Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Version 0.0.4

Changes:
  • changed apache instructions
  • now the config folder and the web folder are the same
  • some work on gui ratings (read this)
  • removed requirement for figuritas external protocol handler
  • now it uses gnome-open to open video files with the default video player
  • updated to JQuery v1.4.2
  • now requires bash >= 4
  • fixed imdb_grabber not getting the year
  • fixed problem when importing files with single quotes.
  • sumbenu implementation
  • some other changes
Download

Friday, March 5, 2010

Setting Ratings and editing Data

I have been thinking about how to implement this features.

Setting Ratings
With the current design you have to put the mouse over the rating to change it, if the mouse leaves, the rating is reseted and if it is clicked then the changes are confirmed. The problem with this are accidental clicks. I rate my movies carefully and I don't like the idea of accidental clicks changing my ratings. Maybe this is not a problem for most people. I could implement a confirmation dialog but this will become annoying if you want to set ratings for many movies.

Editing Data
Let say that you are viewing the details for some movie and you want to edit the title, the plot or anything else. The obvious approach would be to click on for example the title, a pop-up dialog appears to insert the new title and you can click ok or cancel.

This is ok but wouldn't it be much better to edit the data in-place, without pop-ups. I could make the pop-up behave like a tool-tip to make it less annoying but it seems to me that a pop-up is more complex than necessary, It feels more natural and simpler to edit the data in-place.

Now, the problem with editing the data in-place is how to confirm/cancel the changes. This is similar to the rating problem.

A Solution?
I have come to a possible solution that applies to both problems: The ratings are settled as I said before and the data is edited in-place but the changes ain't saved. When something gets edited the current tab color changes to indicate that there are unsaved changes, clicking on the tab will not show the normal menu but a different menu with two items, the first to save the changes and the second to discard them.

With this method it would be possible to make many changes and save them all at once. This is the way text editors do it, geany or gedit for example, when the document gets changed there is an indication in the current tab.

Comments and suggestions are welcome!