poor usability for column selection
ThatTotalAge
via web
With so many columns available to view it's unlikely that all
are needed for most users. For example I'm only interested in about
a quarter of the 43 available columns. However, the options (by
right-clicking and deselecting each column title) for removing
columns from views are extremely non-user-friendly! Especially with
the "Show All Columns" option at the top by default, it's all too
easy to be halfway through removing columns and slip and select
"Show All Columns", forcing you to start all over again. I gave up
after the third attempt!
Improvements to this are simple, obvious and quite frankly should
have been implemented long ago.
If this right-click option is going to be available then put the
"Show All Columns" option at the bottom of the menu and include a
"Deselect All Columns". This will help to avoid any accidental
clicks on "Show All Columns" and will allow users who are only
interested in say 7 of the 43 columns to more easily add just those
7 instead of having to remove the other 36 one-by-one !
There should also be an option in the preferences to manage
views/columns. This should be based on a check-box selection,
perhaps even with grouping such as all the "Sort" columns together
and toggle by group.
There should also be the option to save multiple views (column
selections) with the possibility in the main UI to toggle different
standard or user defined views.
Hope to see this fixed in the next release!
Support Staff 2 Posted by hendrik on 14 Feb, 2010 07:55 PM
Thanks for your input - I can see how usability can be improved here.
The reason this has not been implemented long ago is, that nobody ever brought it up before. But - it's a good and valid point and will be considered.
-hendrik
3 Posted by ladyships on 04 Mar, 2010 03:48 AM
yeah, i'm gonna second this comment. it’s really tedious, & jaikoz has a nice implementation of column management—there’s a tab in the application’s preferences that has a list of all the columns available, & allows you to uncheck|check columns in addition to reorder them. [it also allows you to specify the width in pixels, but that’s clunky—i’d rather just have an option to resize columns according to how long the longest data displayed under each respective column is.]
itunes has a different kind of dialogue for selecting which columns to display, but it doesn’t let you reorder them outside of literally dragging & dropping in the library|playlist window.
Support Staff 4 Posted by hendrik on 22 Mar, 2010 09:42 AM
There will definitely be a solution for this in beaTunes 3.
-hendrik
5 Posted by Lane on 26 May, 2010 08:41 PM
I'm glad I read through the forum, I was just about to post this exact same thing!
To add to this, on snow leopard I've noticed the context menu does not start at the cursor point but rather underneath it with 'Show All Columns' selected. If you could change the context menu to start at the cursor point it would bring things in line with the rest of the OS.
While we're on the subject of columns:
-it would be nice to have a column to indicate if the song has lyrics or not. -the checked/unchecked column would make more sense as a checkbox and not I/O
I'm currently using beaTunes 2.1.8 on OS X 10.6.3.
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Support Staff 6 Posted by hendrik on 28 May, 2010 04:37 PM
Hi Lane,
thanks for the lyrics suggestion and the input regarding the context menu. The enabled/disabled is not a checkbox on purpose as it is currently not editable.
Cheers,
-hendrik