A proposed new main-screen GUI for uT 1.6.x . What do YOU think ?

[Arqentus]

That's exactly what I see -- if someone doesn't like a particular feature, they toss the term "bloated" around. lol that's one very subjective word then. Since that seems to be the case, people shouldn't be using that word around all over the place. Having an arbitrary definition means that the word has absolutely NO meaning; after all, I can say bloated means feature parity with Azureus. Since µTorrent won't ever become Azureus or carry the ridiculous number of features or options that it has, µTorrent can never become bloated. Would I really say that? Never, because there is a limit. This feature just doesn't reach that limit.

General rule number one. When a program goes "newbie friendly", it tends to go "newbie friendly" again, and again, and again. Now, its the interface, next is the options ( aka, hiding everything ), next is the default startup, next is the way saving is handled. Again, and again.

The reason why people complain about this is:

a) people do NOT like change. Especially when its in the name of "newbie friendly".

Those "newbie friendly" features tend to end up breaking the habits of a program.

Seen it to many times with simple but very functional programs. They used to be simple, but great. All the options you needed. Then they decided to cash in for the "newbie friendly" market. O yea ... i don't use any of them anymore.

"newbie friendly" is just another term for restricting the crap out of everything in the system. And in the end, all the advanced options become buried so deep in the program, you spend 10 min just to configure a program AWAY from the "newbie friendly" interface, hidden options etc.

And the term "bloated" is very correct. It always starts small. A wizard, here, a few changes there, and in the end, the program is slow, bugged, or both. Again, seen it with to many programs, all in the progress of "newbie friendly".

Then comes another problem. Feature (a) is added to the "newbie friendly" interface, but feature (a) is left out of interface b. Forgotten. In the end you develop, not one program, but one program, with 2 subprograms. Slowing down development, and introducing more bugs. I program websites ( php, perl etc ), programs etc. And after these years, if there is one lesson to be taken to the hart. Is the KISS principle. KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPIT.

The more you start splitting of features, adding things that are not needed, or not centralising things, you end up in a world of hurt down the road. Hell, the perfect example is a my work. The admin interface of a site is so complex, big, because they wanted to make it user friendly, that the code is a few megs. I build the same interface at home for a private site, using only 20k of code, and 80% of the user friendly nature. Why? Because i didnt build several wizards ( that nobody used ), layouts, looks etc, then changed it, and changed it, and changed it again all in the name of "newbie friendly".

No, the interface now may not look as pretty as something with a dozen of icons, but its functional, and IF a person has a problem, he / she has access to those stats.

Take a look at the crap that Nero turned out to be. Sure, the old interface is still there... When you remember the correct like, how many god daim times i clicked to wrong link, end ended up with the "newbie friendly" interface. Or all the other bloated crap. Wasting my bloody time. O wait, Ultra Edit looked nice, so i decided to look at the last version. Whoops! Newbified appearance. Looks like crap. Paint Shop Pro, again. All in the name of user friendly.

The argument of "but stick with the old 1.5 version" is not a argument at all. What if 1.7 has a new very needed feature. O wait, that means all the old 1.5 users our shit out of luck. What if 1.5 has a bug, that gets misused, and it gets banned on trackers. Again, the same old syndrome. Forced upgrading, or going to another program.

Now, what about the other argument. The interface looks like FireFox download manager, and everybody uses it. Again, a 0 argument. Everybody uses it because its default. But its missing a shitload of features. Maybe that's why there a few dozen download managers for FF etc ... that have the basic "old" uTorrent look.

And another point. With the "newbie friendly" on everything, the only thing it does, is make stupid people even more stupid. They have no intresse in knowing what goes behind that pretty interface. With a old one, some people are curious about what does all that other data mean in the interface.

If you want to make the interface "newbie friendly", then just disable several columns of data, and drop the stupid idea of icons, and other crap to make it look "nice". We are not a bunch of fancy boys who get off at "ooooo, loooook, how prity". *sigh*

The main reason people use uTorrent is because a) its small, has all the features at out disposable, c) is NOT another fancy torrent client, who puts looks before features.

Take this advice as somebody who has been building websites for years. If you go for the "wow" factor, you end up spending most of your time tweaking the colors, icons, graphics, etc, and now working on the code. A "wow" program ( what this new interface is aiming at ), will only distract people for so long, before they hit the "grrrrr, where is xxx feature, and no yyy feature ( while its there but hidden )". I can't see it, screw this. Next program. That's the attitude of many people.

The core users who are willing to spend a bit of time getting to know a program, are a lot less likely to just leave, with the casual of more so the newbie user is bloody fickle. Those people are not even going to give uTorrent a second look if for instance Windows Vista ships with a torrent client. No mather how pretty you make it look.

Now, hows that for a few arguments

[Alpha-Toxic]

I still think that it should split peers and seeds, have a status icon for dling/seeding/trackerdead/whatever. It'd look better if it was half the vertical size. Too much vertical screen real-estate is pissed away.

+1 for the gui. I like it and the newbies will like it too.

+1 for the things Firon said

from the first pics ludde showed us in IRC it looked like the gui will be too not-informative, but he added more things and its ok now.

right now the only columns that i use and i don't see in the new gui are the "availability" and "ratio". Only the "ratio" will hurt me, as i use it as a second sorting option

I see one great advantage (at least for me) in the new look. I've always hated fixed-width colums. For example if you have a very long .torrent name it will get truncated, even if there is a lot of unused space in the other columns. I think the new look will not hve this problem.

@Arqentus: you're making it sound like it's the end of the world as we know it... I't just a new interface, and it DOES look good. It practicaly gives you the same info as the classic one, it's just giving it in a slightly more polished way

[Muzy]

yes it a good option,

[rafi]

@rafi:

Oh, and can you make it painfully obvious (in the first post) that it'll be optional?

your word is my command... at the time - it seemed not to be... so at least we achieved that it is clearly optional...

[Ultima]

@Arqentus:

Thank you, someone who's finally thought out their arguments =]

Some counterpoints (in no particular order)...

- The interface is NOT about the "wow" factor whatsoever. And it's no prettier either. It's easier to read, and certainly less daunting than a bunch of tabular data.

- It's not bloated. I don't see how this adds to bloat. If that's the case, then the RSS downloader shouldn't have been added, no? It uses more resources than this interface could ever dream of doing.

- The interface isn't a shot at trying to look good, so this can't possibly be ruining µTorrent's appeal to people. Again, it's optional, where's the hurt, when it does NOT impact resource usage either way (enabled or disabled)?

- About when/if it is ever added, it will be optional, so that thing about 1.7 is a non-argument. I only said stick to older versions because people were complaining about new features being added. I don't say that seriously, but as a counterpoint to these pointless complaints. If they really want the new feature that's added, then they shouldn't be complaining about new features being added in the first place.

- About making people dumber... read what I said about inf's comment =]

- A lot of people don't switch the download manager in Firefox because it isn't necessary most of the time, especially with broadband nowadays -- the normal several megabyte files are now almost like the several hundred kilobyte files back in the days. I know that when I did use Firefox before, I never switched the download manager, even though I'm this self-proclaimed power user. If people are newbies, they won't care about the details, like I said in my post about inf's comment, and so they won't have a need for more information.

- If newbie friendliness shouldn't be added at all, the Speed Guide shouldn't be there either. Then that just makes µTorrent harder to configure. Then people start complaining. Just recently, I saw someone complimenting µTorrent because they were able to get better speeds with it with minimal configuration. If it weren't for the Speed Guide, I'm sure there'd have to be a lot of tweaking, and a lot of reading. Adding the Speed Guide has not led to a newbie-friendly spiral thus far, and it won't. For the people who are newbies, all they'll need is the Speed Guide, and the main interface. They won't delve into the configurations much, if at all, so I don't see why the configuration would be changed in the first place.

I might've missed some points, and if so, sorry (you can remind me if I did, if you so wish), I gotta go somewhere.

[dAbReAkA]

Argentus, let's remove the GUI completely to remove the bloat. what do u say?

i know what u're talking about but it's not the end of the world as Ultima said..

i personally have coded admin control panels which turned out to be twice or bigger than the other stuff..

it should be customizable.. there should be 2 GUIs so that anyone can choose.. we'll see how much stuff would be visible in this new interface and if they fit my needs i may switch to it..

i assume u're a linux fan? u dont like simplicity, user-friendliness.. looking at a bunch of columns doesnt make u a power user..

sometimes u may find yourself tired enough and u may want to just look at the progress bars and the most important stuff u need instead of looking at a bunch of columns with a lot of data and processing numbers

[nightshifted]

Under this proposal, which interface would be the default? Or would you be asked to choose the first time you run µTorrent (or whenever you open it with neither preference saved in settings.dat)?

[rafi]

I believe someone mentioned that you will be asked the first time...

But those details - will surly be dealt by ludde in good time once he publishes a beta with that GUI and hears users' reactions.

[Arqentus]

Argentus, let's remove the GUI completely to remove the bloat. what do u say?

i know what u're talking about but it's not the end of the world as Ultima said..

i personally have coded admin control panels which turned out to be twice or bigger than the other stuff..

it should be customizable.. there should be 2 GUIs so that anyone can choose.. we'll see how much stuff would be visible in this new interface and if they fit my needs i may switch to it..

i assume u're a linux fan? u don't like simplicity, user-friendliness.. looking at a bunch of columns doesn't make u a power user..

sometimes u may find yourself tired enough and u may want to just look at the progress bars and the most important stuff u need instead of looking at a bunch of columns with a lot of data and processing numbers

Let me put something strait. I never said its the end of the world. I notice several people making that conclusion. I in fact pointed out that a lot of programs who go newbie friendly, end up bloated.

And no, i'm not a linux user. I only use linux at my job, and even then it pisses me off with the command structure. But that's a whole difference discussion. I believe in simplicity, combined with as much useful information as possible. The screens of the current interface i saw, are nothing more then oversimplified, with a lack of information.

There is a BIG difference between simplified user friendly, and dumbed down to cater to the lowest of the lowest.

Do people actually need to see a few big icon's, the grad background etc. No. Whats wrong with the current Interface? Because it shows a lot of data that most newbie users don't know what it is? Because of that do we need to hide it? No...

There is a bad trend in people's mind these days. It's not because the newbie has no use for that information, that it explicit needs to be hidden. What added value does a few icon's, and the loss of realstat onscreen provide? Nothing at all. It just makes it looks better. And to be honest, if that's what your after, the same effect CAN be done without losing any of the information. Override the draw item events, and draw a gradient look on the rows. Add a column, with a fancy little icon <- Notice the word LITTLE. Make the name & process in black color, and the rest in dark gray, to change the focus. Etc ... Its very much possible to make he current Interface look better, without even removing anything, More cluttering the screen.

In response to your admin panel. There is a difference between twice as big, and about 100 times as big he

Ultima: "It's not bloated" -- It always starts with small steps. Today its a Interface, tomorrow a new & bigger wizard, then a new & bigger. Those icon's etc start adding up in the file size, and resource use very fast. Like i said, today its only a few icon's, here, a bit of gradient there, etc. Tomorrow its something elsewhere etc.

"NOT impact resource": The moment you start including extra icon's, its already impacting resource usage. Take a close look at your executable size, and you will see a sharp increase the moment some high definition pics get included for the look. Or you need to leave the icon's out of the executable, making it so that uTorrent is not a single file anymore, but becomes a multi file.

And then you start stepping into the territory of forced usage of installers.

"A lot of people don't switch": Again, did you check the time people lose with the dumbed down interface? In general you end up losing more time with dumbed down interfaces. I like efficiency. Every click you need to do extra, is a wast of time.

Also, i read your inf comment / browser comments: There is a big difference between what your talking about in browsers & uTorrent changes. Your not removing unneeded elements, uTorrent is already compact, with a minimum of widgets & buttons. So again, why the need for a graphical & minimization of the default interface information. There is 0 need for it.

You actually argued for its more easy to read. Well, like i said above, that can be fixed by using a very simple change in color focus. You make the name & download progress black, and the rest dark gray. Bingo. Easy to focus. And yet, the rest of the information is not touched. I've been doing web designs for a few years now, and only providing limited information is not how you focus people. Using the right way to draw people's eyes to the focused data is. And it can be done with something as simple as a few color changes. Without making ever torrent several lines large, without all the extra icon's etc.

Let me put it in other words. If people want a client that downloads maybe one torrent at a time, they can just use Bittorrent Client itself or a graphical whore client. End of story. People actually love uTorrent how it is today. Why add ( and maybe force in the future? ) the added interface then anyway? You say its a option. lol. I heard that before. A option becomes a preference, a preference becomes a default. A default becomes the only choice. Do not fall for that. Read what i said about about color change, and overriding the draw event, and you can provide the same effect WIDOUT a extra interface, and all the other crap. AND you keep the client with only one Interface, helping in the future proof status of the client, because you don't end up duplication data.

If we wanted a graphical whore client, we will have picked another one. And that's what people fear, and so do i. Like i said before, it ALWAYS starts with small steps, and in a year, 2 years time, you are unable to recognise the program you loved.

You can call me that little voice in the back of your head saying: "watch out, this is just one step"

[dAbReAkA]

actually there are no extra icons bundled with this interface.. except this one that u see which is a sample.. i will take the according from what the filetype is or they may even be replaced with status icons.. who knows..

and btw this new interface adds up 1 kb to the size of the program..

[Tarkus]

and btw this new interface adds up 1 kb to the size of the program..

Oh, the horror!

[By-Tor]

+1

I think it would be a nice option. Yes, it reminds me of Firefox, but, that's my browser of choice anyway. I don't think an extra 1k will kill anyone, especially when you take cluster size into account.

[xequence]

It looks like... I dont know, one of those linux or mac clients.

But in my opinion, as long as this doesent take too much code to do, then I guess its fine. But I dont think going any further then this for newbie friendlyness is a good idea.

[Firon]

<1KB worth of code, in case you're curious.

[Ultima]

@Arqentus: If you really want to complain about the direction µTorrent's headed (newbie-land), then complain about an earlier step (I'd say it was the first step, but I don't know for sure), being -- as I said -- the Speed Guide. As for the icons, in case you didn't notice, it's using the Windows Media Player filetype icon. No icons were included in the first place. It's using a standard Windows icon. Oh so resource consuming? Don't believe so. At any rate, adding resources does not make µTorrent any more resource hungry, or at the very most, only an unappreciable amount. Unless you consider disk space usage a major disaster. That this is just one step at an unappreciable amount, that it'll add up? lol it'll take several hundred equivalent steps before anyone might start noticing a minimal increase in memory usage, if at all.

Edit: Just realized that you were talking about hard drive usage when you referred to resource usage. We do not consider hard drive space whatsoever. It's just a nice side effect of coding efficiently. Resource usage is CPU and RAM usage in our eyes because of this very fact.

[DonGato]

- The interface is NOT about the "wow" factor whatsoever. And it's no prettier either. It's easier to read, and certainly less daunting than a bunch of tabular data.

Easier to read? Care to explain why? I 'never liked the way Firefox show the downloads and don't like this way of displaying data that can't be configured. At least this one a bit more useful info. I see it as much more easy the columns format. Just that I tweak it to show the info I want in the place I want.

Opening and handling file type icons is not a "minimal increase in memory usage" but some people like to buy 2Gb for their computers. Oh, well...

[Ultima]

"Downloading from 3 of 6 peers" or "3 (6)" under the Peers column.

Which one looks easier to understand? Don't look at it from your point of view, where you already know what everything means. And about the minimal memory increase, I was talking about adding application resources (images and such). As Arqentus mentioned. Not necessarily loading them. As for loading them, I still don't think it would use much more memory. If you're going to have hundreds of torrents loaded simultaneously, chances are, most of them are going to have repeated icons. Meaning there isn't going to be much (if any) extra memory usage for loading more icons for 900 torrents over 20.

The moment you start including extra icon's, its already impacting resource usage.

Edit: Had the numbers backwards, it's "900 torrents over 20," not "20 torrents over 900."

[DonGato]

Well, for me reading a long line and swiming for the real data in it is worse than watching a tabulated table where I know where to place my sight to watch what I want. We're talking about an application you have to learn anyway. I feel for you when you have to give support to such kind of newbies while you're already spoiling them.

Well, wasting resources is for the two cases.

if (g_App.m_pPrefs->ShowFileTypeIcon())
{
    iImage = g_App.GetFileTypeSystemImageIdx(file->GetFileName());
    if (g_App.GetSystemImageList() != NULL)
    ::ImageList_Draw(g_App.GetSystemImageList(), iImage, dc->GetSafeHdc(), cur_rec.left, cur_rec.top + 1, ILD_TRANSPARENT);
    cur_rec.left += 19;
}

For each icon. Anyway, I think this is not a problem for modern computers but the going bloated argument holds true.

[Ultima]

Fine, hard drive space is a resource count. Just irrelevant in µTorrent's case. Hard drive usage is not a primary concern to ludde. He is willing to sacrifice hard drive space for useful features, and isn't afraid at all. µTorrent has more-than-doubled in filesize since its first release. Is anyone *really* throwing a fit and complaining? That's why we do NOT consider it in our definition of resource usage. Is ludde going to go on an all-out spree and make µTorrent into a *gasp* 1MB blob? lol if it ever got to that size, I'm sure it'd have more features than Azureus, and ludde won't waste his time going that far.

On a side note, why are people so concerned about hard drive usage if they're downloading gigabyte's worth of data onto the hard drive? If it's just the trend people are worried about, then I'll say this: unless ludde starts including hundreds of bitmap (read uncompressed) icons into the executable, I don't see µTorrent ever reaching BitComet or Azureus' size, so it's still the better alternative in this sense.

/me wonders why he even bothers trying so hard when he won't even be using the feature...

("he" refers to me, for you non-IRCers)

@nightshifted: http://forum.utorrent.com/viewtopic.php?pid=190235#p190235

[DonGato]

Memory... not disk usage, memory!

[minirx]

No, I don't support such interface. Just like the beginning of bloating.

The current interface is clear enough, over decoration will not promote uTorrent further, it is already popular among torrents lover

[Firon]

The memory use doesn't really go up with filesize. In fact, these new things don't really even add 1KB of memory use. The only stuff that really made the memory use go up was Unicode and the improved disk cache.

[Ultima]

That post just prompted me to note that the interface isn't only for newbies as I have been so bent on portraying. It's just a bulk of the reason I see it being added for. At any rate, if YOU feel it's clear enough, like most of us do, then YOU can continue using it, no one's going to stop you. I'm not going to bother delving into the bloat comment, again.

[minirx]

Heard that Bittorrent(Mainline) didn't use that interface now:

Short answer: forget it.

I afraid to say the word "bloxt" again. Most like trigger scold :|

[ettpok]

First I thought forget about it, but now after a while I think it's a great idea. Perhaps it's not that useful to me as an advanced user who likes the huge number of information at the screen, but for a first time bittorrent user or a beginner it's just the right approach. They don't know what such terms as 'availability', 'piece' or even 'tracker' mean, they just want to download (and hopefullu share a bit also). With this kind of function users could have the easiness of the mainline client combined with the advanced functions of µTorrent (encryption, peer exchange...)

For the next major release I'd very much welcome this kind of simple gui - as an option.