2013-12-01, 13:01
Running rbej's OE Gotham build on RPi.
I was tempted to post this as a bug as it has such a serious effect on usability but I figured it might be considered a Feature Request by some people.
I've noticed doing some tasks, there's a distinct lack of feedback leaving the user not sure if anything's happening. For instance, updating/Force Refreshing a couple of repos it just said "Updating 0%" and stayed like that until, a minute or so later, it popped up a "Addon downloaded" or "Working" message and then I could see it was doing something. If I didn't have the debug overlay showing that the CPU usage was going up and down, I wouldn't have known whether it was doing anything or if it was frozen.
I think installing new addons shows the same behaviour from my recollection of doing so earlier. Certainly "Install from a zip file" does, as I've just been installing xtv-SAF skin and after about 10s, the highlight re-appears on that menu item again, so it's obviously been doing some processing during this time but then it takes about another 2 minutes with no indication that it's doing anything before "Would you like to switch to this skin" appears. This is obviously very confusing for users and when I was talking my brother through doing it earlier, he said nothing happened after he selected the zip file, which is true from the user's point of view as he/she has no idea if XBMC is doing something hidden in the background and so selected it again. This didn't seem to have a negative effect luckily and eventually the skin finished installing (maybe selecting it a second time re-started the install or maybe it was just ignored).
Testing myself, I found that if I go into Available Updates and back out, the menu now shows an entry for "Currently downloading" but going into that it's empty. If I go to Enabled Addons and select Skins, I see a progress % next to xtv-SAF but I don't know if this updates as it was at 93% when I got there and it didn't change until it finished installing. As it appears to be registering the install progress somewhere, this just needs to be shown on the main Addons menu so that users know something is happening.
Some plugins have this problem as well, particularly when first opening them and selecting a stream. I'm running at stock clocks so obviously when overclocked things will go a bit faster but there shouldn't be a delay of even 5s before XBMC notifies the user that it's received the command and is starting to do something. Even if it adds 1s to the time it takes to complete the task to popup a message as soon as the task starts, it's better than leaving the user unsure if anything's happening. Whether the plugins are to blame here or not I don't know but I suspect not, as the addons screen is a core part of XBMC and that has the same problem.
Another place this happens is when shutting down, where there's no acknowledgement of the command givien until after several seconds when it starts doing stuff. All it needs is a simple "XBMC is shutting down" to be put up as soon as the process starts and then it's much more user-friendly.
I posted about this here http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=169680 quite a while ago but didn't get any response, so I guess it got missed there and hopefully posting here will get more attention.
I was tempted to post this as a bug as it has such a serious effect on usability but I figured it might be considered a Feature Request by some people.
I've noticed doing some tasks, there's a distinct lack of feedback leaving the user not sure if anything's happening. For instance, updating/Force Refreshing a couple of repos it just said "Updating 0%" and stayed like that until, a minute or so later, it popped up a "Addon downloaded" or "Working" message and then I could see it was doing something. If I didn't have the debug overlay showing that the CPU usage was going up and down, I wouldn't have known whether it was doing anything or if it was frozen.
I think installing new addons shows the same behaviour from my recollection of doing so earlier. Certainly "Install from a zip file" does, as I've just been installing xtv-SAF skin and after about 10s, the highlight re-appears on that menu item again, so it's obviously been doing some processing during this time but then it takes about another 2 minutes with no indication that it's doing anything before "Would you like to switch to this skin" appears. This is obviously very confusing for users and when I was talking my brother through doing it earlier, he said nothing happened after he selected the zip file, which is true from the user's point of view as he/she has no idea if XBMC is doing something hidden in the background and so selected it again. This didn't seem to have a negative effect luckily and eventually the skin finished installing (maybe selecting it a second time re-started the install or maybe it was just ignored).
Testing myself, I found that if I go into Available Updates and back out, the menu now shows an entry for "Currently downloading" but going into that it's empty. If I go to Enabled Addons and select Skins, I see a progress % next to xtv-SAF but I don't know if this updates as it was at 93% when I got there and it didn't change until it finished installing. As it appears to be registering the install progress somewhere, this just needs to be shown on the main Addons menu so that users know something is happening.
Some plugins have this problem as well, particularly when first opening them and selecting a stream. I'm running at stock clocks so obviously when overclocked things will go a bit faster but there shouldn't be a delay of even 5s before XBMC notifies the user that it's received the command and is starting to do something. Even if it adds 1s to the time it takes to complete the task to popup a message as soon as the task starts, it's better than leaving the user unsure if anything's happening. Whether the plugins are to blame here or not I don't know but I suspect not, as the addons screen is a core part of XBMC and that has the same problem.
Another place this happens is when shutting down, where there's no acknowledgement of the command givien until after several seconds when it starts doing stuff. All it needs is a simple "XBMC is shutting down" to be put up as soon as the process starts and then it's much more user-friendly.
I posted about this here http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=169680 quite a while ago but didn't get any response, so I guess it got missed there and hopefully posting here will get more attention.