Thread: [Maemo 4] Podcasting: gPodder for Maemo 4 (N800, N810)
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thp is offline thp
2009-09-22 , 13:11
Posts: 1,391 | Thanked: 4,272 times | Joined on Sep 2007 @ Vienna, Austria
#358
Originally Posted by vjones777 View Post
I found the views menus have some issues.
The 'Show Deleted' actually showed ALL of the episodes, not just the deleted episodes. Similarly the 'Show All' seems to show all EXCEPT deleted.
Yep, that's how it works. This was also discussed throughly in the gPodder bug tracker. We settled with this. If you have a better menu structure, please say so (while keeping the labels reasonably short).

The idea for "Show all" is that this is the default, and deleted episodes should really be deleted. "Show deleted" then will show the deleted episodes, too (in addition to "all"). From a code perspective, "show deleted" is "no filter", "show all" is "hide deleted", etc.. You might have noticed that what ever the filter is, "new" episodes are always shown, even in the "unplayed" setting.

For Maemo 5, this is going to be even more radical, as the radio buttons (example screenshot) do not allow for any more text, so it is most likely going to be "Deleted | All | Downloaded" there :/

Again, anything that has short text and makes more sense is gladly accepted Good UI design is hard.

The functionality is fine once I got used to it, I just think the descriptions are misleading/confusing. Can I suggest renaming:
'Show all episodes' to 'Hide deleted episodes' and
'Show deleted' to 'Show all episodes' .
See above for the details, especially the link to the bug report with the discussion on this. Also, "Hide deleted" does not fit in the Fremantle UI (but of course that's less important for the Maemo 4 UI).

The 'Downloaded episodes' view shows Downloaded AND New. I can see this would be a useful view when selecting episodes to download but the name is confusing as I expected just a list of podcasts I could play. Perhaps this could be renamed to 'Current episodes' or just 'New and downloaded episodes'
Please also add a view that does show just the episodes that have been downloaded and are present – that would be useful when listening to episodes and using gpodder to select them.
For this special use case, we're currently thinking of implementing a "All podcasts" view (that will have said "unplayed only" feature) or a "search episodes" dialog that will also allow you to have a filter for unplayed episodes (and also allow you to sort by date, etc..). The discussion for this happens here, so you might read the current discussion and add your comments there, that would be helpful and help shape this feature for future versions.

The 'Unplayed Episodes' view is almost identical to the 'Downloaded episodes' view. The only difference I could see is that episodes marked 'prohibit deletion' are not shown. Otherwise, the downloaded (played, unplayed, deleted in other apps) and new episodes are shown in both views.
Unplayed episodes hides podcasts and episodes that have been played from within gPodder (and have their "new" mark removed). It can be used as a play queue, but this only works if "new" episodes are downloaded or marked as old ("new" episodes are always shown).

'Hide podcasts without episodes' seems to have a bug. I expected it to hide podcasts in the left pane which do not have any downloaded episodes (ones without a count number in the left pane). I assume the name is misleading as I can't imagine anyone would produce a podcast feed that does not have any episodes at all.
The "hide podcasts without episodes" hides all podcasts that do now show any episodes in the current view (so it depends on the setting of the options). Again, the title is kept short, a better title would be "Hide podcasts that will not show any episodes in the episode list with the current filter settings", but that does not fit the screen.

Remove episodes. I think this should preselect episodes previously deleted outside gpodder eg those deleted with file manager. These seem to be marked as a music note with a hollow small X.
Please file this as a feature request on bugs.maemo.org.

The sub menu is not obvious – it's not intuitive that the options on the title bar change, at least not to me – I've never come across an app that does this. To make it obvious that something's different, you could somehow visually change the title bar eg make the title bar reverse video or put a box around it.
  1. Move the 'Never download' into the submenu and use that freed up button for 'More options', which would then pull down the submenu.
A new window is opened for the episode shownotes dialog and the podcast edit dialog, so I think it can be expected that the menu changes. I agree that some options from the menu could be exposed as buttons in the dialog for easier access. Feel free to come up with a list of most-used items and I can put these in the dialog.

  1. Make a long press on an episode pop-up the submenu. I know the options apply to the whole list and not just the selected item, but that should be obvious and the interface would be more consistent with other screens.
Pressing once on an episode already brings up the submenu for this episodes with all options - or do you mean download-specific options like "Pause"/"Resume"?

Thanks for your feedback and attention to detail, it's really appreciated
 

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