by Beece » Sat Feb 25, 2017 10:02 am
After playing with MM5 for awhile now and trying to acclimatize myself to the changes I'm starting to get a feel for how you'd like it to be used. The new panel format that works well both with a touchscreen and a mouse is definitely more modern. Took me a while to embrace it but I'm getting there now.
Overall comment: I'm running MM5 with a house full of chromecasts, and with that setup it becomes a multimedia beast. It actually has more functionality than a Sonos. I'd consider really embracing this type of use and coming out with a native phone/tablet app (andriod and ios) that allows for remote control within the same UI framework as what you've started. Running your tiled main window on a touchscreen would be a pretty user pleasing interface for a whole house system. In any case, I like what you've now that I'm able to get over the loss of the old interface - and I'd do everything I can to streamline the chromecast incorporation. For example, allow it to play different media to different chromecasts at the same time, remote volume control for those devices, trying to add a Google Home app, etc.
Request: Change the way you create artist art on the main tile display. Those of us with thousands of artists need a more efficient way to add artist art to the main page. The "find image" function is pretty unreliable as it often tags with random images of other items with the same name, or other artists, and manually clicking "find image" for 7,000 artists is pretty time consuming. What if the default was just to tag the artist art with the first found album art in the artist directory? At least you'd have a good starting place then.
Finally, I'd strongly echo what others have said - losing the sub nodes on the left hand tree is pretty crippling with large collections. Being able to click on "artist" on the tree and get the sublist of all the artists is far far easier than negotiating all the tiles. I understand it can be an add on this this one feels like something that should be in the base program if you don't want to frustrate a large number of users. Most users don't add scripts and need it to work right out of the box.
After playing with MM5 for awhile now and trying to acclimatize myself to the changes I'm starting to get a feel for how you'd like it to be used. The new panel format that works well both with a touchscreen and a mouse is definitely more modern. Took me a while to embrace it but I'm getting there now.
Overall comment: I'm running MM5 with a house full of chromecasts, and with that setup it becomes a multimedia beast. It actually has more functionality than a Sonos. I'd consider really embracing this type of use and coming out with a native phone/tablet app (andriod and ios) that allows for remote control within the same UI framework as what you've started. Running your tiled main window on a touchscreen would be a pretty user pleasing interface for a whole house system. In any case, I like what you've now that I'm able to get over the loss of the old interface - and I'd do everything I can to streamline the chromecast incorporation. For example, allow it to play different media to different chromecasts at the same time, remote volume control for those devices, trying to add a Google Home app, etc.
Request: Change the way you create artist art on the main tile display. Those of us with thousands of artists need a more efficient way to add artist art to the main page. The "find image" function is pretty unreliable as it often tags with random images of other items with the same name, or other artists, and manually clicking "find image" for 7,000 artists is pretty time consuming. What if the default was just to tag the artist art with the first found album art in the artist directory? At least you'd have a good starting place then.
Finally, I'd strongly echo what others have said - losing the sub nodes on the left hand tree is pretty crippling with large collections. Being able to click on "artist" on the tree and get the sublist of all the artists is far far easier than negotiating all the tiles. I understand it can be an add on this this one feels like something that should be in the base program if you don't want to frustrate a large number of users. Most users don't add scripts and need it to work right out of the box.
