time I started
> amarok
rationally, one would assume that it would keep state and come up with whatever you last had up.
this is about the _first_ time you start amaroK.
Regardless of memory usage (I've been told this is due to QListView inefficientness, and is resolved in Qt 4), its technically impossible to have the All Collection because at the point that amaroK opens for the first time happens to be the point that amaroK is scanning the users collection. Making the scan collection a modal progress dialog would be the a way to solve this, but would hardly make things more instant. ;)
Aaron, I wonder if you will get to read this comment? It's quite late in the day now :-) Sorry for that; I was a bit overwhelmed by all the attention the blog was getting, so I didn't get round to replying to this.
I agree with what you say and have given it some thought. The 100MB Ian claims is not really true, PlaylistItems don't use up much space, we've been careful to limit the amount of data each one uses above a standard KListViewItem. It should only be, one KURL and a bool. I don't believe there's any inefficiency in Q/KListView that makes mem usage inflated, but maybe Ian know's something I don't..
I agree with you that the first thing we must do is let the user play some music without him being scared, I see a few ways to do this.
1. Incrementally add the collection to the playlist as it is scanned on the first ever scan after the wizard.
2. Open the filebrowser at the collection directory and add 5-10 random tracks, or show a help text or something.
I don't know which to choose, I think 2 may work out best as having the whole collection in the playlist may make people want to treat amaroK like iTunes/JuK and we aren't really a library centric app, we a playlist-view centric app. Also 1 wouldn't add music to the playlist straigt away, nor teach the user how to get the music he wants _now_ into the playlist.
With 2. i could even have fun making it show a fake mouse cursor dragging tracks, yay!
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