[mythtv] OSD timeout settings

[Michael T. Dean]

On 06/16/2010 11:07 AM, David Engel wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 10:20:46PM -0400, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>    
>> As long as we have the opportunity to do it over, why not do it
>> better this time?
>>      
> It sounds like you're advocating for "short", "medium" and "long"
> settings for those OSD displays that could/should be configurable.  Is
> that right?  If not please clarify.
>    

My real preference is appropriate defaults so that no settings are 
necessary.  With settings, users won't know which displays are affected 
by which settings (and, for that matter, it's possible that the same 
display in different contexts will be affected by different 
settings/timeouts), so it's just confusing.  Or, users will have 
different opinions about which displays should use which timeouts.  (Not 
to mention that I have sent way too many posts to the lists telling 
users what settings their looking for and where to find them--i.e. setup 
is /way/ too confusing because long-time users can't even find the 
settings they want.)

Or, perhaps, something completely different...  For example, maybe any 
user-initiated OSD is displayed for a long time, but 
automatically-displayed OSDs are displayed for a short time.  On short 
OSDs, users can extend the display (with the INFO button or whatever), 
on long OSDs, users can dismiss (with ESCAPE, as always).

IANAUIDE (I Am Not A User Interface Design Expert), so really, I'm 
really not the right person to come up with a better approach.  Getting 
a UI design expert to help would be ideal, but it seems most of them 
gave up on MythTV years ago.  ;)

That said, if we go back to the old approach, I can live with it--as 
long as it's applied consistently and universally.

Basically, I'd like to take the opportunity to rethink old behaviors and 
improve.  Unfortunately, it seems that inertia may make major 
improvements impossible.  I fully admit that I don't have a plan.  I 
don't really care that much about this particular issue (other than 
insisting that it's at least a complete implementation unlike what we 
had before).  So, I'll leave it up to others.

Mike