[toolpunk]

I would love to see all spin controls replaced by selection dialogs or dropdowns as they leave you clueless about what options you have. So you end up cycling through a potentially long list hoping to find a setting you like. They basically prevent you from making a quick decision.

Spinners are useful for numeric inputs, but if I'm not mistaken XBMC / Kodi uses sliders for those, which makes me believe changing the spin control's behavior shouldn't break existing functionality.

[un1versal]

You mean [Feature Request] Replace All Spin Controls

Speaking of removal the duplicate entries from such lists like resolution one has double 1920x1080 you have no idea if that is for progressive or interlaced anyway if its not duplicates then duplicate entries should be distinguished from the others.

[jjd-uk]

I think this was under consideration. When audio settings were redone between Frodo & Gotham exactly this point was made, hence why Audio Device selection is a list now and not a spinner as previously.

I think at the moment changes are only being made as setting areas are updated or revisited, so to speed it up it needs someone to through all the dialogs and make the change everywhere, however I've not seen anything to suggest anyone on the Team has the time or motivation to do this at the moment, so it would probably have to come from the community.

[un1versal]

If I had the the necessary skills it would be already done.

[toolpunk]

My C++ skills are a little rusty, but I think I should be able to do this. It's perhaps a little time consuming but it should be a rather easy copy & paste job.

[Ned Scott]

I hate the way about 80% (probably more) of the spin controls in XBMC/Kodi are used. A list or dropdown menu would be much better in those cases.

[Montellese]

The problem right now with replacing spinners with the selection dialog is that the selection dialog does not scale to the number of options so if you have a setting with 3 options and you use the selection dialog you get a huge dialog with 3 small options at the top and the rest of the dialog is a huge waste of empty space.

Anything that is part of the settings window in XBMC (i.e. what you see under System --> Settings but not e.g. the video or audio playback settings when playing a video) can easily be adjusted in settings.xml by changing the control type from "spinner" to "list" so it doesn't even need C++ skills. But I'm against such a change for settings with a very limited number of options due to the above reason. It works perfectly fine for things like language etc where there are a ton of options though.

[toolpunk]

Could you elaborate on why you think it's a waste of space for short lists?

You've located a setting of interest and might want to change it. You however have no clue what the options are and start cycling through them. Let's call them A,B,C and D. After finding out about all of them, that is when you return to A, you decide that C is pretty much the best of the bunch and need two additional clicks to get back there. So short lists which fit on a single page would actually benefit the most from this change.

While you're dealing with the configuration of a specific setting the other settings aren't of much interest, so they don't need to be visible. If anything they might distract you from the task at hand, which is why I don't think it's waste of space at all.

[un1versal]

I think he means the size of the selection dialog/list is the same size weather there's 200 options or 2 in which the one with 2 option you see 90% empty space.

while making all lists show a dialog for selection instead of a spinner is pure xml change, making that dialog dynamic size is not a clear cut change.

So back to square one.

[phil65]

something similar should be done for slidercontrols, esp when they are two-sided (like in filter dialog). they are hard to use and do not allow a consistent navigation behaviour because they take onleft/onright actions.
and what about taking context menu instead of DialogSelect? that menu does not have that "empty space" problem. (would need c++ work though)

[toolpunk]

I understand that often times there would be empty space, but I fail to comprehend why this is inherently a bad thing. As I illustrated it comes with virtually zero downsides and a couple of significant benefits from a user experience perspective.

Still I agree the size should be dynamic and adjustable by the skinner. After all I do not want to limit creativity.

EDIT
@phil65
Yes, I agree slider controls feel weird in many places. They should probably be spinners instead. They make a lot of sense to arbitrarily increase or decrease numeric values. Sliders are a more natural choice if you have to balance a setting between two fixed values.

[Montellese]

IIRC context menu doesn't work either because

• it doesn't allow multi-selection
  
• it simply grows with every additional item and can get bigger than the screen size and you end up not seeing all the options
  

so as you can see from a GUI point of view the code is simply not ready to handle this properly.

Yeah the sliders aren't ideal either but if you want range selection it's the best we can do. Using a list of choices is simply not intuitive for selecting a range (at least that's what I thought when I tried it when I implemented the filter dialog).

[Montellese]

I understand that often times there would be empty space, but I fail to comprehend why this is inherently a bad thing. As I illustrated it comes with virtually zero downsides and a couple of significant benefits from a user experience perspective.

Well I simply think that something like

looks crappy so IMO until that dialog can auto-resize with the number of items (and to a maximum size) you have the downside of a bad looking dialog. Every time I open a selection dialog with very few items I hate the way it looks.

EDIT
@phil65
Yes, I agree slider controls feel weird in many places. They should probably be spinners instead. They make a lot of sense to arbitrarily increase or decrease numeric values. Sliders are a more natural choice if you have to balance a setting between two fixed values.

AFAIK most of the sliders we use are range selections which you can't do with a spinner

[toolpunk]

I completely agree with that. The dialog should auto-resize unless requested otherwise by the skin. If I wanted a centered full screen dialog that should be possible too.

[Ned Scott]

I'd rather live with the occasional wasted space than have to scroll through 20 options with spin control. The lesser of two evils, ya know.