gui confusion

[FredThompson]

I've just upgraded to the final v6 release and chose the Windows Native "look."

The pause button in the main toolbar is very awkward. The only difference I can see between being paused or running is thin outline around the button. The symbol doesn't change from the two vertical lines to the rightward-pointing triangle which are standard for pause and play. The tooltip is "Pause the Download" regardless of running state.

Each entry in the list of posts has two icons on the left; a rightward-pointing trEach post in the list has the sameiange in a circle and two vertical lines in a circle. Nothing distinguishes a post set for active retrieval from one which is paused other than a green square to designate posts which are in the process of being downloaded.

Is something wrong with my installation that there are such minimal visual cues? I've tried the various "looks" and most have these visual problems except Visual Studio 2010. How can the appearance be modified so the states are more obvious?

With NBPro5, I had, essentially, a two-paned layout with the servers and groups on the left, most of the other items on the right. Clicking on a tab in v5 would change which windows was shown in the pane. I've discovered how to dock the various windows. How can they be stacked somewhat similar to the tabs in v5?

I've also found the v6 installer does not remove nbpro.exe. Is there a reason to keep that old executable?

[Quade]

- Pause state is listed on the status bar too (and you can toggle it there as well).

- The left most icon lets you expand the listing to show all the files and pars. The other icon is simply status. As for the pause status, in the post list, do people actually want that? The problem coming late to the party like this, is it's really too late to complain. You can make suggestions for the next version but, this version is the way it is.

- You can dock the tabs to pretty much anything. The one thing you shouldn't do is close the search tab or the post lists won't know what to dock to when you open new ones.

Dex is working on some video's showing how docking works.

You ought to be able to delete the old EXE.

[FredThompson]

wrt my comment about icons to the left of the posts, this appears to be an issue only with a queue which was migrated from v5. Posts added to the queue with v6 show the standard pause icon, a green downward arrow or a green square.

I saw how to dock each window but when I tried to dock the list of queued posts and the list of files using the same location as show by the "floating" location icons, the result was 2 columns next to each other, not sharing the same space.

I'll look at the videos on YouTube. Maybe there is something I don't understand.

wrt the pause icon, I'm not asking how to pause, I'm saying it's very hard to visually discern the status of the button. In v5, it looked somewhat depressed...well...not really...the shading on the edges changed. Is there something programatically which prevent that button being either the two vertical bars or a rightward-pointing triangle?

I've also noticed selected posts in the queue do change color but only slightly. The overall luminance-as-color-palette is nice but contrast indicating selected entries could be more distinct.

It does seem to be a heck of a lot snappier and I'm thrilled by the spool organization which is far more efficient than the older method of a gazillion files.

[Quade]

wrt the pause icon, I'm not asking how to pause, I'm saying it's very hard to visually discern the status of the button. In v5, it looked somewhat depressed...well...not really...the shading on the edges changed. Is there something programatically which prevent that button being either the two vertical bars or a rightward-pointing triangle?

I'm saying that the Pause state is also visible and changeable on the status bar (at the bottom). So, if the pause button is too vague, you have some text at the bottom too.

[kknostman]

I searched and couldn't find a post that explains what the download list icons mean but this thread seems to be the closest related to it.

In the download list there are a variety of possible icons that may be in effect based on the status of the file download. The problem is that it can be very confusing and I cannot find any legend that explains what each icon means.

Some seem to be pretty self evident (the green icon with the down arrow is obviously downloading). Others though aren't. For example the blue icon with the check box, that would seem to mean it's "done" but I sometimes see it next to files that show 0/### (ie size) downloaded. I assume the green "page" icon actually means downloaded?

So a question and suggestion for the future.

1. Is there any documentation that lists the icons and their meaning.
2. How about adding a legend to the download tab bar (there's a lot of empty space there) that lists what each icon does. It could be a download maybe if not simply displaying them all.

Thanks

[Quade]

1 - Check box means that the file is queued for download but, not yet downloading.
2 - Down arrow means "on the process of downloading"
3 - * means that it's queued for download and set to bypass filters.
4 - red with exclamation point means there was an error. You problably won't see that in the download lit.
5 - blue with pause indicator = paused

I think that's about it. In the download list. I'd expect mostly to see:

- blue pause - pause
- check - queued for download
- * - queued for download - bypass filters
- down arrow - currently in the process of downloading.

The download list uses fewer states then say the post lists. I'll think about an icon legend. There's already one in the help menu but, maybe it needs to be fleshed out.