SageMC settings menu suggestions

[tchapin]

Hi there. I love SageMC; it's what makes Sage usable!

I love the fact that the main menus are reconfigurable. However, the settings menus for SageMC (and the regular Sage options, but I'll bring that up in the other subforum) could be optimized a bit more.

There are two issues that I think could be addressed. 1) make it clear which items effect only the device that you're watching from (and perhaps that's all of them in SageMC?) 2) reorder the menus to make it easier to find stuff

Some questions:
1. Are STVis used for SageMC?
2. I've been reading these forums for a while and still am confused between STVs and STVis. What's the difference?

On the main SageMC settings page, the items should be reordered:

SageMC settings
SageTV setttings (Detailed Setup is too vague)
Channel Setup
Parental Controls
Load STV
Select SageMC Theme
Import STVi

(I'm not so sure about these last three. I feel like they should fall under SageMC settings)

Also, this may be a bug. If I go into SageMC settings, select main, then Global UI options, then click the "back" button, it takes me to the main Settings page, not the SageMC settings page. The same thing happens from Screen Specific options.

What's the difference between enhancements and global UI options? I think that distinction always trips me up. To me, the items listed under enhancements should be spread out through the screen specific options, right? Album art options should go under "music". Disk bar should go under "main menu", as should weather.

You know, I've also never been sure what a .my file is. Do people still use them? What are they? How are they created?

I've noticed that when I go into a settings submenu, I'm not always placed at the top of the list (i.e. the scrollbar will be at the bottom most position).

Also, there are some menus that have a scrollbar that don't seem to need it, suck as the main menu screen options. All of the options fit on the screen at one time, yet a scrollbar is showing and indicates that there are more options.

Another spacing / scrolling niggle: On the main settings screen, the info box has to be scrolled. There're no real affordances that it's a selectable item though, I just notice that the frame around the items goes below the screen. There's a lot of space between the items; could that be tightened up?

Some of the options menus are very long, due to having several items that relate to the same thing. I would collapse those into a sub menu. For example the watched bar & icon settings. There are four of them in the My TV screen options menu. I would collapse them into one "watched bar & icons" sub menu.

Yes, you end up creating more small sub menus, but it becomes easier to find the things you want, since the actual menus become shorter. Part of the problem is that the lists are long and the menu items are not presented in any sort of order (that I can tell). If the menu items were all things that users would know the exact names for (like selecting from a list of flavors), then alphabetical would make sense. However, I'm not sure that it would in this case due to the somewhat arbitrary-seeming names of each of the menu items. I'm not saying that arbitrary is bad, it's just the nature of the beast since these are not things that we can easily point at and name.

SageMC options
-----------------
Global UI options
- Behavior
- Display
- Animation
Screen Specific options
Recording
Paths
External Programs
Extras
Backup settings
- save options
- load options

Also, the descriptions for some of the items could be improved. For example (I can't find it at the moment) there's the conflict resolution item where the description says basically" have conflict resolution work like default STV". Well, what's the alternative? No conflict resolution? What are the differences?

I'm happy to help out with writing more of the explanatory texts, as well as put more thought into how the menus should be laid out.

However, what do people think about this?

[toricred]

STVi's are plugins that add functionality. STV's are complete user interfaces.

The SageMC interface uses STVi's, just ones that have the xml extension rather than stvi. They must also be designed for MC. Some are designed to work with both.

[tchapin]

Thanks for the info.