Disabling compact view - impossible?

[Wildfire]

Just to be clear to everyone. It's impossible to disable compact mode. That ain't happening. What might be possible is a single click "expansion" button though.

...and that would still leave us with an extra thing to do each time we look through a newsgroup. Why not include an auto-"expand all" option for all groups? For those like me -this thread shows there's clearly a demand for it- such an option would be ideal. Currently, we end up performing CTRL+A and SHIFT+RIGHT CURSOR each and every time we want to browse headers. Please, at least have the program do that automatically.

[heyray]

Just to be clear to everyone. It's impossible to disable compact mode. That ain't happening. What might be possible is a single click "expansion" button though.

My way or the highway - I understand.....

[Quade]

My way or the highway - I understand.....

It's been that way every day of the 9 years you've used Newsbin. It should come as no surprise. I listen to what you guys have to say then write the code to make it a program I want to use. Sometimes it matches up with what you want and sometimes it doesn't.

Please, at least have the program do that automatically.

You're really better off using 5.59 then. 5.59 will both use less ram and load uncompacted files faster than 6 will. I promise you that. 60 days of some groups I normally look at, takes up about 150 megs compacted but, takes well over 1.2 Gigs fully uncompacted. Because 6 wasn't designed to display uncompacted.

Automatic uncompaction might work. Don't complain to me about how slow it is or how much ram it uses. I'll just tell you "I told you so".

[Wildfire]

I don't need 60 days uncompacted. I check the groups I follow every day, at worst every few days. So no need (for me anyway) to have dozens of days worth of headers uncompacted. And in those rare cases I do need to look at so much headers, I've got 12 gigs of RAM. No worry there.

Currently, I end up manually expanding each group each and every time. Having NewsBin Pro do that automatically will actually save me some time, so where's the problem? (other than you apparently not really understanding why we don't like the compact view)

[richy99]

not everyone has that amount of memory available and you get people trying to load the entire 800 days or more of bonless, its a balancing act for Quade

[Quade]

Maybe I just do it and tell the people who run out of RAM "Tough luck".

[Wildfire]

As long as everything's documented I don't see the problem. You could even have a warning pop up when someone enables the auto-expand option. Then you'd be sure the user was warned for potential disadvantages. Then Quade can say "tough luck" to those still trying to load zillions of headers and we, those who actually understand the disadvantages, would still have the oh-so-wanted auto-expand option.

Case closed?

[chiphead]

Quade, you should ask yourself if catering to the whims of a vocal minority is really serving the needs of the public at large. If you keep getting sidetracked by retrograded features, you're going to have feature-creep and have to do regression tests and what not.

My position: you've clearly outlined the reasons for the architectral change and made a good case to not support auto-expansion. You're entitled to your position, whether the customers accepts it or not. That's your prerogative.

[Wildfire]

Quade, you should ask yourself if catering to the whims of a vocal minority is really serving the needs of the public at large. If you keep getting sidetracked by retrograded features, you're going to have feature-creep and have to do regression tests and what not.

My position: you've clearly outlined the reasons for the architectral change and made a good case to not support auto-expansion. You're entitled to your position, whether the customers accepts it or not. That's your prerogative.

I doubt we're a minority! I fear many people who'd like an auto-expand option just don't find their way to the forums. Further more, the functionality we request is basically already there. Instead of us pressing CTRL+A and SHIFT + RIGHT ARROW, it'd be the program itself doing that.

And no, it's not a "whim". I'm quite sure that scanning through headers like I do is something that many people do. Whatever you may think about it, browsing through headers in the compact view really is slower. It's not just a matter of getting used to it.

Quade said we could stick with v5.59 but on many other levels that would not be desirable. For one thing, downloading with v6 is much more smooth than with v5.59 -- in v6, the downloadspeed is very smooth but in v5.59 it's very erratic.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to run a poll for a week or so through the Message of the Day? To get a little bit more insight in this matter?

[richy99]

if it wasnt a minority then i would have expected alot more traffic and more posts about this, granted many people dont always visit the forum but then many will also turn off the motd, a poll for a week probably woudlnt give an accurate result and you woudl more than likely get skewed results

i personally do not find it slower, do you mean slower as in you take longer to look or the program being slower? every new version cycle there will be users who dont like certain things about the new beta, i seen it from v4 to v5

were you not happy with 5.59 until the beta of 6 came along then? the issue is that v6 has improved vastly over 5.59 due to the internal changes made to accomodate the newer features and newer internal workings, this will make it smoother and faster for the majority of users

as i have suggested before to other users, maybe you would be better off sticking to 5.59 until the beta cycle hits release candidate or release and then see if it has changed as many things are likely to change and if it v6 isnt to your needs at present moving back to 5.59 might at elast solve it for now

[DThor]

It's already been stated that having a one button solution or a preference to do the select all expand may show up in the final. I think it would be a good idea inasmuch as it's easy to code and it would default to off. There really isn't a need to keep kicking the horse. About the only fact at this point is that compacts aren't going away. Life goes on...

DT

[Wildfire]

Well, I'll just wait to see what the future brings us. At least Quade is listening, I know several other companies/programmers who only do what they want and to hell with the users. So all in all, I'm still glad that at least Quade listened to the arguments and did not shoot down the request immidiately.

So for now, I'll just wait and see

-- Edit: @ below -- you just don't understand it. I wanted to explain it yet again, but I won't. The reasons why expanded view is much faster for some of us are already well explained earlier on in this topic. In short: it's not that we're against change, not at all. If that were true, we wouldn't have switched from v4 to v5 at all.

[KilJaden]

I've been using Usenet for quite a while , and i just don't understand why some still wanna browse groups uncompacted .

What advantages does it have ? Seeing 47 rars and 9 pars scattered rather than just a single post line that's the sum of all ? Some of you say it's faster while browsing how come : watching 1000 lines rather than 50 lines is faster ?

If we were talking about pictures sets then yes that could be a issue , because you can't see every post by default so things might get complicated , but for rar sets i just don't see why not browse results compacted. And if i were to say that during the Alpha stage Newsbin had pictures groups compacted as well , and it was dropped just because for picture sets it didn't seem right .

I don't want to be disrespectful but some of you just don't like to change.

[lesgrandfomage]

Just to be clear to everyone. It's impossible to disable compact mode. That ain't happening. What might be possible is a single click "expansion" button though.

So please give us the one click expansion button.
What I don't understand is version 6 does not seem to run much faster on my computer than version 5. Am I missing something? Of course I don't download 700 days of boneless at one time. Maybe that's what I need to do to see the increase in speed. The time I spend looking at headers in version 6, makes it much slower for me than version 5. I like the look of version 6, it's all good for me except the compact view. I know I can stay with version 5, but we all like to try something new, even old-timers.

[pl5bnsf]

Here's my view of compact vs expanded (and the new gui in general)

I liked seeing the v5 way of doing things. For example I prefer to usually download the smaller set of videos for a show. I don't need HD all the time, I'd rather download 300meg rather than 1.x gig of data (except when I do want the big files).

So with V6, I need to watch carefully for the ONE line showing the total size of a show. Then carefully look for the other ONE line with the smaller set.

With V5, I had to scroll thru many lines, but each line showed say 49meg for each piece of the download, I know quickly that I did not want that set, so I keep scrolling down to the next set of 15meg files. All while continuing to scroll down.

With V6, I had to, horrors, actually read and think more. And stop scrolling and think. And read. Carefully. With V5 and a larger in-your-face file list (expanded) it was easier to do things mindlessly.

And with V6, you have the nested tree listing and all that. It's very confusing. Probably much better/quicker/cooler/modern. I can appreciate the speed issues. And I have tried to work with the compacted view, I understand that better now. If V6 had a an expanded with NO trees view, like V5, I would be very happy with that.

Gui wise, I can't figure out the windowing. I like V5. I had the groups list in the top 2/3 of the windows and my download list in the bottom. Period. I know where things are. In V6, I don't know, I bring up the download list and it fills the screen. I try to move things I get placement options. And then I never can find my download/group list again. I'm scared to move a window. Or I lose the way the windows were setup and I don't know, it's just confusing.

And now Newsbin has those green icons on each line. I don't know what each one means. I just changed over to Windows 7 as well. And WOW am I tired of blue backgrounds with light blue text. Give me standard old windows old style grey with black letters any day.

Again, the new gui required too much thinking on my part to use.

So guess I'm going to stick with V5, V5 has been fantastic, and V6 also works great, I just can't handle the new gui. It's becoming 'better' but not easier.

[Quade]

"View/Application Look/Windows Native" is pretty bland.

Again, the new gui required too much thinking on my part to use.

It's not much different than 5.5X unless you start dragging things around, which is purely optional. That was the whole point. Make it work like 5.X unless you really want to make changes.

This is really the same thing that happened when 5 replaced 4. "It's different, I don't like it". I knew I'd get that reaction. 6 works the way I want it to work, some of you will follow me forward, some will stay behind with the version they're comfortable with.

[pl5bnsf]

It's not much different than 5.5X unless you start dragging things around, which is purely optional.

:> And that is exactly what I do every time, start dragging windows around and never can get it back to what I wanted or like it was in the first place.

[Wildfire]

It's not much different than 5.5X unless you start dragging things around, which is purely optional.

:> And that is exactly what I do every time, start dragging windows around and never can get it back to what I wanted or like it was in the first place.

And that's why Quade has nicely implemented a "lock"-button to lock down the interface once you're happy with it

[richy99]

It's not much different than 5.5X unless you start dragging things around, which is purely optional.

:> And that is exactly what I do every time, start dragging windows around and never can get it back to what I wanted or like it was in the first place.

if you want the default look just delete workspace.xml in the data folder then you can start again by moving tabs etc

[Quade]

Dex has a tutorial video on how to move things around the GUI.