5.0.4 Beta - A few thoughts/issues

[wikedguy]

First off, I really like the general look - much cooler, very iTunes, maybe even Chrome, which is quite the compliment.

I'm not so sure you needed to redesign totally, the layout of limewire 4 was great!

I liked having the tabs at the top for library and search.
Instead, there are two icons for home and limewire store; personally, I can't see why you would want those there.
I've never used limewire store, although I can understand it is important from your perspective.
I don't understand why you would want to return 'Home'? To read through the 'Known Issues' again? Unless you have other plans for the home page, it's fairly superfluous - definitely show it when the program opens, but giving it a link, particularly such a prominent one, is not right.

Customisation of the layout would be great - I'm thinking firefox here - allowing you to choose icons you wanted and where and so on...

Moving on to the search:
What happened to detailed search options? Now you can only select audio/video/etc.
And the boxes at the side with artist, album or whatever they were? Personally, I found one of the most effective ways of weeding out spam was to select the correct artist name using those... ideally it wouldn't be necessary, but that's unlikely.

Haven't actually searched for too much yet, but it seemed to me there were far fewer results than with limewire 4... which could be good or bad.
Maybe it's doing a better job of gathering up identical files.
Maybe it's just finding less.
There's no spam showing either, which is frankly just suspicious - with limewire 4 spam would show up whatever you typed! :p
Have you managed to get rid of it all?! or is it just hidden?
I don't think the latter is a very good idea, as I usually found lots of the spam was actually ok, and had many more seeds.

The list view is pretty useless, but thankfully you've given the option of classic view - although the font for the no. of P2P users is very small?

I like the look of the search tabs, as well as the fact they stay there if you click on to the library.

However, it all feels quite big - the tabs are large, and the search bar is huge.
Not entirely convinced by the behaviour when you open too many tabs either - when you click on 'more', it lists all the tabs, including the visible ones.

If you made the tabs smaller that would allow for a second layer, which I think could look pretty cool. (as in limewire 4!)

Other points:

What's happened to the mp3 player? Surely that's an essential part of the iTunes feel!

How does the memory footprint compare to limewire 4?
For me, it seems perhaps slightly higher, although the program is very responsive and I haven't experienced any problems.

A few buggy things which need fixing:

On the list of downloads, when you click 'show all', there's no way of deleting all the downloads at once - it's possible to select them all with Ctrl+A, but when you right-click it only brings up the menu for the file you clicked on. And it would be nice to be able to use the Delete key!

If you download something that turns out to be spam, its no longer possible to mark it as spam on the search page. Which kind of defeats the point.

Wow, that was so much longer that I intended. Have fun with that lot! :eek:

Generally, I think it's a major improvement - it will definitely make the program more appealing to less experienced computer users. Good work.

[limewiremike]

First off, I really like the general look - much cooler, very iTunes, maybe even Chrome, which is quite the compliment.

Thanks! I think with this version, the dev team really took swing development to a new level.


I'm not so sure you needed to redesign totally, the layout of limewire 4 was great! I liked having the tabs at the top for library and search.

Instead, there are two icons for home and limewire store; personally, I can't see why you would want those there.
I've never used limewire store, although I can understand it is important from your perspective.
I don't understand why you would want to return 'Home'? To read through the 'Known Issues' again? Unless you have other plans for the home page, it's fairly superfluous - definitely show it when the program opens, but giving it a link, particularly such a prominent one, is not right.

For this design, we are trying to make the most important things accessible all the time. Home will be much more important for the release and future versions, so stay tuned. Accessing your Library, doing a search or accessing your previous search results are all accessible with 1 click compared to the previous, tabbed version.

Customisation of the layout would be great - I'm thinking firefox here - allowing you to choose icons you wanted and where and so on...

Baby steps :)

What happened to detailed search options? Now you can only select audio/video/etc.

In this new version, we do all the work for you. If you want to enter certain metadata for a type, just type it in...don't even worry about what specific fields you want to search for...we'll be searching those fields. It's a major improvement the dev team made in this version vs earlier ones where we just used to search the filename. We are toying with the idea of advanced search for future versions that will be even more robust and powerful than it used to be.

And the boxes at the side with artist, album or whatever they were? Personally, I found one of the most effective ways of weeding out spam was to select the correct artist name using those... ideally it wouldn't be necessary, but that's unlikely.

If there is metadata in the list view, we'll be showing it. In classic view, we'll be showing you important metadata for each type...so if that's how you weeded out spam in the past, you can still continue to do that. Additionally you can refine your search by typing in the textbox at the top to find something even more detailed.

Haven't actually searched for too much yet, but it seemed to me there were far fewer results than with limewire 4... which could be good or bad.

There are fewer results displayed in list view, and we're looking at this as a great thing. The dev team found a great way to group files together that are not exactly the same, but pretty darn close. We'll pick the file that matches your search the best and put it at the top. Press the + button in list view to see files that are similar to it. We're trying to show you less so you can do more quickly. The classic view still shows the same number of results as the old version and it's always sorted by the number of people with the file.

(re: spam) Have you managed to get rid of it all?! or is it just hidden?

We're pushing a lot of spam to the bottom.


The list view is pretty useless, but thankfully you've given the option of classic view - although the font for the no. of P2P users is very small?

The list view is in it's infancy, but the idea behind it is that the dev team can tweak the algorithm to best match what you are looking for and push those results to the top. Think of it like going to Amazon.com and having them match your result within the first few rather than you search through 100 results yourself. What do you prefer about the classic view?

Not entirely convinced by the behaviour when you open too many tabs either - when you click on 'more', it lists all the tabs, including the visible ones.

What do you mean? It list all your tabs when you click on more

What's happened to the mp3 player?

It's there, just a bit hidden by default. Just double click on an audio file to play it inside of LimeWire. You can filter inside the audio section of your Library to only listen to files with certain metadata also.

How does the memory footprint compare to limewire 4?

Not too sure...I'll let someone from the dev team answer that


If you download something that turns out to be spam, its no longer possible to mark it as spam on the search page. Which kind of defeats the point.

Good point. We'll make it happen for the release

Thanks for all the feedback!

[wikedguy]

What happened to detailed search options? Now you can only select audio/video/etc.
In this new version, we do all the work for you. If you want to enter certain metadata for a type, just type it in...don't even worry about what specific fields you want to search for...we'll be searching those fields. It's a major improvement the dev team made in this version vs earlier ones where we just used to search the filename. We are toying with the idea of advanced search for future versions that will be even more robust and powerful than it used to be.

Cool. As long as it works reliably.



And the boxes at the side with artist, album or whatever they were? Personally, I found one of the most effective ways of weeding out spam was to select the correct artist name using those... ideally it wouldn't be necessary, but that's unlikely.
If there is metadata in the list view, we'll be showing it. In classic view, we'll be showing you important metadata for each type...so if that's how you weeded out spam in the past, you can still continue to do that.


Ah, now I'm not entirely sure we're talking about the same thing here - I meant the boxes on the left in limewire 4. When you searched for something, they were there in the sidebar displaying all the different artists, albums and genres of the search results. Then if you clicked on one of the listed artists, it showed you only results with that exact artist in their metadata. Which I used to get rid of a lot of spam.


Haven't actually searched for too much yet, but it seemed to me there were far fewer results than with limewire 4... which could be good or bad.
There are fewer results displayed in list view, and we're looking at this as a great thing. The dev team found a great way to group files together that are not exactly the same, but pretty darn close. We'll pick the file that matches your search the best and put it at the top. Press the + button in list view to see files that are similar to it. We're trying to show you less so you can do more quickly. The classic view still shows the same number of results as the old version and it's always sorted by the number of people with the file.

Ok, I found the grouping system, but I'm not entirely sure how useful it is. Unless you're also downloading from those grouped files, it's a little strange - they're just hidden.
What you really need is a more effective way of joining identical files into one listing.
And surely you should work a + button into classic view - atm you have to right-click to see if there are more hidden files.



(re: spam) Have you managed to get rid of it all?! or is it just hidden?
We're pushing a lot of spam to the bottom.

Hmmm, ok. It's just I haven't seen anything marked spam, unless I marked it myself. And I downloaded something that was spam, not that I blame you for that.


The list view is pretty useless, but thankfully you've given the option of classic view - although the font for the no. of P2P users is very small?
The list view is in it's infancy, but the idea behind it is that the dev team can tweak the algorithm to best match what you are looking for and push those results to the top. Think of it like going to Amazon.com and having them match your result within the first few rather than you search through 100 results yourself. What do you prefer about the classic view?

I have one, simple problem with the list view.
It's lacking in information. As much as you might want it to be, limewire is not the iTunes store. When downloading files, you need to know the file extension, the file size, the bitrate, and full metadata info. It's useful against spam, and just generally very helpful in choosing the best download. I realise that you do display some metadata in list view when it exists, but that's not really enough.
The design of Classic view really is classic - it's a proven, simple method of displaying files (even iTunes still uses it!). You could still use your amazon relevance sort on classic view (doesn't amazon just sort by bestselling?). I think you're trying to reinvent the wheel here.

But the font for no. of P2P users is still very small on Classic view.


Not entirely convinced by the behaviour when you open too many tabs either - when you click on 'more', it lists all the tabs, including the visible ones.
What do you mean? It list all your tabs when you click on more

Yes, why should it list the ones that are still visible? Surely you only want it to list the hidden ones. That way the dropdown list is a lot easier to look through.

Thanks for the comprehensive response.

Just wanted to check you read this:
On the list of downloads, when you click 'show all', there's no way of deleting all the downloads at once - it's possible to select them all with Ctrl+A, but when you right-click it only brings up the menu for the file you clicked on. And it would be nice to be able to use the Delete key!

I still feel parts of the layout could be a bit smaller, but generally it's gonna be great, once you've ironed out the bugs.