Hi,
Sorry to answer so late, I had lots of stuff to do @ work.
Thank a lot to themadproducer and knääärz for their awesome mockups !!!!
I have to say I had both ideas (of course it is easy to say after you showed your work
) but that's really true!
And like ESD, I think both design are relevant for their own purpose!
Here are my design ideas:
- giving a name to the backup: as you may have noticed (or not) I have modified the rate bar at the bottom of the screen. It has now a little cross and doesn't disappear after 10 seconds. You need to click the little cross. Moreover the button is now more obvious. I did that because I want to use it to much more things than just rating. I think it s a nice design pattern, you can ignore it, you can close it, or you can use it without being interrupted in your flow. With a dialog you are stopped, you need to click cancel to go through or yes or .... When I rewrote this bar, I made it easy to inject a view or change the purpose of the button. So my idea is just to make this bar appear when someone launch a backup, and have an edit box inside to enter the name of the backup. If you enter nothing, it will work too. I prefer that solution to the one to include the name field inside the main backup box as it is done in the mockup because the backup box is not just a backup box, it is a box to display the result of any command. It can be installing a beta, or xdelta, or installing the tools... I want to make this box consistent across the application. No user interaction in this box. So at the end there will be three zones over the list of backups : at the top of the main window (just under the bar where there is written "Backup", "Setting"...) are displayed some contextual messages for a few seconds -> gives information + no user interaction at all, in the middle of the screen there is the launch script box (like launch backup...) -> may have limited user interaction (stop hide start...), and finally bottom of the screen where there is the rate bar (which is not anymore only for the rating btw), where you can enter the name of the backup, and may be other things I have not yet think about.
- editing information is different. and as knääärz, I think it needs to appear only when needed and be hided most of the time. The idea of the bottom bar is good, but I have already a zone for that: the sliding menu which appears when you click an item in the list view. As you have noticed, when you click on a backup there is no more dialog, instead the menu slides and some buttons appear. To keep the experience consistent I am thinking to put the edit buttons in this zone. The main advantage over the bottom bar as it appears in the mockup is that the bottom bar needs a long click to be discovered. Most of the user will never see it. I mean as a user I would not try to long click just to check if something happens. I may long click an item in a file explorer because it s intuitive, I know there is an equivalent to right click in a file explorer, but in OB I am not sure it is intuitive to try the long click. So, IMO, sliding menu is a better option: new user won't see it directly, you need to open an item, so the function is kind of hided by default, and every one can discover it really easily. The experience of the sliding menu exists in the other parts of the application which is good.
What do you think about that ?
BTW, the fix I made for the CWM + Android 4.2.2 have created many new issues, so I will probably spend my week end on these bugs instead of implementing the Backup Manager layer ... but for sure I will do it because that's the most requested features by the users on the moderator page.
Regards