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

Anything that suggests a 'one size fits all' state, then xbmc will be poorer for it.

One of the greatest things about xbmc is it's flexibility.

Flexibility comes from options.

While I can agree that a careful balance should be maintained, if one is to err, it should be on the side of flexibility.
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Someone could rather easily write a script to config as.xml. That would give you the appearance of it being built in, yet the average user would never see it since they likely wouldn't install it.

Is it just me or do other people think its all the options that make xbmc so great?

The fact that you can alter many different settings straight from inside xbmc itself means that you can customise it to your individual needs and see the result instantly.
I dont want to have to edit an xml file from my computer to do it, i dont want to touch the computer. Sure, i know what i am doing, but i want instant interaction.

Take mobile phones as an example. How many options do we have on those these days? More and more with every new generation.

The average joey doesnt know what they all do, but they are there for the people that do. At least you have the option, and you can change it in an easy fashion.

Sure some people will mess up, thats just what people do though.
Maybe a global setting for a Basic or Advanced user would cover that, with the default obviously set to Basic.
Or how about protecting that "section" with a pin number?

There are quite a few ways other than the above to have these options available to the GUI but hidden from the fiddling kids

I do like althekiller's suggestion of a script to give the impression of them being built in, but then wouldnt it need a re-write with every new setting addition?

Just my 2cents, not out to cause any arguments or anything so dont bite my head off lol

Well, since they're going to re-evaluate the options that are available in the GUI before the next point release, I'll wait for that time. I look forward to it because there are probably a lot of options I'm not aware of but could take advantage of.

We need to really define what an advanced user for XBMC is ?

Is it someone who can build from SVN ? Is it someone who knows their way around the OS ?

Windows is a much easier OS than Linux, so does that mean anyone who is able to configure and run Linux is an advanced user for XBMC ?

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

theuni Wrote: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.

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.

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.

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