[migueld]

When using the Esc key on Project Mayhelm 3 in the Settings page it goes back to the previous menu, but on Media Stream it goes back to the home screen. It seems that the only way to go back to the previous menu in Media Stream is to use the left arrow key. The problem is that it's not consistent with the general navigation in XBMC and it's somewhat confusing.

I don't mind keeping the left arrow key functionality but.. is it possible to have Esc behave as it should? Ie, have Esc honor the "PreviousMenu" keymap like PM3 does.

[skunkm0nkee]

First of all the Escape DOES work, it's just that the way we've designed our skin there is no intermediate screen between the Home screen and the Settings screen. PMIII has a screen that allows you to select a Settings category but we have done away with that and use menus on the Home and Settings screen instead.

Secondly, if you are REQUESTING a change or expressing an OPINION please think about the language you use when you do it

I don't mind keeping the left arrow key functionality but.. is it possible to have Esc behave as it should?

If there is something broken in the skin then I can handle stronger language as it's not an ideal situation but what you have posted here (and in some other posts today to do with lists) is YOUR opinion. Posting stuff in this manner is not going to encourage any of the team to do anything about it at all.

I don't expect praise or anything of the sort and fully welcome criticism and negative comments as they show the areas that we may need to do more work on.

Remember that the skin is something we provided for free, you decided to download it and are free to use it how you like. if you are going to post feedback then please do it with a bit of respect to the people who put a lot of their free time into providing this for everyone.

[migueld]

First of all the Escape DOES work, it's just that the way we've designed our skin there is no intermediate screen between the Home screen and the Settings screen. PMIII has a screen that allows you to select a Settings category but we have done away with that and use menus on the Home and Settings screen instead.

Secondly, if you are REQUESTING a change or expressing an OPINION please think about the language you use when you do it



If there is something broken in the skin then I can handle stronger language as it's not an ideal situation but what you have posted here (and in some other posts today to do with lists) is YOUR opinion. Posting stuff in this manner is not going to encourage any of the team to do anything about it at all.

I don't expect praise or anything of the sort and fully welcome criticism and negative comments as they show the areas that we may need to do more work on.

Remember that the skin is something we provided for free, you decided to download it and are free to use it how you like. if you are going to post feedback then please do it with a bit of respect to the people who put a lot of their free time into providing this for everyone.

You raise good points and let me just clarify that I didn't mean to be disrespectful, I'm sorry if that's how it came across. I'll keep that in mind in the future

My motives for wanting Esc to honor the previous menu stem from the idea of having an universal back button for easy navigation. You might ask, well what's wrong now? In XBMC I currently use a combination of Esc, Tab, X, Delete, and now Left Arrow to navigate. Sure, many of us get used to that but I think it far from ideal. Coming from an AppleTV/FrontRow/Media Portal background, I found it confusing for a first time user. I've also found it troublesome when trying to map buttons to a remote. I still find it cumbersome after a few months of usage. In contrast, Apple TV navigation is straight forward, with the "Menu" button always going back to a previous menu. I do understand that this is not a Media Stream issue, but a XBMC issue.

Having said that, I think it would be REALLY nice if Media Stream would change the current design for Esc so that it went back to a previous menu instead of home screen in the Settings page. I think PM3 users would be familiar with it, and it would be a step closer to consolidating navigation.

For the record, I do think Media Stream as an amazing project, with one sexiest UI out there and it easily puts the Apple TV skin to shame. Great work to the devs, keep it up

[skunkm0nkee]

You raise good points and let me just clarify that I didn't mean to be disrespectful, I'm sorry if that's how it came across. I'll keep that in mind in the future

No problem, thanks. I was probably in a foul mood at the time and your posts just caught me at a bad time.

My motives for wanting Esc to honor the previous menu stem from the idea of having an universal back button for easy navigation. You might ask, well what's wrong now? In XBMC I currently use a combination of Esc, Tab, X, Delete, and now Left Arrow to navigate. Sure, many of us get used to that but I think it far from ideal. Coming from an AppleTV/FrontRow/Media Portal background, I found it confusing for a first time user. I've also found it troublesome when trying to map buttons to a remote. I still find it cumbersome after a few months of usage. In contrast, Apple TV navigation is straight forward, with the "Menu" button always going back to a previous menu. I do understand that this is not a Media Stream issue, but a XBMC issue.

Having said that, I think it would be REALLY nice if Media Stream would change the current design for Esc so that it went back to a previous menu instead of home screen in the Settings page. I think PM3 users would be familiar with it, and it would be a step closer to consolidating navigation.

I'm afraid there's nothing we can do since as I said before we have no intermediate categories screen so you go from home to a settings page (whilst you are on that page you can use the menu at the top to change to other caegories) and then if you press escape it will take you back to teh previous screen, the home screen. Not sure what it is you think we can do?

[jmarshall]

I think (and this is a guess) that migueld is referring to the slideout list on the home page?

i.e. the user presses SELECT on the Settings button and they get the slideout list, they then must press LEFT to get back to the Settings button.

I may well be wrong, as it's not at all clear what the migueld was referring to.

migueld: Perhaps you could consider posting some screenshots that describe the problem. A picture says a thousand words, after all.

As for the back behaviour, you should be able to cut it down to 2 easily enough (ParentDir and PreviousMenu) by remapping the escape key to get out of the fullscreen views. I'm not sure why you want to remap X exactly though - that's stop.

I have some sources in my tree that kill off the ParentDir past the start directory of the skin for those skins that want it (for the video library at least, which is the big "problem" with the way MediaStream does it.) I'm planning on supplying the code for skunk et. al. to play with, as I think with a bit of subtle rearrangement of the home menus, and judicious use of this new feature, navigation will improve immensely.

If you have ideas for the default keymap, we're more than happy to hear them. It hasn't been optimized to any great degree at this point, I agree.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[kricker]

I also have been flumuxed by having 2 different buttons that close screens/menus depending on which menu/screen you are on. I am often pressing one then the other to close a screen or go back, as I just cant get my brain trained properly. I have not unleashed XBMC upon the wife because of this. In other apps I use, there is one button that goes back...back...back..and that same one closes open dialogs. A few apps even use the left or right keys to go back thru menus (depending if the menus are right or left oriented). Personally I find both of these methods easier to get the hang of and use without having to think about it, or explain to a new user which button they need to press. All I have to say is "that is the back button", or "just press left to go back".

With all the other things I've been playing with in XBMC I kinda left this little annoyance to the side, but I am reminded each time I use it.

[migueld]

Right, how about treating this as an intermediate a screen:



Currently if one presses Esc there, it won't do anything. The only way to get back is it press the left arrows twice.

So this would be a place where I think it'd be advantageous to have Esc functionality. Pressing Esc here would return the user to the home screen. The reasoning for this is that Esc is usually expected to close things in XBMC (OSD, context menus, panels, etc) or to return to something.

Another scenario: suppose I'm in the Appearance screen. If I press Esc it would take me back to the intermediate screen above. I guess I'm thinking about this in "iPod mode" where one always returns to the previous screen.

On a side note, I am aware that one can change the categories at the top of the screen, but I find that this isn't as practical or intuitive as returning to the previous menu where I came from.

I hope this makes sense, let me know what you think.

[migueld]

Hmm I don't seem to be able to edit my message lol, is this normal? Anyway here's the image:

[jmarshall]

kricker: So elaborate on exactly what you think should go where. We're more than open to improving things, and usually it's new users who can point out things that us old hats have learnt so well already that we can on occasion overlook them.

migueld: Thanks, that makes it clearer - it appears you were talking about what I was indicating. I think it would be tricky for the MS team to achieve this, as it's all the one screen. There's no sub-windows here. They'd either have to make separate windows and hope for a seamless transistion, or do them as dialogs. It still wouldn't solve the exit from Appearance settings, which I believe you want to go back to home, while having the submenu out and focused. That would only be achievable with a separate window I think for the menu. The team I think could solve the Appearance settings->Home with submenu focused by judicious use of keeping item focus on that subgroup, or by using skin bools to make sure it's set.

An alternative that I've been considering is allowing skinners to specify the default <onback> action for any particular control. This would involve quite a bit of code shuffling, however, so will have to wait until after atlantis. With that, I think, the escape key (or whatever it is that you'd like to choose) would first check to see if the control wants to perform an action, and if not, do the default.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[migueld]

As for the back behaviour, you should be able to cut it down to 2 easily enough (ParentDir and PreviousMenu) by remapping the escape key to get out of the fullscreen views. I'm not sure why you want to remap X exactly though - that's stop.

I have some sources in my tree that kill off the ParentDir past the start directory of the skin for those skins that want it (for the video library at least, which is the big "problem" with the way MediaStream does it.) I'm planning on supplying the code for skunk et. al. to play with, as I think with a bit of subtle rearrangement of the home menus, and judicious use of this new feature, navigation will improve immensely.

If you have ideas for the default keymap, we're more than happy to hear them. It hasn't been optimized to any great degree at this point, I agree.

Thanks for the response and insight. I did play quite a bit with the Keymap.xml file now that you mention it I do have a few suggestions to make. The reason I mentioned X is because during video playback, the only way to go back is by pressing X. In Apple TV one can press "Menu" and the playback will inherently stop and you will go back to the previous menu. This is very handy. The reasoning is that the user doesn't have to think about stopping playback, the user can just think about going back.

I think this is more evident during music playback in fullscreen. Suppose you want to go back and choose something else. Currently the user must press a dedicated "fullscreen" button to do so; Esc doesn't do anything. Suppose that Esc did. Wouldn't that be really handy?

So I remapped Esc to do the following:

During music playback in fullscreen (<Visualisation>), Esc is mapped to Fullscreen. So during fullscreen music playback, you can go back and choose something else by pressing Esc (exits fullscreen).

During video playback, I wanted to do the same, but there is no easy way to return to fullscreen since the minimized video is not selectable by arrow keys through the keyboard (or remote). And I didn't want to use an extra key (tab) to return to the video, so I chose to map Esc to X. So during video playback, one can go back to the previous menu by pressing Esc (which inherently ends playback).

The aim here would be to consolidate shortcuts into a "universal back" button to streamline navigation. This would make it very easy to map buttons to a remote for example.

[jmarshall]

migueld:

Sure - escape during fullscreen music certainly makes sense, but I think you have the same problem of how you get back to fullscreen visualisation? Are you just waiting for a timeout, or do you press TAB again?

We could also easily have a timeout for fullscreen video as well if that makes sense.

Whilst there is certainly an argument for Escape as being stop in fullscreen video, I see a couple of problems with it, namely that you could easily accidently stop a video if going from the OSD (escape to close it, whoops, pressed it one too many times). It seems a bit unnatural in that role.

I think mapping to escape to switch back from all fullscreen views makes a lot of sense, however.

Would you mind posting your keymap.xml somewhere once you've got it how you like it for perusal?

Cheers,
Jonathan

[kricker]

kricker: So elaborate on exactly what you think should go where. We're more than open to improving things, and usually it's new users who can point out things that us old hats have learnt so well already that we can on occasion overlook them....

An alternative that I've been considering is allowing skinners to specify the default <onback> action for any particular control. This would involve quite a bit of code shuffling, however, so will have to wait until after atlantis. With that, I think, the escape key (or whatever it is that you'd like to choose) would first check to see if the control wants to perform an action, and if not, do the default.

I'll need to take time to sit down and see where I get tripped up and make notes. It very well might be fine the way it is and once I switch over to using xbmc exclusively it won't be a problem. I'm old hat too BTW. I've been using XBMC since before it was called XBMC (You'd think I'd know how to control it by now).

Allowing the skinners to specify the <onback> sounds like a good idea, it may allow for more fluid navigation within skins.

[migueld]

migueld:

Sure - escape during fullscreen music certainly makes sense, but I think you have the same problem of how you get back to fullscreen visualisation? Are you just waiting for a timeout, or do you press TAB again?

We could also easily have a timeout for fullscreen video as well if that makes sense.

I like the idea of a timeout for fullscreen for audio. I think it makes sense in a media center environment.

The way I currently have it is that if the user goes back to the home screen and presses Esc, it'll toggle fullscreen there. But it's obviously not an ideal solution.

In the case of video, I do understand your concerns and I have an idea that might work. First let me point out that I've been using Esc as stop and it has been working very well for me. We could find a number of users to try it internally before making the change and see how that goes. The other option would be to map Esc to fullscreen, and the user may toggle fullscreen again by selecting the minimized video. The minimized video would need to be made selectable by the arrow keys.

The idea, again, of doing this is that navigation would be as simple as possible, only arrow keys, a select, and 1 "back" button (that always works). Advanced users would still be able map specialized keys, but the core navigation would be streamlined with as few keystrokes as possible.

[migueld]

Here's the file that I'm using currently. There are couple of issues, but I guess the good outweigh the bad. I've tagged my changes with <!-- "Universal Back" -->. If anyone tries it, let me know how it goes:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/5hkr67

[jmarshall]

Thanks for taking the time to think stuff through. I'll have a look through the changes at the first opportunity (perhaps later tonight, else it'll be the weekend) and see whether there's some other way we can toggle to fullscreen - I don't like escape used for two different functions in this capacity. One could always have a button in the skin, but that causes more problems as the skinner has to decide where to put it!

Cheers,
Jonathan