Bugzilla – Bug 6572
No message on the web interface when there's no player connected
Last modified: 2009-09-08 09:30:08 UTC
GateX didn't like this. The only indicator there is is the empty player selector top right. Possible solutions: a.) display this text by default in the playlist pane. Pro: Simple. As soon as it loads the current player's playlist the message will disappear. If there's no player, no playlist will be loaded, thus the message will stay. Con: SC doesn't automatically select a player when these appear (we've had this, but it lead to various issues with selecting the wrong player etc. if available). Thus even though players might be available from the selector, the message would still say it's not available. b.) open a popup or something giving the user the same information plus the hint to select a player from the drop-down. Pro: the message is not sticky, but still clearly visible to the user. Con: a bit more of work. No localized text available for the additional "select from list" message. Dean, Brian: what do you think about these?
The playlist pane seems like the right place for this information to me (though that might be because I'm used to it. It isn't modal and doesn't prevent the user from getting to settings, etc... It's not clear to me the behavior when the player does eventually connect. Can you explain a little more?
The new skin tries to be too intelligent about handling disappearing servers. With the old skins, a disappearing server would create a 404 or something. It's obvious for the user that he has to reload the page. Default uses background updates and tries to gracefully recover from connectivity loss. But as this doesn't give the user a clear signal that the server meanwhile has died or restarted, we don't want it to reconnect to the first best player available. Or, if a player has disappeared temporarily, reconnect to a different player, as this might lead to surprising results (waking up your wife when you wanted to silently play some music in the living room). In a nutshell: we don't automatically select players, unless the last player used before server or client restart is available. see bug 5621 for details And a message which isn't forced on the users eyes isn't read. I hate modal dialogs. But we're talking about a message the user shouldn't miss. Once he's clicked that ok button he can do whatever he wants. Just not complain he didn't know the player was missing.
Yeah I think messaging in the playlist pane would be fine, especially since they will eventually have to use that pane. Maybe they know their player is disconnected, in which case a pop up would be annoying. Maybe we could even have a "refresh SqueezeCenter" link in this message.
Let's go a.). We probably only need some text change, telling the user that he can select available players from the drop down?
change 16333 and later
This bug is being closed since it was resolved for a version which is now released! Please download the new version of SqueezeCenter (formerly SlimServer) at http://www.slimdevices.com/su_downloads.html If you are still seeing this bug, please re-open it and we will consider it for a future release.