Weird Foobar's logic, time to improve usability? Options

[SacRat]

Recent versions of Foobar allowed Keyboard shotrcut sorting, but it's done in some weird logic.
Wouldn't it be better to combine them together, like
A
B
?
Alt+A
Alt+B
Shift+A
Ctrl+B
Alt+Shift+A
Etc?

Second... Why can't we change a hotkey by double-clicking one in the list?
Sometimes Del-Add is too boring. I know, it's far not the most common operation, but work with Foobar often consists of such things...

The third and the last question/suggestion.
IMHO One of the worst Foobar's features is a lack of usability knowledge of its developer and plugin creators. No offence, I'm not blaming neither Peter nor Case or anyone else. One can hardly be a good singer, artist and boxer at the same time. There's nothing wrong with it.
But I'd really liked to see Foobar with redesigned interface 'till 1.0 arrives.

If any of developers is interested in free usability consultations, please contact me by e-mail. As interface designer with big enough expeience I might be useful to you. Besides, I could try to get a couple of professionals in this field to help if needful.

I'm very busy now and have a huge lack of free time, but I'll be happy to find some free time to help Foobar's developers.

[Canar]

The third and the last question/suggestion.
IMHO One of the worst Foobar's features is a lack of usability knowledge of its developer and plugin creators. No offence, I'm not blaming neither Peter nor Case or anyone else. One can hardly be a good singer, artist and boxer at the same time. There's nothing wrong with it.

I agree with your first two points, but I wonder about the third one. Where do you find the usability problems? I showed foobar2000 to my parents and sister (hardly technical users, any of them) and they all found it easier and more straight-forward to use than Windows Media Player or Winamp.

Honestly, with the new tabbed interface, what does it lack in usability? Where do you have issues with it? Both WiMP and WA are much, much less user-friendly than foobar, loaded with completely useless features that do not add one lick of useful functionality.

fb2k's basic interface has all the functions needed, a highly functional default configuration, and all the components needed to do anything audio related that's somewhat relevant. I uninstall most of my Winamp installation to make it do what I want. I install most of my foobar installation to make it do what I want. I think the latter option is the way it should be.

[SacRat]

I can tell very little bad things about layer's window usability, but when things come to more complex work (playlist programming, playback configuration, etc...) it turnes into a hell
I'm far from being WA zealot. It's usability is higher, but sometimes it's logic even more perverted. The same about WMP.
Foobar between audio players got the same poit, as FAR manager among file managers: "eleet" powerful player with numerous unique features and relatively easy to use, which can make you crazy, when you're trying to change it's behaviour, thanking God that it happens really rarely.
I won't touch default UI (there's not too much to improve, IMHO), but take a look at settings... it's a garbage! Ask someone to find a needful thing there and I doubt they will. Even then they could have problems editing it.
I could name you all the "fault" of this GUI, bt I'm afraid, this list would take you hours to read (and days for me to write).

[Canar]

Care to list a point or two then? Some particularly glaring problems about the configuration usability?

Here are a few rebuttals already:

TAGZ is complex, yes. Here, the complexity gives power. If someone coded a simpler UI, this problem can be fixed. TAGZ gives the power to do anything you could possibly want when it comes to renaming stuff and the like. There are simpler ways to do things, and fb2k has the configurability to allow these simpler ways to work, but they'll lack power.

There can be many things to configure if you install a lot of components. Cause and effect here. Due to the fact that the plugins were coded by different people, there isn't necessarily any continuity between them. So, if this bothers you, uninstall those plugins. Component install/uninstall could be easier, admittedly, but it's not that hard to delete a .DLL.

There are a lot of "expert-level" configuration items shown. Perhaps this could be fixed with a MirandaIM-like "Show expert options" dialog.

Any other gripes?

[nIRV]

Thing is, foobar2k does really lack of what we could say "interface polishement" (much like my english sometimes ). Small things that someone would think of doing at first are absent. For exemple dbl-click on the tab region doesnt create a new quick "New Playlist(X)"

And once you install some more components, the "Component" menu gets crowded (which is inevitable I guess) but the right-click context menu just gets over-stuffed and looks like a bunch of geek items without separators (the default positions of items in this menu is also not the best one either)

One can put his/her head in the sand and say fb2k doesnt lack any refinement in its interface and I think he/she would miss a major goal to fb2k 1.0. That being said I'm not against the current interface, the idea behind it is superbe, all it needs is some more work to make things roll even more easily (the best exemple of what I mean is: that windows picture viewer integrated in winxp doesnt exit when you press ESC although _everyone_ will think of doing that to close this app (I've seen bunch of people doing it, torturing their keyboards).)

Doing a component that would create an "Easy Dialog Preference" item in the menu would be nice too for some people because once again, when you get to install some components (and even with the new 0.7.5/0.7.6), you get a big tree

[paulski]

The thing that makes foobar really cool in my mind is extensibility on top of core functionality. Fortunately, this extensibility applies also to the look and feel of the user interface so that you can completely replace it if you want. By providing an explicit description of the tasks that you typically want to perform against the functionality offered by foobar (+plugins) it is possible to develop your own user interface to match your individual needs. foo_looks offers a way to do this but it is only really useful for playback control and not for advanced tasks like editing a playlist or database (as far as I know).
One thing that I experimented with in the past with was interfacing the Macromedia Flash player to the foobar core so that you could author any type of look and feel you liked (provided you know how to author Flash movies). If someone is interested in this (unfinished) foobar plugin for Macromedia Flash, I can send the source code to them.

[Mike Giacomelli]

Well tagging, sorting, title formatting, etc are ridiculously complicated if you don't have some familarity with it or some programming experience. I suggested that a few basic presets be added or a simple GUI for adjusting them a long time ago but it never happened.

Most of my friends who use foobar actually trade sort strings they found on the net rather then try and come up with there own.

[The Link]

Foobar2000's playlist formatting syntax is just pure logic. The fact that it is hard to learn/use for some people just shows how few "normal people" know about the basics of logic. I know that this is not their fault because you learn almost nothing about such elementary things at school.

Regards,
The Link

[SacRat]

Well, Canar, let me disagree with some of your states.

1. Tagz are really complex now. the more, I and some other people already mentioned, that in it's current form TAGZ generated code is very difficult to read. IMHO its main failt is that "space" and "tab" symbols are in some reasons written in their "straight" form without using tags. That makes code even less readable. I didn't say about power. Sure, we need it. But I never stated, that power and usability can't be together

2. The same problem was with FAR. The difference is that its creator don't give a damn about users opinion at all
I think, that plugin mamager can be more, than useful and helpful. Another bad thing with Foobar is that many plugin writers don't care about documentation... Well, that's the other movie...

And samples you asked about:
Go to settings. Now see: Comonent Libraries and Components.
Note, that none of them let you turn plugins on/off, sort plugins, and get their description in simple form (don't tell, that double clicking is not a problem. it's not, unless you have tens of modules).
IMHO this can be done by a single panel:
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
? abx comparator 1.1 (foo_ablx.dll) ?
?Xexperimental plugin (fooexp.dll) FAILED TO LOADXXXXXXX?
? new plugin (foo_new.dll) ?
? ?
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
? my first experiment in making plugins ?
? ?
? FAILE TO LOAD ?
? OLD SDK VERSION ?
?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Volume control on "playback" even though it can be disabled. The same is true for some other components: it's not obvious, that their current location is the best suitable.

A lack of separators in menus was aleady mentioned.

Are these enough?

Thing is, foobar2k does really lack of what we could say "interface polishement" . Small things that someone would think of doing at first are absent. For exemple dbl-click on the tab region doesnt create a new quick "New Playlist(X)"

Agree with most things you noted, nIRV. You understood me.

That's what I'm talking about. Things, which people feel intuitively just don't work.
A combination of all these factors influences total usability.

Most of usability problems I noted are hidden in Preferences menu and if things come the same way configuration of next versions might vecome even more complicated.

Try to experiment: give "average user" Case's installer and ask to do some basic things, like changing replaygain mode or surround settings of MOD decoding.

There are too much elements on the screen and that's not good for interface creators. ATC programmers suffered from the same problems and finally got flexible, but extremely bloated interface.

If anyone's interested, i could give some suggestions about possible Config interface improvements (we could talk about default GUI, but since it's changeable there's no much sence in doing that):
Add tiny icons near "key" elemnts: this would increase search speed in times.
Do whatever possible to reduce number of items displayed at once: organized TABs might be better here: user can't work effectively with interfaces, having more, than 7+/-2 elements at a time.
Try to copy "usual" behaviour or windows applications, maybe, some good features from competing products: migration to Foobar would be easier...



P.S.[offtopic on]
So from now discussing anything, where user's view is different from moderator's one is called trolling? OK.
[offtopic off]

[anza]

1. Tagz are really complex now. the more, I and some other people already mentioned, that in it's current form TAGZ generated code is very difficult to read. IMHO its main failt is that "space" and "tab" symbols are in some reasons written in their "straight" form without using tags. That makes code even less readable. I didn't say about power. Sure, we need it. But I never stated, that power and usability can't be together

Agreed, formatting strings are a pain in the ass when it comes to reading it from foobar's preferences page, if you make it messy. Why not just split long lines to two or even more? It makes it much more easier to read. Or, if you're editing a script, why not do it in some text editor, like TextPad. I never edit my strings in foobar's prefs (except when I'm tweaking the colors), I always load it up in TextPad.

edit: When it comes to the preferences.. _My_ opinion is that there's no need to change anything there. Things are easy to find and categorized well. Also, at least in my opinion it's quite logical to have volume control under playback. Ok, maybe it could be under Output also, but maybe it's still better under playback. Meh, who even uses that volume bar?

Got some other things in mind but forgot them already

This post has been edited by anza: Dec 16 2003, 21:36

[snek_one]

Well tagging, sorting, title formatting, etc are ridiculously complicated if you don't have some familarity with it or some programming experience.  I suggested that a few basic presets be added or a simple GUI for adjusting them a long time ago but it never happened.

Most of my friends who use foobar actually trade sort strings they found on the net rather then try and come up with their own.

I absolutely agree with this.. Most of foobar is great, except the formatting of strings. Having quite a bit of programming knowledge I can say that even I get demotivated once I see the syntax..

My vote goes out to rewriting the syntax in a couple of screens to simple English..
Just parse it back to tagz "behind the scenes".. with an option to show either tagz or english it would be very helpful for all.. that way people can easily learn the tagz as well because they can compare the two, if both views are updated realtime..

using 2 tabs for the different views could work, simple and advanced? or even right next to each other.. with a bit bigger preview window.. a lot of these names go out of the current bar..

just my 0.02 euro's

[Mike Giacomelli]

Foobar2000's playlist formatting syntax is just pure logic. The fact that it is hard to learn/use for some people just shows how few "normal people" know about the basics of logic. I know that this is not their fault because you learn almost nothing about such elementary things at school.

Regards,
The Link

I strongly disagree. I'm a CS double major and that doesn't mean i instrinsically know what $caps2(x) does verses plain caps, nor does it mean i know the exact name of each possible variable. Logic is easy, the problem is most people are not too familar with the syntax.

Of course I'm a CS major so i just look them up and am happy to have them But its still very annoying and time consuming if i want to modify someone else's sort string or something like that. Its also impossible if you don't spend the time studying the help file, which IMO should not be required to do something as basic as sort a list.

[DaCypher]

I agree that FB2K is a bit rough around the edges (some of the menu layouts and specific useablities that were mentioned earlier). However, this does not bother me at all. It makes for a bit higher learning curve when first starting to use it, but now that I am used to it, I don't have any complaints.

The only complaint that I could think of would be that FB2K is not very intuitive to use some of more powerful features. However, most power users that really want to get in and tweak around with the settings have to use more than just intuition anyways (thus seperating the power users from average users). Besides, as an end-user, why should we care how easy/intuitive FB2K is for Joe Schmoe to start using its powerful features?

That being said, I would like to see some of the playlist tab features and other things previously mentioned implemented eventually.

This post has been edited by DaCypher: Dec 16 2003, 23:23

[foosion]

My vote goes out to rewriting the syntax in a couple of screens to simple English..
Just parse it back to tagz "behind the scenes".. with an option to show either tagz or english it would be very helpful for all.. that way people can easily learn the tagz as well because they can compare the two, if both views are updated realtime..

I've already seen a natural language <-> formal language translation (it was OCL <-> English). It doesn't make things simpler except for rather trivial expressions and it also restricts you as to what you can write in English. In fact, complex expressions are hard to read when they get translated to a natural language, as the sentences get really long and are nested ad infinitum.

Or are you suggesting something like COBOL? I don't know any COBOL myself, but I've recently seen it in a lecture about programming languages. Examples from that lecture:

"Normal" programming language style:

CODE

a := b + c;

COBOL:

CODE

ADD GIN TO WHISKY GIVING VERMOUTH.

Well, these examples are from the lecture, I didn't make them up myself.

[anza]

I just don't get it. I've got no programming experience whatsoever but still I think writing formatting strings is the easiest thing ever! Have you people checked the help button in title formatting preferences page? It tells you all you need/can/should know about writing the strings. Anything else you need would be pure logic.

[billcow]

My opinion (probable some things already mentioned - I skimmed the thread, but probably missed some specifics) is as follows. Note that although I'm not actually trained in the art of interface design (it's quite an art, too), I have a tendancy to have a very clear idea of where my "usability threshold" lies compared to less advanced computer users, so I tend to hit these sorts of things right on the mark.

1) Formatting strings. I think the main problem with them as they are is readability - you can't have spaces or anything to improve this without messing up the output. My solution would consist of several things...
(a) Code snippets. Things like detecting artist and title from filename if the tag isn't filled, various coloring tricks, removing "The" from the beginning of artist names, and so on could be consolidated into a seperate file defining macros. When the formatting engine reads the string it would go into this file and grab out stuff that it needs. This wouldn't be the same as user functions because they wouldn't be recursive or anything like that, and thus wouldn't make for any snafus that don't already exist.
(b) Better math. Even simple math stuff like finding the percentage based on the current position and song length are hard to understand, even with the $muldiv() function - "$muldiv(%_time_elapsed_seconds%,100,%_time_total_seconds)" is a whole lot harder to understand than "%_time_elapsed_seconds% * 100 / %_time_total_seconds". Maybe this could be implemented as a $math() function taking a bunch of variables, numbers and math symbols (+, -, /, and *) to make it backwards-compatible. Another useful thing to have would be floating-point, as it seems like that's a common thing that throws new users off.
© Better variables. The method for setting them ("$puts(var,value)") is pretty intuitive, except for the difference between "$puts()" and "$put()". The method for using them is somewhat un-intuitive - from a non-programmer's standpoint there's no obvious reason why you can't just get them the same as file tags. An easy way to fix this would be by simply retrieving script variables with %name% - or possibly with a prefix (such as the "__" prefix for tech info fields) to prevent conflicts with actual tags.
(d) The most obvious problem, spacing, should be fixed somehow. It couldn't be a matter of simply allowing spaces, as that would screw up anything that uses literal text (although I personally use the single quotes even when not strictly necessary if i'm using actual text) so a solution would be a little harder to come by, but should still be possible.
(e) Readability would be vastly improved if syntax-highlighting were included in the editor for playlist strings. The problem with that is that it'd take a lot of work for a relatively small benefit, so it wouldn't be too high on my priority list.

2) The config dialog. As has been said already, it is quite complex and overwhelming. There are a bunch of possible solutions, ranging from creating one small dialog with the most common settings, all the way to having certain sections designated "advanced" and then grouping them together somewhere else. I think the latter would be better in the long run, perhaps with a way for plugins with options that do the same thing as an option somewhere else for a different plugin sharing the option. An example there would be for module file decoders. Most of the different mod file formats have a setting whether to loop them, what sample rate to decode at and so on, so you could have all the decoder plugins share the same settings page for those settings. The problem with that is that the plugins would have to be partly re-written or else foobar wouldn't know how to handle them. Overall though, I think the easiest thing to improve the config dialog would be to have the tree be collapsed by default and remember which branches are open and which are closed. Then it wouldn't look as cluttered when you first open it. The next step IMHO would be to have a seperate part of the tree designated for "basic" settings - the sort of things that just about everyone will want to configure when they first install foobar. What output plugin to use, showing or hiding playlist tabs, whether to minimize to tray, behavior when adding files from command line/explorer, resumeing when started, and other stuff that falls into the category of things that people would expect to be able to change easily.

3) Menus. The "Playback" and "Foobar2000" menus are well-organized by default, with very little clutter, as is the playlist menu for the most part (although I would drop "add location" and "add playlist" - the former is somewhat confusing and the latter is useless since you can select a playlist in "add files"). The components menu however isn't sorted or anything, and with the lack of seperators it's hard to look at. Same goes for the context menu. The other problem is that it's fairly difficult to sort menus effectively. In the menus with seperators, different items end up in different parts of the menu, and items in submenus aren't kept together, and even the sorting list is a mess. I hate to use microsoft as an example for anything good, but I think a variation on the customize toolbar dialog they use for all there stuff would be good. The only thing I would change is to make the dialog resizable, and possibly make it a tree view to handle submenus. Drag and drop re-arranging in addition to the current "move up/down" buttons would make it easier, as would moving sub-menus by dragging the submenu title instead of all the individual items. One other nit-pick I have with the menus is that you are stuck with the sub-menu arrangement that the plugin creator defines. It would be nice, although not crucial, if you could make your own sub-menus and put whichever items in whichever submenus you want. Another addition to this idea is renaming items. It'd also be nice to be able to put context-menu items in the the main menus.

4) File info. This isn't a problem as the "special" file info dialog is just about perfect, and since you can just remove the standard one from the context menu and put the special one in it's place it isn't a probelm. Although I think it would be smart to make it the "official" file info dialog.

For the most part though, I think foobar has very few problems interface-wise that can't be solved with a little bit of looking around and in the case of formatting strings, a bit of concentration. Unfortunately, these are IMHO exactly the things that turn new users off to foobar. Of all the things I listed above, I think the biggest problem has to do with the readability of formatting strings. If they were easier to read then it'd be easier for new users to take one they got on the internet and either learn from it or modify it to change something they don't like about. With the "code snippets" idea new users could easily apply advanced stuff like filename-based tag deduction and sorting tricks (swapping first and last names if there's a comma (so the display is cleaner but sorting is by last name), removing "The" (to make stuff sort better), that sort of thing) to code that would be simple otherwise, but is complicated if you do anything fancy.

[edit]
Just noticed that the state of the config dialog's tree is now (in 0.7.6 beta 2) saved when you close it. That oughta make things a lot easier to get at.

This post has been edited by billcow: Dec 17 2003, 01:00

[mazy]

i agree with billcow, mostly with (1)

code snippets / macros would be nices, they could make for smaller and easier to manage formatting strings.

they would get expanded internally.

defining macro would be easy like this:
macro(var_1,var_2,var3)=(
// macro code, using var_1 etc. as parameter substitutes
)

variables should get accesible the same way internal variables are, maybe using special prefix.

as for highlighting, i edit my strings in external editor anyway, so i think it would be good enough to have highlighting file for ultraedit etc. (should be easy to do, anyone going to do it?)

edit: ah, and move genral gui settings like fonts and colors to public vars so plugins could interference it (and billcow could modify his foo_syfm )

This post has been edited by mazy: Dec 17 2003, 02:07

[billcow]

Macros have actually been discussed before, but were ruled out as a result of numerous ways you could crash foobar with them.

Of course, the thing there was that said macros were actually thought of more in terms of functions - aka with recursion and such. If we do it this way, it would be a simple substitution - something you can easily do via find/replace in a text editor - something I do quite often when working with formatting strings. The benefit would be that you could actually edit the file without doing all the replacing every time you wanted to see if it worked.

As for fonts/colors, I'm for obvious reasons a huge supporter of moving them to a more "open" place so that they could be changed automagically by plugins that edit formatting strings. However, a long time ago Peter explained that the reason for having them in the GUI is that if, say, foo_looks were to use them it (the tagz string) wouldn't be able to use the color since the background is that of the underlying graphic, but the user would expect it to. And while that makes sense, it also seems like any use of formatting strings that's that advanced probably wouldn't look good in such an environment anyway, so it's basically a he-said-she-said thing, except in this case one of the viewpoints is the developer, so that's the one that wins if neither has any other side-effects.

Hence, my idea (or rather the most recent version of it) would be to give formatting strings access to a set of color codes defined by the user - like a primary, secondary, and tertiary color, and possibly brighter/darker versions of them. Then, whatever UI is using the formatting string would define what those colors are - either through a configuration setting or based on the graphic used for a skin, or whatever - and the formatting string says "use the primary color for the artist, the secondary color for the song title, and the tertiary color for everything else" and would have the same color scheme as any other formatting string.

This would have several benefits:
1) No problems switching formatting strings
2) The user can easily change the colors used without knowing anything at all about how the formatting string works
3) The idea could be extended to include other things as well - this would be quite complicated, but rather useful from a beginning user's standpoint as well. You could have a set of checkboxes telling what information to display - such as whether or not to show the genre, whether to show the album, replaygain, or whatever. This is actually something i've been wanting to do with foo_syfm for a while now, but unfortunately I've had some (read: a lot) difficulty implementing the necessary string-manipulation functions. It would be very complicated of course, but would be great for people who want to tweak the display without any Tagz programming

Other neat stuff would be informing the string whether the font is fixed- or variable-width, so the string could adjust between using tabbed columns or space padding.

If anyone has some extensive knowledge of string-manipulation (or a good, open source, relatively simple to implement regexp engine that supports Unicode and is easily implementable) PM me - I'd really like to do several things with foo_syfm that would benefit - this is on-topic because it's for the purpose of making more things possible for the end-user to do without having to learn to program Tagz.

Overall, I want to state again - Foobar is IMHO at the point now where it can do just about anything anyone would ever need or want it to do - now it's time to make more of that stuff easier/more intuitive to more people.

[mazy]

that colors stuff would be nice, indeed!

although i would still like to be able to change the gui colors and fonts.

anyway, that 'checkbox' processing shouldn't be that hard. you could make it to look for them in block bounded with say // TOGGLES:START and // TOGGLES:END, and they would have format like this
// name: description
puts(t_name,1)

you would strip this whole section from the string and append generated one in the beginning.

still i can see it could use nice regular expressions library.

you can find some info here:
http://www.codeproject.com/string/spencerregexp.asp
http://www.codeproject.com/string/regex__.asp

ah, it would be nice if plugins could add tagz functions, i would like regexp in it

[SacRat]

Well, let me try to tell you something else I think about Fooba and usability in general.

First of all, high quality interface should be intuitive in use:
1. none of control elements can be interpreted in two ways
2. finding needful control elements doesn't have to take time
3. user MUST NOT do RTFM to do simplest things, especially if there's no FM
3. one doesn't have to guess, hy program is doing this, not that or why this element is located here.... let's call it obvious behaviour

As you can see yourself, Foobar suffers from many problems above.

Good user interface could allow customization. The problem with FB is that almost any customization needs much enough efforts.

As for TAGz... Now it's possible to write a plugin, which parses readable text and converts it to TAGz markup, but this is the way of creating crutches Peter tries to avoid.

Just logic of programmer usually differs from "mortal's" way of thinking. That's OK, but difficult thing here is trying to imlement interface, which can be easy to use for everyone.

It's possible to do this and I'd liked to pay users' and developer's attention to this issue.

foosion, I'm not asking to convert TAGML to EnglishML. That's nonsence. If you were in Russia, I could show you some samples of such "languages".
IMHO it would be enough for people to get easily readable layout, where:
1. Spaces and Tabs are not meaningful (only defined by TAGz)
2. Function names and syntax are easier to read. For example, why not to make it look, like:
%_ispaused% --> %is_paused%
$caps2(x) --> $cap_leave(x)
$if(a,b,c) --> $if a $then b $else c

It's just a sample, so don't blame me I'm sure, that people here might create a better ML, which could be even easier.

Even simple removing of tabs and spaces would help PL coders a lot!

anza, I have a little programming experience, but I think you're wrong. Hae you ever tried to program complex formatting? Sure, making strings, like ARTIST-TITLE won't need much time, but doing something more complicated is really hard. Many people already mentioned that.

Just TAGz isn't a good markup language. It's good enough for making simple expression, but not for advanced formatting some gus here try to do.

@billcow: have you tied colorer? I'm not sure about unicode, though...
I know some very owerful implementations of this engine.

[anza]

anza, I have a little programming experience, but I think you're wrong. Hae you ever tried to program complex formatting? Sure, making strings, like ARTIST-TITLE won't need much time, but doing something more complicated is really hard. Many people already mentioned that.

Yes I have. I use my own album-formatting, which looks like this.
The screenshot doesn't show much (eg the mode for single files), but check out the formatting here to see what it does.
And yes, I have made it COMPLETELY by myself. Actually, I have never even used (or even read the code of) someone else's formatting for the playlist. A little part of the statusbar code is taken from someone (can't remember) in the times of 0.5 or something.
It's also much newer than the one in formatting page.

This post has been edited by anza: Dec 17 2003, 13:56

[mazy]

well i guess ppl either have natural feeling and talent for programming and stuff like that or not

of course not everyone can code their own string etc., that's why we have formatting string website, forums etc

[Guest_panzemeyer_*]

And yes, I have made it COMPLETELY by myself. Actually, I have never even used (or even read the code of) someone else's formatting for the playlist. A little part of the statusbar code is taken from someone (can't remember) in the times of 0.5 or something. It's also much newer than the one in formatting page.

Doing what you did is very time consuming, and I think not everybody is prepared to spend hours on formatting their audio player playlist.

The problem is partly solved by the ability to copy formatting strings on the web and paste them. Many people simply apply one formatting they found on the web and are happy with it. But when it comes to tuning this formatting to your own tastes (sometimes details matter), you need to get a good knowledge of formatting strings to manage it. And their complexity will deter most users I guess.

Maybe the answer would be adequate information on formatting strings in the html help file (which isn't really helpful as it is now when you want to create advanced formattings). Or adding default playlist formattings that any newbie could simply click on, preview and apply. Just an idea.


As for foobar's interface in general, like the thread starter I think that its lacks (on places) some sense of user-friendliness. Again, most of its shortcomings are really details, but fixing all these details would push foobar a step forward. As some said before, I think the main efforts should be directed on the Preferences GUI, which could display and order info in a more intuitive way.

[anza]

well i guess ppl either have natural feeling and talent for programming and stuff like that or not

of course not everyone can code their own string etc., that's why we have formatting string website, forums etc

Yes, I agree with you. But my point was to show that one CAN do quite complex strings without any knowledge of any kind of programming (well I know HTML a bit, but that doesn't help with TAGZ ).


Actually I just remembered that I have looked at someone's formatting before. It was the first-ever album based formattign (can't remember whose it was, sorry), just to see how it was done. It was quite easy to spot that it was done by checking the track numbers, and I tweaked it a bit, but really soon I decided to write my own formatting from scratch,

[ssamadhi97]

well i guess ppl either have natural feeling and talent for programming and stuff like that or not

Yep.. some intelligence helps as well. :-P