Should XBMC's "Advanced Feature Settings" be hidden from the GUI as they are today?

We were discussing this issue in the following trac:

http://www.xbmc.org/trac/ticket/5969

I added a feature which allows users to execute actions while system was idle. It turned that it was too advanced of a feature and it should not to be availiable to the normal user as a GUI option

We usually place advanced settings in the advancedsettings.xml file.

What do you all think ? Should these Advanced Options being shown on the GUI ?

I think if XBMC is going to become more widespread (which I hope it does) then an 'Advanced Settings' menu would be a good idea as it's more user friendly than creating and editing your own advancedsettings.xml.

GUI for advanced settings would be great, but IMO the biggest thing that would help facilitate mid-level use, would be a gui for remote control programming.

Instead of trying to re-program remotes for existing maps or messing with keymappings manually, it should be made trivial (from a user perspective) to assign functions to remote keys directly from within xbmc.

ie like how pretty much any modern game allows you to remap keyboard (select event/command, then press the key or remote button you want assigned to it) directly from the options.

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. Just my 2 pence. Cheers.

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

Hitcher Wrote:I think if XBMC is going to become more widespread (which I hope it does) then an 'Advanced Settings' menu would be a good idea as it's more user friendly than creating and editing your own advancedsettings.xml.

I would like to see this. It would also limit the number of issues where someone has place invalid values for certain parameters.

The more you take away from having to edit files manually, the more user friendly

There is always room for a warning message and a reset button lol

advancedsettings.xml will NEVER be editable from within XBMC.

Separate app, I have no problem with (but I won't write it). The reason is simple: Advancedsettings is for advanced users! We don't want people touching it, and you shouldn't have to! I don't touch it unless I absolutely have to, which is usually when I'm testing something in it.

If something HAS to be altered by a user, then it should be in the GUI. Anything else should not be available, as I can guarantee that many users WILL play with them and then freak out when stuff goes wrong.

We have way too many GUI-settable items already - hopefully a whole bunch can be scraped for the next release.

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall what about things like to enable remote to work with onscreen keyboard shouldn't that not be in advanced settings but in the GUI settings?

Ideally, the setting should not be needed - XBMC should function. I suspect, however, that this is impossible to achieve in general, at least in the short term, for things such as SMS based input into edit controls.

Any option that can justify itself as being in the UI obviously will be there. I will be conducting a review of all gui and advanced settings prior to the release of 9.04.

Cheers,
Jonathan