After reviewing and discussing the transfer page with our designer, we reached the conclusion that the filter-bar can completely be dropped from transfer page; the size and type-based dropdown/filters were deemed unneccesery, the network-based filtering is not "hydranode style" (since downloads aren't owned by any specific network), and filtering by type will become obsolete anyway as soon as I get to introducing improved downloadlist, which groups all downloads intro three groups - complete, active and inactive. The filtering functionality will most likely return in slightly different way though - accessible via a keyboard shortcut and/or button, will display a small bar/box near the bottom of the list similary to firefox's "search-as-you-type" feature.

Also, the bottom buttons on tranfer-page were reconsidered, and Clear button was dropped from the listing. Reason is that the other 4 buttons - Pause, Stop, Cancel and Resume, all act similarly - alter the state of selected downloads - while Clear button behaved completely differently, leading the test subjects to confusion. Also, the name Clear looked lot like Cancel, which further introduced confusion; and last, but not least, the name Cancel is used generally in dialogues to dismiss modifications and close the dialog, but here it has a different purpose. Hence, it was renamed to "Remove", which is more straight-forward and avoids confusion.

Library page got a thorough discussion as well; basically, the main purpose for the library is to provide means to manage and use the downloaded media; that means listening to music, playing videos, burning/riping and so on. One point that raised was that this would largely duplicate what Windows Media Player already does, altough it would do it better - support any kind of formats for burning; playing everything without needing separate codecs (most likely using VLC engine) and so on; however, implementing all that will take a lot of time, so while this has been planned since the start, it won't see the light of day anytime soon due to other things having higher priority currently.

However, with that in mind, it turned out that the library page became entirely useless - just as useless as eMule's "shared files" page - there's simply no reason to go there if you can't do anything useful there except view your files. After some brainstorming, we realized that there was actually one subset of features that had been discussed in the past and which actually falls under the same category - namely, release/share manipulation. Basically, "release" is same as "sharing", except "release" is an active activity, while "sharing" is passive activity. Making Hydranode releaser-friendly and providing tools to aid both regular users as well as power-users perform releases has been planned since the start, and the library page is the right location in the UI for this functionality.

So the bottom line is that the library page (possibly renamed in the future) will serve two purposes - for downloader, it is a location where to view, sort, manage, play and burn the downloaded data; for those wishing to share content with others, either via passive (ed2k, gnutella) or active (bittorrent, ftp) means, it will provide means to do so in an effective way.

The statistics page got kicked completely from the interface. There's simply no justification for an entire page to contain only statistical data. The need for some statistics data is still present though, and this will be satisfied on frontpage (small graphs and such); extended statistics, if deemed nessecery, will simply become new tabs on the System page. The bottom line is that Statistics isn't an important component of the interface to justify button in the main navigation, but the functionality will still be available via other means, so as to avoid endless complaining of stats-freaks.

As I mentioned yesterday, I did initial layout of Settings page; after reviewing it with our designer, and doing some trivial corrections, it's ready for viewing, so here it is in it's current incarnation:


You also notice I added placeholder icons to the top toolbar; seems we'll be using 16x16px icons there after-all instead of the originally planned 24x24 icons, since 24x24 would simply be too large there and waste precious screen space.

Madcat, ZzZz