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Originally Posted by pshute
I'm testing v 0.4.2. Here are my initial comments:
- a help option might be good to get people going. Mention things like shortcut keys and any other common questions.
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Yes, I think bbTracker is slowly getting complex enough for this. This is also an excellent way for anyone wanting to contribut, who thought "What can I do? I can't do any programming". Programmers are notoriously bad at writing documentation (possibly because you just can't compile it and check if it's correct
), so I'd appreciate any help I could get here.
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- when I press the Back key when I'm in Options, it should really prompt before discarding any changes.
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hm ... probably a good idea
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- not sure of the value of this, but could you display the current direction to the nearest 0.5 degrees instead of the nearest degree?
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I don't know if I get
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- when quitting from the program, it asks "Cancel/Quit?". The default is Cancel, but normally I'd want to Quit. Could you change the default? Most other Blackberry programs would offer the options Yes or No, and I would be able to press Y or N. It would be nice to be standard.
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I probably could change the default. The problem is, that the escape key activates it and <Escape><Scrollbutton> is a combination that can easily be pressed accidentally.
The reason I'd like to avoid "YES/NO" is that those are generic answers where you have to read the question to know what they mean and one major rule of user interface design is "Users don't read message boxes" or more broadly: "Users don't read"
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- while tracking, the display shows, E, N, speed, direction, height, time since start, total distance so far and tracking point number. While playing back, it's the same, but the distance is always the total. Could you display the distance to that point *and* the total?
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I've thought about that. The distance is currently the only display that always displays the total. I'm probably switching that for 0.5.0. The total distance will be shown on the status screen.
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- The change notes say "add shortcuts to jump to first ('7','s') and last ('9','e') track point". On an 8800, 2 is on the E key, and 4 is on the S key.
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That means that the keys '7' and 's' are valid shurtcuts. For the 8800 you'll probably always use 's', as you'll have to press <Alt><y> (or <Alt><z> for Querty BBs) to push '7'. The '7' and '9' shortcuts are for 8100 and other mobile phones without a full keyboard.
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- I'd like the option to display a previous track while recording a new one. This is so that I can either follow a previous path, or find my way back to the start. I guess you'd need another colour on there to distinguish the two tracks.
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That's a good idea and shouldn't be too hard to implement. But since 0.5.0 is already late and full of new stuff, it'll have to way a bit longer.
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- It might be useful to be able to load a track, then continue tracking on it. This would be useful on multi-day trips, where you might need to close the application overnight, but continue the next day.
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In my opinion each day would be a seperate track, wouldn't it? I'm not convinced that this is a necessary feature (the problem with features is that once you've got too many a program becomes unusable).
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Other than that, it looks very good. (It's not spyware is it?)
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I'm happy you like it. Of course it's not spyware (or any kind of malware). You don't even have to trust me on this, you can
look at the source code and see for yourself. Currently bbTracker doesn't ever make any data connections at all. It stays totally local to your BlackBerry.
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- When switching between views, the view title remains visible for 5 seconds. It often obscures information under it. I realise this is to save screen space - could you make that delay shorter?
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Yes, I'm not too happy with that myself. I'll probably make the delay shorter and possible place the title in the top right corner, where it obscures less information.
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- When scrolling between tracking points in the views that support this, I need to scroll the ball (8800) sideways to go from point to point. Scrolling up or down jumps by 10 points. That's a good feature, but what happens is that as I scroll sideways, occasionally the ball moves up or down just enough to make it jump. Is it possible to disable the jumping if the ball is moving sideways at the same time?
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The program doesn't see the track ball, but just a series of key presses "Left, Left, Left, Left, Up, Left, Left, ...". I might filter out keypresses that are different from those sent only milliseconds before another ... I'll have to experiment with this wether it's good or it makes the application feel clumsy (such filtering can go wrong).
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- Where there are shortcuts available for menu items, could you display them in the menu?
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Good idea... I'll see what I can do.
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- Where there are shortcuts, but no menu items (e.g. E and S) could you add menu items? These last two suggestions are to help people learn the program faster.
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This might be a good idea, but I probably wont add <up>, <down>, <left>, <right> as that would fill the menu with items that noone will want to activate via the menu.
Thanks a lot for your suggestions, those help bbTracker get better!
I'll probably add most of them to the
issue tracking system, where you can follow their state (you could also add
some yourself if you wanted).