News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999). Parent comment

Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by DonHopkins on Monday October 15, 2018 @12:58PM (#18221423)
To their credit, WinAmp and QuickTime (or any other known video player) never rotated the zoom widget with the video rotation, the lower end of which was so small it was unusable at any scale, and the entirety of which was unusable at any non-normal rotation or reflection.

https://imgur.com/gallery/g0acV

That's right: the mouse target is the outlined region whose width (and thus usability) diminishes to zero towards one end. It's the most Fitts' Law Hostile user interface I've ever seen, AND it rotates sideways and upside down with the video, AND the mouse tracking doesn't work at all in 3 out of 4 rotations (or reflection), only when it's non-rotated and non-reflected: they didn't bother to transform the mouse event coordinates, just the video-resolution user interface drawing!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Don't even get me started about "interlaying" the user interface INTO the video, so it looks jaggy with unreadable text, instead of "overlaying" the user interface at full screen resolution. Just look at those blocky letters "VLC ZOOM HIDE", and the ferocious jaggies on the diminishing zoom slider curve!

It's not even worth fixing any of those particular bugs in the zoom interface, because the entire concept of "interlaying" the user interface into the video is fatally flawed.

All that code needs to be printed out and burned, and VLC's entire user interface needs to be completely rearchitected from scratch by designers who know and respect Fitts' Law, so it works consistently across all platforms at all resolutions and rotations (and doesn't suck, while they're at it).

But that's not what the VLC developers want to acknowledge or work on. They're more interested in supporting the latest fashionable Anime format.

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/2.1.5.html

>FOR ANIME FANS

>New 6.1 downmixer to 5.1 and Stereo from MKV/Flac 6.1. Correct YUV->RGB color matrix in the OpenGL shaders. Improved MKV support for seeking, and resiliancy. Editions support in MKV. Better subtitles and metadata support from MKV. Various ASS subtitles improvements.

But nothing for us "usability fans".

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by enticeing on Monday October 15, 2018 @02:34PM (#18222352)
I'm not sure why you take such issue with the fact that they added new features "FOR ANIME FANS". Not every foss project is going to focus its resources where you think they should be focused. You might as well say "FOR MOBILE" and print out that entire section because it's equally not focused towards the desktop ui improvements you think are necessary. EDIT: Typo in necessary
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by DonHopkins on Monday October 15, 2018 @05:22PM (#18223897)
Not just added, but headlined in their release announcement. Yet there was no "FOR USABILITY" section, and more than three years later, VLC 3.0.4 STILL has the same constellations of bugs and egregious usability issues.

I would also hazard a guess the mobile user is larger than the anime user base, and they're just as concerned with usability as the desktop users.

Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?

Is it just you who feels this way, or can you point me towards some evidence of that, please? Because if you read the VLC bug reports and discussion group, and even this thread, you can see that there are a lot of people who agree with me that VLC needs to focus more on usability. Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by bArray on Monday October 15, 2018 @11:48PM (#18226286)
>Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who believe that VLC needs to focus on anime more than usability?

Either the Anime audience is better at filing bugs and chasing the up, or the developers favoured those tasks for some reason. Perhaps the UI guy is really slow or just missing entirely.

>Where are all these anime fans demanding VLC focus less on usability and more on supporting their anime fetish?

There aren't any. It's clearly not a trade-off on developer time. For an open source project, people work on what interests them the most.

Specifically in regards to "anime fetish" - who actually cares? What difference does it make if it is an Anime crowd, people who like watching 8k raw footage, people who want to watch 3D films or whatever. What does the specific reason for a video format being worked on bring to the table, other than the fact you clearly don't like it?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by DonHopkins on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @08:40AM (#18228844)
I don't dislike a video format. I dislike terrible usability, and arrogant cliquish developers who refuse to even acknowledge there is a problem: not just fail to focus on it, but actually make ridiculous flippant insincere arguments that it's not a problem, in their consistent efforts to brush off repeated valid bugs reports that they get frequently from many different users, and steadfastly refuse to do anything about every single time.

And it's not a matter of anime fans being better at filing bugs. As I said, I filed some very detailed bugs, with step-by-step instructions to prove there was a problem, and they were flippantly dismissed and ignored.

At least Apple had the decency to acknowledge the universally held opinion that the QuickTime 4.0 player SUCKED, and they fixed.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Interface Hall of Shame – QuickTime 4.0 Player (1999) by duskwuff on Monday October 15, 2018 @06:55PM (#18224722)
Developers are not interchangeable, especially on open-source projects. The group of people who contribute their time to work on core multimedia features (like audio mixing or OpenGL shaders) has almost no overlap with the group of people who will work on UI/UX.
[ Parent | on HN ]