Rearrange menu based on usage

[korben_dallas]

Would it be difficult to have a context menu rerrange itself based on most-clicked / most-selected commands?

I find myself really only ever using 2 or 3 of the options on the recording dialog.. usually "Set Watched" and then "Delete". It would be nice if these commands would be at the very top of the menu.

[GKusnick]

Obviously it's not hard to make an STVI that reorders menu items statically to suit your preference. This is undoubtedly the most expedient solution to your immediate problem.

But if actually you want to keep stats on which items are clicked and reorder them dynamically, then you'd need to redesign the menu to be table-driven, taking items from an array or list that can be sorted based on click stats or whatever. That's doable, but it's not a minor change, since it basically requires replacing the existing statically-defined menu items with the new table-driven design.

I guess another klugey way to do it would be to keep the statically-defined items, but assign their Y positions dynamically by table lookup. So you wouldn't actually be reordering the items in the menu structure; you'd just be causing them to display at different locations on screen. The drawback to this approach is that you'd lose the advantages of automatic layout and would need to calculate the position of each item explicitly. You might get some odd navigation artifacts as well, where down arrow might not always take you where you think it ought to. Personally I think the table idea would be a lot simpler to maintain once you got it working (although more of a departure from the current design).

[tmiranda]

Writing a Plugin like this would be a good way to learn Studio

[korben_dallas]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Writing a Plugin like this would be a good way to learn Studio

Yes my delving into Studio is inevitable - once I get a little further in my Java skills - but I want to make sure my goal is actually doable instead of wasting a bunch of time.

[tmiranda]

It's very do-able, and a good idea. Studio is a different animal from Java. I bet you could do most of the Plugin in Studio directly and not write any java code at all.