People love Apple so I guess it stands to reason the more ‘Apple-Like’ you are the more people will love you…until they hate on you for trying to copy Apple.
I would prefer to be more like Linux…ie user configurable. Let users configure pages and ‘clean-up’ remove menu picks they just don’t use. Even add simple color choices for themes, why not get fancy and add a color palate. Speaking of Linux, it appears the color scheme Roon is trying to copy is from a Shell Theme called Paper, made for Gnome. The blue and two shades of grey are close, but they are off, making both the light and dark versions not pleasant to look at.
Paper Theme, the blue pops just a bit more and the greys are slightly lighter and darker which gives a better contrast.
Either way, the Apple philosophy of ‘take what I give you and like it’ should be avoided…but then some love this about Apple too.
Oh well, guess I’ll just have to get used to looking at this funky grey…or just look at the screen less.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
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Totally agreed. I don’t necessarily care if it “looks like” apple although I am not one of the i-faithful but I do not want anything nearly as inflexible as an apple product.
I recall having read from one of the Roon team on the concept of user customization of screens is that it would be too confusing for a certain base of their users. Same with a streamlined deletion process (though I think ‘dangerous’ might have been used). Um, then perhaps in this day and age of software and digital technology, those few users who might get confused by a few simple UI options or can’t properly delete somehting should stick to vinyl then?
Instead, I feel like the interface is somebody else’s kitchen - why in the heck would you put the spatulas next to the sink and not the stove? And for a lot of users it involves constant opening and closing of drawers for the simplest things (like deletion of streaming titles). Don’t put the food prep knives in a drawer behind the plates - put them on a holder right next to the counter. Of course some may never want to prepare their own food, or even go into the kitchen, so give them a nice default ‘restaurant’ to go to, but give the rest of us a kitchen that we can streamline to our needs.
And if Roon want to stick to the Apple model - this is what you get - fair enough. But like another poster said above with a hardware case analogy, if I came home one day and my Naim amp suddenly had a gray stripe painted along the bottom and a bunch of unneccesary leds and knobs added to the front in order to give it the apperance of more value then I’d be upset too. Same great sound and functionality, but no matter, it’’s not something I’d want to look at day and night.
Roon’s UI has been semi-problematic on some portions of some screens since its inception…for the approx. 5% of males who are significantly red/green color blind. I posted about it eons ago.
–edit-- actually, as far as inadvertent torturing of the color-blind goes, Roon isn’t at all bad. The tiny SQ colored stars are a complete fail, but you can always click on it for a description.
The new footer in dark mode (which is what I use) is god-awful & ugly – but I think that’s been mentioned before…
If you had started to describe where to put the microwave or tea towels, I would have thrown the flag for an over-extended metaphor.
But, the kitchen thing is spot on! I understood immediately what you meant.
Question: do you think you’ll have the same discomfort two weeks from now when you become more familiar, or will it always feel like it needs “your touch”?
I keep switching between the light and dark themes to see which one I can tolerate the longest.
I think I’ll just pick music and minimize the screen, between the grey hash boxes that should be pics of artists, and all the grey in light and dark shades, I’m getting depressed.
I tried this, but the light mode has always been terrible (for me), while the dark mode has now been desecrated. So yeah – minimize it & make it go away…only way not to constantly sip the bitter dregs of this new UI.
Unless you’re color blind or have contrast sensitivity. That’s why I really wish Roon allowed customization of font colors and size. I can see white and orange text on black/dark grey very very well. Blue on black not so much. And much of the small fonts used are very hard to read for me.
Well as it is some of the fonts have become so small now it doesn’t matter what color is used for readability. But look beyond the blue/black of the Android Phone app for its layout.
Surely the color scheme was changed for the sake of change. Offer suggestions like having a color palate so users can pick their own color? This surely can’t be a bad suggestion and who would say “No I don’t want to choose my own color”. In this day and age the “code” required to implement anything is available with ease, so its not like someone has to spend months writing it from scratch.
In the near term, how do you feel about allowing users to pick their own color and adjust their own font size? Would you say this would meet both long and short term obectives or is this short sighted?
this is planned for our next bugfix release… We got a lot of good feedback from this thread, and you’ll see it shortly.
It won’t meet short term objectives since new users or users that don’t want to touch the interface options will still have a bad experience.
It won’t meet long term objectives because we want to make a product that “just works”, not one that has mandatory tweaking. Obviously, we can always do better.
Got it, so allowing a user to choose a color “IF” the default color is not acceptable is not good.
New users and users who don’t want to touch the interface obviously don’t have too, do they? Esp, if they like it out the box.
And allowing users to change the font size “IF” the font is too small is not a good idea either. Again they don’t have too if they don’t want too, so I don’t understand how this ‘tweaking’ is mandatory? But you know me, my small brain has a hard time processing things.
But then, how can you ‘do better’ without allowing users to make fonts large if they can’t read them?
Is it possible to create a UI that meets the needs of ‘all’ users and at the same time be hard-coded without flexibility? Maybe so, Apple did it. Let me try to stretch my thinking a bit…is Roon after a homogeneous product UI, such that if these things were allowed it would destroy the “Brand Image”? Thinking Apple here again.
I’m starting to sense a bit of contrarianism here…
Danny, our dialog never ends well…we can’t seem to agree on anything.
We allow for 2 themes. Light and Dark. We aren’t going to do more customization for the colors.
Our opinions clearly differ on what products need to do or be. Nothing wrong with that. I see on your website you give many accolades to some Linux (ui) music players. For me, they miss the point completely and focus on the wrong aspects of library management and playback. I’m OK with having different opinions.
Actually, my request was not for ‘more colors’ but the ability for users to choose colors from a palate. Totally different.
I think it was the messenger that caused this stance…sorry.
The only other thing I can think of is Roon wants to maintain a strict “Brand Image” which does not allow for different colors for all users. Much like why Google will not change its GMail color scheme or even allow users to choose colors for the Android devices…its Red and its going to stay Red.
It’s strange only because you don’t have my insight here.
We used to have 4 color themes and it was a disaster. Even 2 are hard to maintain. In this release, dark theme was tested for blatent errors, but not run by enough of the team that makes subjective decisions about look and feel. Many of the complaints of 1.6 stem from subjectivly really terrible colors of the footer in dark theme.
Is this possible to fix and avoid in the future? Yes. But I’d rather spend our R&D resources on other problems.
