do people like the way the arrow keys work?

[gveres]

I am fairly new to Sage and SageMC. I am not sure if the arrow key behaviour is a SageMC thing or a Sage thing ....

I find the way the arrow keys navigate the menus to be very difficult and error prone. I guess this is something that people get used to but was is there some benefit to it that I am not seeing yet?

What I am talking about is how the left and right keys work. Lets say there are three items on the left menu and 20 on the right menu (series settings for instance). If I am on the left menu and I hit the right arrow, it takes me to the closest right menu item, so if I had scrolled down 5, it will likely take me to the 5th menu item on the right. Then if I scroll down further on the right and hit the left key, it takes me to the bottom of the left menu. This is the unpredictable nature that I find very disconcerting as a new user.

There was also some funky stuff going on where it would shot me to the bottom of the list on the right before letting me go back to the left part of the menu. I can't seem to reproduce that so maybe that was just some funky bug I hit but I remember it happening all the time. I am not sure why I can't repro it now. This behaviour caused me to lose my settings sooooo many times because it was so unpredictable. Some times I would need two left arrow presses to get back to the left menu sometimes it would just pop back and the second press would make me leave the settings screen and lose my changes.



Anyway, I would have thought a better system would have been to keep independent menu item pointers for the left and right menus. That way when I went back and forth, it would jump back and forth between the same elements no matter how many times I did it.

I would expected that each time you select a new entry on the left, it would reset the menu item pointer on the right so that when I pressed the right arrow key, I would always go to the top entry. Then when I went down 10 elements on the right and pressed the left key it would take me back to where I was on the left before I hit the right menu.

This scheme would be completely predictable and probably more familiar to most new people since it is the way most systems work.

Anyway, don't get me wrong. I think SageMC is a big improvement over the standard sage UI (although I didn't use the standard UI too long).

I am just trying to understand if there is some inherent benefit in the current scheme that I am not seeing and to suggest an alternate scheme that I think would be easier and more predictable for new people.

Thanks
Greg

[kricker]

I used to find this disconcerning as well. Although I eventually got used to what it was doing. That said, it does still bother me sometimes. I never looked into whether it is a core thing or a SageMC thing, or ever asked if it was "fixable". We will have to wait for Opus4, and/or Flachbar/MeInMaui to chime in.

[bialio]

It's a Core thing. It's even mentioned in the SageTV Studio manual.

I don't like it either, but like kricker I've gotten used to it.

btl.

[Opus4]

If an STV developer wants to remember where focus was last held, then code can be added to the STV to remember the last-focused items & then use listeners to handle the focus change when the arrow keys are used. Otherwise, the core uses its automatic focus determination when arrowing off a focused item.

- Andy

[MeInMaui]

SageMC relies on the core automatic focus determination. The way it works seems pretty straightforward to me, but maybe I've just gotten used to it.

Aloha,
Mike

[gveres]

I could see how you would get used to it, but it really is horrible, IMHO.

I setup a few more shows and had to do them a few extra times because I accidentally left arrowed too far and lost my changes.

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by gveres

I could see how you would get used to it, but it really is horrible, IMHO.

I setup a few more shows and had to do them a few extra times because I accidentally left arrowed too far and lost my changes.

There are a couple of things you can to do make things work better for you:

First, you can disable Left-as-Back to prevent accidentally leaving a menu as you describe. This will probably also require mapping a dedicated back button on your remote as well.

Second, it sounds like you may have some timing issues with your remote that causes it to respond too quickly. You can edit your sage.properties files (or sageclient.properties) and change the infrared repeat delay and period values

infrared_receive_repeat_delay=250
infrared_receive_repeat_delay_rc5=350
infrared_receive_repeat_period=120

The values are in milliseconds. You can increase them to slow down the remote's response.

Aloha,
Mike

[gveres]

Thanks for the tips.

I will get rid of the left as back and see if that helps control the error side of it.

As for the remote timing issue, that isn't an issue. I only program recordings using the keyboard when I am doing a bunch. I was using the keyboard when this happened. It was the left arrow first takes you to the bottom of the list of settings, then to the left menu (well sometimes it does, sometimes it takes you directly back to the left menu and then the second press that you have become accustom to having to press, takes you out of the settings screen).

I think the left as back flag will probably help here, I am just wondering what I will be giving up as this. On the remote, I am already used to having an "exit" button from my BTV days.

Greg