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 Post subject: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 1:43 am 
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One of the best things about Winstep is it's wide array of options. With every update comes more flexibility and a more enhanced user experience.

Unfortunately, that's also one of the worst things about Winstep. With every new option, every new update, comes another reorganization of the preferences dialog (WorkShelf and NextStart). We have to relocate options on dialogs accessed through "Advanced" and "More Options" buttons on tabs that aren't as clear cut as one would expect. Real estate in the preferences window is clearly at a premium.

Jorge, I don't know what it would take to change how the options are organized or displayed, and no doubt you may have considered this previously, but I invite you to take another look.

As an example of great setting organization, to include the ability to keyword search for specific options, take a look at Directory Opus.

Image

It's straightforward, organized and searchable. Which is what I would like to see in a future iteration of Winstep.

I know it ain't sexy, and it ain't "eye candy," but rebuilding the preferences popup with this different approach would go a long way to improving this user's experience.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 2:35 am 
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I would love this. Directory Opus' settings and options seem as numerous Winstep's but DOpus settings are fairly well navigated by both category and by searching.


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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 3:36 am 
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While I perfectly understand and even agree with your concerns, I think organization of the settings has actually improved quite a bit lately. Things will usually be where you would expect to find them, at least I think so.

The major problem, as Chuck very well noted, is that space in Preferences is at a premium.

This in turn causes two major drawbacks when new settings are added: either there is no space for them where they should rightly belong (for instance, the new menu scaling slider in v18.10) and thus those settings end up being placed in non-clear cut locations such as 'More Options' in the Advanced tab of Preferences OR existing settings in a particular tab end up having to be re-arranged (again!) to make room for the new setting(s) (which is what happened to the menu scaling slider now that I made room in the Appearance tab of the Dock Properties dialog by moving floating label settings to their own dialog).

Apart from these two drawbacks, I don't think organization is the bigger problem, but something else that even Opus suffers from, and that no amount of organization can fix: the sheer number of different settings and options is simply OVERWHELMING. And here allow me to quote from a PCWorld article discussing Opus:

"The degree of control which Directory Opus gives the user is extraordinary, especially in an era in which many programs try to simplify or cut down on controls, options, and settings. Directory Opus assumes the user is a grownup and doesn't do a lot of hand-holding or simplification. However, it is rarely confusing or contradictory, just sometimes overwhelming. There are many different ways to do almost anything and many different options to turn on or off (and often you can have multiple windows, each of which may have different values for those options)."

Sounds similar to Winstep applications?

There is no way around it: the more powerful and flexible an application is, the steeper the learning curve.

You can either do like Apple and Microsoft, who decide for the users how something works and then only provide the most basic settings so everything is kept nice and tidy - at the cost of flexibility - or you go all out and allow the user to customize everything - at the price of simplicity.

Where I try to find a balance is in the *default* settings and in what is available from the right click context menus. If what the user wants is simplicity, then stick to those and pretend Preferences does not even exist.

But if what you want flexibility, then sooner or later you will have to dive into Preferences, and there you will meet your learning curve head on (made worse by the lack of a detailed user guide). Even there I made a big effort to prioritize settings by putting the most useful/used options top level and 'burying' the rest in secondary popup dialogs.

This is an attempt to avoid settings clutter, which immediately overwhelms the user - Opus Preferences is indeed very well organized, but it suffers from this issue: every setting there is equally important and is thus like a gigantic wall of text hitting the user in the face, setting after setting after setting with no way of knowing at a glance which are the REALLY important and which are the secondary.

Note that I am not criticizing what Opus did there (it has the HUGE advantage of being searchable, but, of course, this means you must know in advance what you are looking for), just stating that every approach has its strong points but also its weaknesses.

Of course, avoiding settings clutter also has a drawback: makes it harder to find the least used options precisely because they are buried in secondary dialogs.

Anyway, making settings searchable can only be done by putting those in some sort of hierarchical database, and at this point your only option becomes presenting those settings exactly like Opus does in that screenshot: as a simple collection of checkboxes and option boxes, divided by categories.

Gone are the useful previews, such as you find in the Winstep icon spacing and background transparency dialogs, or in the Modules tab. Plus, not every feature and option in Winstep applications can be presented in such a neat way (for instance, Task Icon and System Tray icon customization, etc...)

The only other solution would be to offer the user the choice of two Preferences modes, the current and an alternative similar to Opus - but that would mean I would have DOUBLE the work, would have to make sure both modes are synchronized at all times, and would have to duplicate the code that transfers visual options into the actual variables in memory.

No thank you. :)

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:12 am 
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There is something else that can be done, but that I don't particularly like: make Preferences resizable vertically and add scrollbars to each page (a bit like it happens in the alpha of the Winstep Theme Builder).

This way I wouldn't have to struggle to find space every time I needed to add a new setting. On the other hand, it becomes, IMO, very easy to miss the fact that there are more options 'hidden' beyond the scroll line.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:30 am 
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winstep wrote:
There is something else that can be done, but that I don't particularly like: make Preferences resizable vertically and add scrollbars to each page (a bit like it happens in the alpha of the Winstep Theme Builder).

This way I wouldn't have to struggle to find space every time I needed to add a new setting. On the other hand, it becomes, IMO, very easy to miss the fact that there are more options 'hidden' beyond the scroll line.

Jorge Why do you box yourself in!!. I get that a few will not use high resolution but you could make the references panel 2 3 times the size giving yourself a lot more space. I attach a screenshot your preference dialogs is just loaded in the middle, plenty of space for more round the sides top and bottom. Please ignore the dual display and just look at it as one screen.
Attachment:
Untitled.jpg

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 11:59 am 
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Jorge,

While I don't disagree organization has improved, your level of understanding as the developer far surpasses my understanding as a semi-experienced user... And exponentially surpasses that of a novice or potential buyer. There's a huge disparity between what you know because you own and built every line of code and that of your disparate user base.

In your PCWorld quote, you highlighted the word "overwhelming." Take a second look at the quote. A phrase I would highlight is "rarely confusing." In Winstep's current dialogs, I am generally familiar with the tabs, but often have no idea what lies behind those "Advanced" and "More Options" buttons. I really have to dig in and experiment. Winstep's few hard core users may not have this issue, but many casual users and potential buyers will.

Frankly, it's sometimes just not worth the time.

The option to enlarge the dialog and/or make it sizable may, on the surface, seem sound. I'm not sure I agree, as I immediately think of that box of stuff in the garage labeled "kids" that I continually put things in, only to run out of room and put the stuff in a larger box labeled "kids." Sure, it's compartmentalized and has more stuff, but I have to dig into the box even more to find something specific *if* it's even in there.

In terms of other programs like Directory Opus, one way it tackles those "overwhelming" options, beyond the organized and searchable preferences dialog, is by maintaining an extensive help file. Here again, Winstep falls short. And this has been a point of discussion before, so I won't belabor it.

That said, I truly appreciate the mostly one-man show that is Winstep, and will continue to support you and it... Even if I can't find an option, much less understand it.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 2:16 pm 
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oOSGearOo wrote:
Jorge Why do you box yourself in!!. I get that a few will not use high resolution but you could make the references panel 2 3 times the size giving yourself a lot more space.


No I can't. When we have high resolution screens, we tend to think everyone else has them too, especially in this day and age.

But reality does not work like that... do you know what is still the most common screen resolution, by far? 1366x768.

The Preferences screen is designed to fit into a 800x600 screen, so it barely fits.

Chuck wrote:
While I don't disagree organization has improved, your level of understanding as the developer far surpasses my understanding as a semi-experienced user... And exponentially surpasses that of a novice or potential buyer. There's a huge disparity between what you know because you own and built every line of code and that of your disparate user base.


Absolutely no contest to that - which is one of the reasons I spend half my life asking for user opinions here, because it comes from a fresh pair of eyes.

Chuck wrote:
The option to enlarge the dialog and/or make it sizable may, on the surface, seem sound. I'm not sure I agree, as I immediately think of that box of stuff in the garage labeled "kids" that I continually put things in, only to run out of room and put the stuff in a larger box labeled "kids." Sure, it's compartmentalized and has more stuff, but I have to dig into the box even more to find something specific *if* it's even in there.


And you're right, making it larger/scrollable does not help with the complexity, but that is not what it would be for anyway: it would be to put a stop to constantly having to shuffle existing settings around in Preferences to make room for new settings.

Chuck wrote:
In terms of other programs like Directory Opus, one way it tackles those "overwhelming" options, beyond the organized and searchable preferences dialog, is by maintaining an extensive help file.


See, again I agree with you, and in fact I think THAT is the TRUE problem (the lack of a User Guide). As I noted in my previous reply, a Search function is only useful IF you know what you are searching for in the first place.

At the risk of repeating myself, up until v9.5 Winstep applications had a very detailed User Guide, one I started from scratch on the very first release and which I laboriously updated and built on with every release.

However, this was only possible because keeping a User Guide up-to-date, while laborious (at least for someone like me, who HATES having to write the release announcements on the web site), is completely different from having to write it from scratch.

The next release after v9.5, which took over a year to complete (v10.6), changed EVERYTHING: the user interface, where every option was, removed skinning settings, added a ton of new features, etc...

It was no longer about simply updating an existing User Guide but about re-writing it - and since the UI was so much simpler than before and I was already exhausted from investing a full year of non-stop working on v10.6, I opted not to.

A few years later I partnered with Proxma AG to distribute Winstep software in Germany, and they even made a PDF User Guide in German to go with it (which they actually wrote based on my previous User Guide), very nicely laid out, etc...

I even paid a professional translator to have it translated into English, so I could perhaps use it as the basis for a new User Guide, but alas, that too ended up not happening. I even tried paying someone to re-write it, but that ended up not working either. The major problem is that I am the only one who knows every little cranny of the software, so I am the only one capable of explaining everything properly.

And so the problem is always the same: Winstep is just me and I simply don't have time to do everything at once. I'm not whining, just explaining.

Sometimes I wish I was like Brad and had others I could delegate to: 'Hey, <x>, make me a cool new video about WB and put it online'. 'Hey, <y>, write the new release announcement and put it on the web site'. 'Hey, <z>, write a User Guide for OD'. He not only has employees, as he is surrounded by capable people who actually understand and use the software.

Unfortunately Winstep is not a multi-million dollar company. :)

I can't even pay someone else to make a nice professional video show casing Nexus (something I am in DESPERATE need of). More likely than not, the person making the video never used Nexus and so would have NO IDEA what needed to be show cased, etc... I know because I tried, and if I need to micro-manage everything the freelancer does, then I might as well do it myself.

... but I don't have the time for that.

And so some things end up getting pushed forward with the belly. Eventually they do get done, but it might take a long time.

My hope is that at the speed I'm working the core of the Winstep applications is going to stabilize soon (i.e.; when I finally reach the end of my to-do list). At that point I imagine further development will be based on adding more modules/widgets, leaving the core stable enough for me to finally finish writing the User Guide and take a more leisurely pace at development, thus leaving me enough time free to focus on other necessary things.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 6:12 pm 
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I mostly have to agree with everything you've said here so far, Jorge.

I do think the Prefs are coming along quite well, and scroll bars would be ghastly. Why not have a big button at the top of tabs that need more space for "Page 2" etc., pretty much as e.g. with the forum and similar. Just more in your face so people can't miss it.

The D. Opus configs/prefs are, to put it mildly, a bloody nightmare, having used the app for a while now and thoroughly familiarised myself with it, and with the manual, prefs, and everything else - and that was tough going for a couple of weeks or so! Yes, Opus has some wonderful facilities etc., but the way the program works is not flexible enough IMO and certainly does not seem to suit my way of working. I'm used to the way DOpus4.x on the Amiga used to work and Magellan Explorer does, and it's very hard to change that after nearly 30 years. And those Opus prefs/configs really do my head in! Magellan's are quite similar to Winstep's, highly graphic, no manual needed, though of course not as complex as the latter's.

Yes, a complete User's Manual for Winstep would be nice I guess, but if a user spends just a few hours familiarising himself with the various Winstep prefs and shelf and dock properties, they won't need one as they are pretty simple and straightforward, with lots of graphics. The odd tooltip might perhaps be useful for beginners, as it's not always clear at first glance what some settings actually do, but even that can be figured out without too much difficulty - just a bit of patience, lateral thinking, and trial and error.

Opus style prefs in Winstep would be a real PITA IMO. And probably would put of more new users than it helps.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2018 3:16 am 
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winstep wrote:
And you're right, making it larger/scrollable does not help with the complexity, but that is not what it would be for anyway: it would be to put a stop to constantly having to shuffle existing settings around in Preferences to make room for new settings.

Which is my point behind the DOpus-like preferences approach.

Winstep wrote:
At the risk of repeating myself, up until v9.5 Winstep applications had a very detailed User Guide, one I started from scratch on the very first release and which I laboriously updated and built on with every release.

However, this was only possible because keeping a User Guide up-to-date, while laborious (at least for someone like me, who HATES having to write the release announcements on the web site), is completely different from having to write it from scratch.

So it's been over nine years since the Winstep user guide was last updated...

Winstep wrote:
The next release after v9.5, which took over a year to complete (v10.6), changed EVERYTHING: the user interface, where every option was, removed skinning settings, added a ton of new features, etc...

...Making the user guide irrelevant.

Winstep wrote:
The major problem is that I am the only one who knows every little cranny of the software, so I am the only one capable of explaining everything properly.

Hence the need for a more organized preferences dialog and/or up to date help file.

Winstep wrote:
And so the problem is always the same: Winstep is just me and I simply don't have time to do everything at once. I'm not whining, just explaining.

I empathize. I truly appreciate all the work you put into Winstep.

Winstep wrote:
My hope is that at the speed I'm working the core of the Winstep applications is going to stabilize soon (i.e.; when I finally reach the end of my to-do list). At that point I imagine further development will be based on adding more modules/widgets, leaving the core stable enough for me to finally finish writing the User Guide and take a more leisurely pace at development, thus leaving me enough time free to focus on other necessary things.

Truth be told, I would rather you focus on a better organized preferences dialog and more up to date help file, than the theme builder and more modules/widgets.

I may be in the minority, but I don't use Winstep for the modules. For me, it's all about the WorkShelf and NextStart functionality.

Regardless Jorge, keep at it!

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2018 3:32 am 
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Chuck wrote:
Truth be told, I would rather you focus on a better organized preferences dialog and more up to date help file, than the theme builder and more modules/widgets.


Every user has different priorities. The Winstep skinners at Wincustomize would KILL for the Theme Builder (and they will, but me, if I don't come up with it any time soon lol).

Plus, there is something called 'windows of opportunity'. One existed for docks when I finally decided to launch Nexus as a stand alone application (RocketDock and ObjectDock had not seen a new release for some time, which left a 'gap' and gave me enough time to play 'catch up').

Likewise, with many OD users (some of which are also skinners) currently abandoning it in favor of Nexus due to Stardock not renewing the AccuWeather weather feed subscription, now is the RIGHT time to come up with the %ยงยง!@# Theme Builder (and also Winstep's own Themes Gallery).

Chuck wrote:
Regardless Jorge, keep at it!


Thanks! Doing my best! :)

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Thu Oct 18, 2018 7:24 am 
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winstep wrote:
I can't even pay someone else to make a nice professional video show casing Nexus (something I am in DESPERATE need of). More likely than not, the person making the video never used Nexus and so would have NO IDEA what needed to be show cased, etc... I know because I tried, and if I need to micro-manage everything the freelancer does, then I might as well do it myself.

... but I don't have the time for that.

And so some things end up getting pushed forward with the belly. Eventually they do get done, but it might take a long time.

Hi Jorge
Sent you 3 emails to support your so busy not had time to look them over propably, I took to heart your comments in the post. If its any use Ile polish it up and list it proper.

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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Tue Oct 23, 2018 6:46 pm 
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oOSGearOo wrote:
winstep wrote:
I can't even pay someone else to make a nice professional video show casing Nexus (something I am in DESPERATE need of). More likely than not, the person making the video never used Nexus and so would have NO IDEA what needed to be show cased, etc... I know because I tried, and if I need to micro-manage everything the freelancer does, then I might as well do it myself.

... but I don't have the time for that.

And so some things end up getting pushed forward with the belly. Eventually they do get done, but it might take a long time.

Hi Jorge
Sent you 3 emails to support your so busy not had time to look them over propably, I took to heart your comments in the post. If its any use Ile polish it up and list it proper.

I am not professional Jorge but I have been busy so far I polished up the start of the video and added voice over explaining a few things. If you can use it then by al-meens do It needs an ending though. What you all think what have I highlighted! What have I got wrong! I know one person whose likely to chime in hopefully.

https://youtu.be/u9h2hzlDiP8


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 Post subject: Re: Setting Organization and Display
PostPosted: Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:25 pm 
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Thanks for the video(s), and for the work you went through making it.

While users are more than welcome to submit videos and they're very appreciated, there are strong reasons why I don't actually ask users to do specific videos (when you're paying for something you have every right to demand professional quality, with gifts you can't and feelings can get hurt, etc...)

Also, what I am looking for is not so much a tutorial but something more like this (and with just as much impact):


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