Some UI observations - part 1

[nobodyspecial]

Hi - I know this stuff is trivial - and I don't want to appear pedantic (please don't flame me!) - but just wanted to make a note for someone at FT to read...

The choice of "Group Boxes" or "Tabbed" items..

Click "Settings | Spam Tools"

1) Click Filters - the details area uses a Group Box with the title "Filters" - because there is only one choice - OK

2) Click Origin of Spam - the details area uses 2 tabs ("Origin of Spam Servers" and "Options") because there are 2 choices - OK

3) Click Learning Settings - the details area uses a Group Box - because again there is only one choice - OK

now, click "Friends List" - the details area uses a tab - but there is only one choice - should this use a Group Box?

same for "Blacklist"

[Michael]

This will be due to some earlier work on the lists where there was an actual options tab as well. We kept the tab structure just in case we need it sometime in the future. You're right, it does looks a bit out of place, we'll see about getting rid of it until we need it again.

[stan_qaz]

Any thoughts on getting back the expire timers that were going to be on the tabs instead of removing the tab? Folks doing a lot of blacklisting really need the timers to be available to keep their list cleaned up as do folks that use the friends list as a temporary thing replacing any long-term entries with a Friends filter.

timers-1.png (7.63 KiB) Viewed 6277 times

It would be really nice if we could also see the expire or last-hit dates in the UI as well, this was an often requested option in v5 and v6.

[Michael]

Actually, thanks Stan, you've just reminded me that we are actually working on the list expiry stuff at the moment, so it does look like we'll have some options for the friends and blacklists. We'll be adding in functionality to expire list entries by count or days, so we may well be bringing in the options tab. We did some testing with an unnecessarily long blacklist (about 180 000 entries) and it ran like a turtle, so an expiry system is definitely gonna speed things up for those who use the lists heavily.

[mcullet]

Hi - I know this stuff is trivial - and I don't want to appear pedantic (please don't flame me!) - but just wanted to make a note for someone at FT to read...[snip]

Good post Robot Overlord.

This stuff is far from trivial - it's critical that we get qualified (examples / reasons) feedback to gauge how it's going. I don't see any reason for anyone to flame another over reasoned (non-personal) feedback. No offence to anyone, but this is software - not religion or politics. It must work well - which by necessity means users need to be able to use it fairly easily as a minimum requirement. "Easily" - depends upon the program in question. No graphics editing program is easy for me because I am entirely graphics illiterate.

Put bluntly, no matter how well a program might perform its task - it's useless unless users can use it easily. People might be perfectly happy with WORD2007 - 2010 UI - but I hate it because I waste lots of time fudding around looking for stuff that is not where I expect it to be. Sure, I'll get used to it eventually - but then MS went and altered what you get ask for help ... I gave a specific personal example (different for others) because it includes an adverse emotional reaction: frustration / anger.

I'm building up my own list - so if nothing else, you have a flame buddy.

That said - like most projects, MWP2010 (probably?) uses commercially available third party toolkits - for grids and so on. It's common practice and makes good sense: why reinvent the wheel? Some toolkits are 'better' than others - reasons range from technical to cosmetics to support and so on. So there may be very valid reasons which limit what Firetrust can do about our feedback. I chose to continue to provide the feedback - offer suggestions / alternatives. Otherwise there is a huge reality gap ... never a good thing IMHO.

[stan_qaz]

If I'm reading things right the friends and blacklists are just fed to the regex engine for matching, if that is correct have you looked at giving us a regex mode for them instead of just the wildcards? I haven't tried abusing the database or the UI by poking in regex stuff to see what happens but I've been tempted.

[Michael]

Yep, currently the list stuff is just fed into the regex. I don't think there's any plans at this time to support regex in the friends list, I guess we're leaving that to the filters for now. You never know though, maybe throw it up on suggest and see how it goes.