[jmarshall]

An advanced user is someone who comes here and posts regularly on the forum. Every single one of you in this thread I would consider an advanced user. That's why you all like the options. My question to you is: Do you ever change any of them? If you do, then either there's a bad default, or we need to do things in a better way to eliminate this.

We have 4000 "active" forum posters. We have had over 700,000 downloads of XBMC Atlantis, just on Windows and OS X. This does not include the myriad of Linux and Xbox users.

We have far too many options already. They'll never be taken away (unless they make no sense whatsoever, ofcourse) but the settings that are available from within the application interface will be reduced to a minimum.

I don't expect you to agree with me, indeed I expect you to completely disagree!

Cheers,
Jonathan

[rwparris2]

There are far too many entries to list them in an advanced screen.

Ideally, i'd like to see an advanced configuration editor, like with firefox or thunderbird (about:config). Everything could be accessed here, and it could read from/write to the existing xml. Could be accessed from xbmc itself with a keyboard, via the web interface, or by editing the xml directly. A dinky config editor could even be written to allow access in xbmc w/o keyboard if it became popular enough.

See here: http://kb.mozillazine.org/About%3Aconfig

TheUni

Aside from 'leave it how it is', an about:config clone available from the web interface is the idea I like best of all.

[CrashX]

If the people on this forum are advanced users, shouldn't they be used to determine what should be considered as advanced feature afterall alot of bugs and fixes come from within the forum themselves ?

Why care about people that aren't contributing into XBMC itself ? Yes I am aware that 4000 users will become 400,000 user all complaning they played around with some of the advanced options and screwed up XBMC. But eventually over time, they will become advanced users themselfves with the knowledge they learned from the forums.

The reason I like XBMC so much is that it is open source. We can always fix the bug ourselfes if we needed too.

[TomJensen]

I think the relevant question to ask is: Who is XBMC targetted toward?

Is XBMC a techie toy only for peeps who frequent this forum, or does it cater for the common peeps who are only going to interface with it through the clicker and the boob tube?

Hey, if it's only for "advanced users" (read: peeps who like to manually edit config files) then why do Windows at all? Surely all "advanced" users would be running Linux already? May be we should kick out all the XBox peeps as well, not to mention the Mac peeps.

The XBMC interface is horribly user-hostile. If you want to understand how bad it is, then get a normal "apps user" to configure it. Good luck.

[jmarshall]

@TomJenson: Perhaps you could then suggest improvements (in a different thread)?

[TomJensen]

@jmarshall

Truth be known, I'm not sure where XBMC ends and the skin begins, so perhaps much of the UI ickiness referred to isn't XBMC's at all. I've already made a number of UI suggestions a few months ago in the skin's forum (forget even the name of it now). I do agree that there is way too many "advanced" options available in the popup menus as they are. I also agree that if a default needs to be frequently changed, it's a bad default.

XBMC is a media center, which means that its audience is media consumers. I shouldn't need an IT college degree to watch movies. Since XBMC is geared for the remote as its primary use interface, all install/config options should be relegated to the PC (mouse/keyboard) interface, and the remote should be limited to mainly in-use options. This makes sense, given the average user who use the clicker would not likely be a tech who understands configuration parameters.

Yes, there are people who use XBMC who don't frequent this forum (like my mom, whom I set up the box for). "For advanced users" and "flexibility==more options" are often excuses for crappy UI. It's an argument made in the early years of Linux, but not so much today.

I chose XBMC with the understanding that it was the most mature open-format media center available for the PC. That proved to be relative, as the experience of configuring it was a major chore. To be fair, XBMC is new to Windows, so hopefully it will get better.

I'll post a general suggestion here, as it is relevant to the thread: Some basic features are broken in the official Atlantis build, such as idx/sub subtitle support and UTF-8 support for the default skin fonts. Perhaps they are fixed in the newer SVN builds. If so, please backport these specific fixes to the official build and post a minor update. Per above, not everybody who uses XBMC reads these forums, nor do they know how what the heck SVN stands for, and for them, XBMC is broken in a lot of places. Make the fixes available to normal users, not just for techies.

And as slicemaster had mentioned in a previous post, the majority of the plugins (linked from within XBMC) are broke, at least in Windows. This confuses the new user, since it's hard to know whether the problem is the plugins or a bad XBMC config. Please either remove the link--which make the plugins "official"--or include a caveat to let the user know that many of the plugins no longer work.

[ashlar]

As far as I am concerned, I believe it's fine to reduce the available options to a minimum, for a default configuration.

On the other hand, I would strongly suggest to have a single setting, probably inside System configuration, that gives all the other options back.

I hate "going out" from XBMC to configure stuff. Especially when years of use have amply demonstrated that there is A LOT one can do from "inside".

I agree with Rand Al Thor when he says:

I think that the advanced settings should be accessible from the gui. However, I think that it should be up to the "master user" to lock the settings so that less experienced users don't mess up these advanced settings. People need to make different users accounts for the wife and kids and lock all the important stuff up.

[CrashX]

The way I see it ( Correct me if I wrong ) is that Developer should just keep adding as much features as they can, it is up to the Skinners to worry about how to display it to the user.

I would love to see different view based on skill level of user ( basic, intermidiate, advancced ). When the gui setings are added to the windows, we set the which view it would belong in. Skiners can take this information to create the view.

I do agree XBMC has way to much information for media consumer who just want to watch a movie.

[jmarshall]

If there's an "Advanced Settings" button in the UI, people WILL click on it, whether or not they need to. It also leads to laziness - "Ah, who cares, just put it advanced and users can choose it if they want", instead of thinking things through and really justifying whether a new setting is needed.

I believe a script that will handle reading and writing advancedsettings.xml will be written anyway, making all this a moot point. Clearly such a script will NOT be included in XBMC by default.

I suspect in a couple of weeks I'll start the settings cleanup exercise, and at that point I'll post a new thread with proposed changes for comments.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Mart!]

"Decide the little details so your customers don't have to. You're faced with a tough decision: how many messages do we include on each page? Your first inclination may be to say, "Let's just make it a preference where people can choose 25, 50, or 100." That's the easy way out though. Just make a decision.
Preferences are a way to avoid making tough decisions
[...]
Preferences are also evil because they create more software. More options require more code. And there's all the extra testing and designing you need to do too. You'll also wind up with preference permutations and interface screens that you never even see. That means bugs that you don't know about: broken layouts, busted tables, strange pagination issues, etc.
Make the call
[...]
Yes, you might make a bad call. But so what. If you do, people will complain and tell you about it. As always, you can adjust. Getting Real is all about being able to change on the fly."

Source: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch06_Av...rences.php

Note: I'm am NOT affiliated to these people, I just read the book.

I think it also applies to the advanced settings. It should not be in the interface as far as I'm concerned. To take it a step further, less options = better. To create a large userbase, XBMC should be as easy to setup as possible.

[rwparris2]

The way I see it ( Correct me if I wrong ) is that Developer should just keep adding as much features as they can, it is up to the Skinners to worry about how to display it to the user.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_creep

It should be up to the skinners how to display the features that are there, not which features to display.

[TomJensen]

Chewing on this a little more, I think both sides are right, that XBMC does need to have a better way to configure options using a GUI, and XBMC already has too many options in its GUI.

To config XBMC right now, you have two options: doing it while XBMC is running, meaning having to deal with a UI that is geared primarily for a remote control (read: clunky), or manually edit one of several xml files. Neither is appealing.

XBMC needs to have a GUI outside of the program for configuration, not so much for the graphical stuff, but to have all the options in one location, with context help for what all the settable parameters mean. Ideally, it would have tabbed panes similar to Firefox config or the umpteenth other apps. Then you can have advanced options alongside basic ones, w/o worry that an "apps user" is going to muck it up while running the program. Lack of a config GUI outside XBMC is what leads to the cramming of all the options inside it.

[sho]

The XBMC interface is horribly user-hostile. If you want to understand how bad it is, then get a normal "apps user" to configure it. Good luck.

That's funny since the XBMC interface is a recurring theme when people who like XBMC talk about it.
Each to his own I guess.

Aside from 'leave it how it is', an about:config clone available from the web interface is the idea I like best of all.

This is an excellent idea.
Advancedsetting editor available only through the webserver. It would in turn generate the xml file.

[althekiller]

Advancedsetting editor available only through the webserver. It would in turn generate the xml file.

Except it would add even more settings as something of this nature obviously needs its own auth.

[rwparris2]

Except it would add even more settings as something of this nature obviously needs its own auth.

Maybe only require auth if the profile is password protected (ie profiles).

It is still pretty insecure, as I'm guessing most users don't know they can have separate profiles, let alone lock them down. Maybe a default password of 'xbmc' making just as (in)secure as ftp on xbox?