07-21-14, 12:29 AM | #1 |
First impressions
Just noticed Minion was a thing again (actually Seerah pointed it out) and decided to try it out. Here's how it went:
#1 - The download button doesn't work when Google Analytics is blocked. I can honestly say this is the first time I've ever encountered a website where something actually didn't work because Skynet was blocked, but okay, right-click and save the file works too. #2 - Okay, installation complete. Low contrast. Low contrast everywhere. I can't read half the text in the app without squinting and leaning in toward the screen. #3 - There's a button at the top that seems to be two semi-transparent buttons stacked on top of each other, labelled "Update All" and "Auto Update". See attachment. #4 - Upon entering my username and password I got a "Login failed. Please check your userid and password." message. After clearing the field to try re-typing my username with a capital P in case it was case-sensitive, I noticed the field was actually labeled "Email" and not "Username". Okay, after going into my settings to see which email account I used on here, I was able to log in. #4a - Do you guys have any plans to support username-based login in the future? #4b - Please use persistent form labels. I know these in-field labels that vanish as soon as you focus the field are all the rage these days, but when I'm tabbing through form fields (I guess the iPhone generation don't know what the tab key does?) I'm not scanning ahead, and if I get distracted for a second after focusing a field, I'm not going to remember what that label said. Hopefully this trend goes the way of the Under Construction gif soon. Also, dat low, low contrast. Too dark, can't read. #5 - Stuck on "Detecting WOWGame Installs" for about 15 minutes. The app updated itself after I logged in, so I'm pretty sure it's up to date. Build ID at the bottom says 02b2a4ed106cf3bc8d6a9394c917568c6f1654b and again -- guys, seriously, I can't read that. I literally had to screenshot and paste into GIMP and up the brightness and contrast to be able to see it well enough to type it out, and even then it was difficult due to the microscopic size. Closing thoughts: Overall impression was not positive. I'll try it again in a few days, because I understand it's still in beta, and all else being equal I'd rather use a WoWI app than a Curse app, but without some major UI changes to fix the low contrast and tiny font sizes, it's just not usable for me. System info: - Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, US English - 1920x1080 at 120dpi (the "Medium/125%" setting) on a 27" monitor - WoW installed in C:\Applications\World of Warcraft
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. |
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07-21-14, 01:16 AM | #2 |
After re-launching the app it found WoW, but took about 5 minutes to scan my installed addons. The Curse Client takes about 5-10 seconds to do the same thing, so I guess there's still some optimization to be done here.
More tiny text, okay, I expected that. It's also oddly fuzzy, like I'm looking at a medium-quality JPEG image instead of actual text. See attachment. Version boxes aren't wide enough to show long version strings (eg. Git hashes). There's definitely room in the UI to make these boxes (and everything else) a lot bigger. Please do that so I can see all the things. Scrolling through the list of my installed is fairly laggy, and the response time seems variable, producing a rather disorienting effect. My GTX 750 Ti is more than capable of handling a simple scroll box, so I'm guessing this is just another area that's not optimized yet, or possibly a limitation of whatever GUI framework you're using. Development copies (anything with .svn or .git folder inside, or wowi:revision keyword in the TOC, and probably the Curse TOC keywords too, and possibly any addons where the currently logged-in user is listed as an author) should be ignored. All of my own addons are being shown as having updates available. Other incorrect version detections:
On the plus side, actually updating individual addons seemed to be noticably faster than in the Curse Client, so there's that! And I found that a couple of my WoWI-only addons were out of date, so those are now up to date. Edit: Speaking of fuzzy images, are you guys ever going to fix whatever your server is doing to uploaded images to reduce quality and increase filesize? I reported it years ago, and bumped it at least once, but nodoby ever responded, but I just noticed it again with the screenshot I attached.
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. Last edited by Phanx : 07-21-14 at 01:18 AM. |
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07-21-14, 10:50 AM | #3 | ||||||||
You should be able to copy and paste the buildid. In the future we will have the version number displayed. The buildid is just for this beta period.
I will comment on your 2nd post shortly. |
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07-21-14, 11:05 AM | #4 | |||||||
Thank you for this list. I will go over it in detail. Just one thing to keep in mind is that Minion only sees if the version number is different and if so it wants to update the AddOn so it can make sure you have the same version that is on our site. From then on it will keep track of updates as expected. We can certainly make this better when the version numbers are simple int's but when authors start mixing alpha into their versions Minion will only be able to tell if its different. Thats one of the reasons we display both numbers.
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07-21-14, 11:14 AM | #5 |
Almost forgot, I also want to thank you for taking the time and trying out the new Minion. I really appreciate you posting all this feedback!
We are really making Minion a focus of our development and plan to continue with improvements, fixes and new features. Last edited by Dolby : 07-21-14 at 11:19 AM. |
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07-22-14, 12:09 AM | #6 | |||
On the addon info rows I circled in the Minion screenshot, the bigger text only measures 10px high, and the smaller text 8px -- for someone with normal eyesight that's probably at the bottom end of the readable range, but I could only read it with a lot of squinting and leaning toward the screen. I do wear glasses, but there's only so much they can correct for astigmatism, which makes it difficult to focus on fine line details like text.
I'm not sure why Minion thinks that 80 addons need updates, though I did notice that the number decremented each time I updated an addon. About 80 addons were shown on the list (the rest, I guess, aren't hosted on WoWI at all) but only about 25 were actually shown as needing updates, and most of those were my own addons, which are SVN working copies rather than actually out of date.
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. |
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07-22-14, 04:28 AM | #7 | ||
Back at home now, so I ran it again.
Also, it's now showing that no addons have available updates. While technically this is correct, shouldn't it still be considering all the addons it flagged as being out of date last time to still be out of date, since I didn't update or ignore them? (On a side note, the "Update All" button should be disabled if there aren't any updates available. I didn't actually click it because I didn't want to find out whether it would try to reinstall all of my addons or something, but it responds to mouseover and appears to be clickable.)
Scrolling in the list of installed addons is still laggy. If I sit there and click through one notch on the mouse wheel at a time, or click the arrow at the bottom of the scroll bar, in nice measured intervals, it responds immediately, but while rolling the mouse wheel or dragging the scroll bar, there's a very noticable lag between the input and the visible scrolling action, and that lag is very variable, which is the most annoying part. Another thing I noticed while scrolling -- in either list -- is that the mouseover highlight lags a bit behind the scrolling. The list scrolls by 3 items at a time, so if you move the mouse over the 4th visible item, the 4th row is highlighted, but if you then scroll by one mousewheel tick, the 4th row is still highlighted (because the mouse is still over it) but the 1st row is also highlighted for a fraction of a second, since it was previously the 4th row. This produces a noticable flashing effect during continous scrolling. More detailed system specs for reference: - Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 - AMD FX-6100 (6 cores @ 3.3 GHz) - 16 GB RAM (but 8 GB is occupied with a RAM disk, so basically 8 GB RAM for the system) - GeForce GTX 750 Ti (yes, drivers are up to date, I just got it last week :P) Let me know if there are any logs I can send you to help pinpoint why the installed addon list is so laggy. Edit: Also, the inability to resize the window is driving me nuts for some reason. I'd really love to be able to see more listed items at once!
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. Last edited by Phanx : 07-22-14 at 04:32 AM. |
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08-11-14, 12:19 PM | #8 |
Just installed Minion again at work (noticed some addons on my WoWI favorites were updated, so I thought I'd try checking for updates in Minion, since there haven't been any addon updates since I first posted this thread) and came up with some new complaints:
During installation: (1) Please include an option to not create a Start Menu folder. On first run: (1) "Detecting WoWGame Installs" still takes about 2 full minutes, but at least it doesn't completely hang the app anymore. (2) I was prompted to back up my addons. This prompt could use a bit of explanatory text, I think. Is it going to create a ZIP file somewhere on my computer? If so, where? Or is it a cloud-based backup like the Curse Client's backup/sync feature? If so, what information is it going to upload? Why does Minion want me to make a backup, anyway? Is it about to wreck my addons folder? (3) There is a dire need for an additional "okay, I found these WoW installations, which ones do you want to scan for addons?" prompt between the "detecting installs" and "detecting addons" stages. Minion found two ancient copies of WoW on a mapped network drive, and scanning their addons took forever (16 minutes, to be exact). (4) During the "detecting addons" stage, Minion appeared to detect a number of addons that I don't have installed (and aren't present in that aforementioned network copies either) such as "Raio X" (which appears to be an old Portuguese version of Examiner, which I do have installed) and "Grid Pack" (an extremely outdated bundle including Grid and some Grid plugins; I do have Grid installed, obviously, but I don't have any the plugins from the bundle installed). Unfortunately, by the time this long long process finished, I forgot about this, and removed the network installs before checking their addon lists to see if Minion actually listed these mistmatches in the installed addons list. (5) The "Add Game" function doesn't seem to work. After selecting World of Warcraft and navigating to the game install path and clicking Select, the dialog closes, and nothing happens. Selecting the top-level program folder, the Interface folder, or the Interface/AddOns folder all yielded the same result. Also, the treeview for selecting a WoW folder is pretty buggy. About half the time when selecting a drive, the tree panel is just blank; I have to select a different drive and then re-select the desired drive to get a list. And when I do get a folder list, the order in which the folders are listed seems totally random. It's certainly not alphabetical, and doesn't appear to be chronological either, at least according to the created and modified dates on the folders I checked. (6) SVN working copies and Git repositories are still shown as needing updating. This makes the "Update All" feature completely useless for addon authors. (7) Addons needing updates should be at the top of the list. Scrolling through ~150 addons in a window that only shows 5 at a time (and only scrolls by 3 at a time) is extremely painful. (8) Tooltips on version numbers don't appear immediately. I just thought they didn't work, until I accidentally left the cursor over a version number, and noticed that a tooltip appeared after 1-2 full seconds. (9) Clicking on an addon immediately pops up an overlay with info about the addon. This is pretty annoying, as clicking on a window is a very common method of bringing the clicked app back into focus. (10) Scrolling in the addons list is more consistent now. However, responsiveness in general is very bad across the whole app. Scrolling still has a noticable delay between the time I turn the mousewheel and the time the UI actually scrolls. Clicking on most things (game in the left column, installed/get more/options tabs across the top, sort dropdown) has a noticable lag time (0.5-1 seconds). Typing in the search box is extremely slow (when seaching on the "get more" list, there's about a 1-second freeze after every letter typed in the box). Specific misidentifications: AckisRecipeList_QuickScan was marked as needing an update from 5.4.0-1.0.8 to 5.4.0-1.0.8 (same version). ArchyFix (a private unreleased addon) was misidentified as Archy 1.6.3 Fix, an ancient fan update from 2011 (which should really have been moved to the Outdated category by now). Some kind of basic size comparison on ambiguous name matches could easily tell that an addon that's 308 Kb zipped cannot possibly be the correct match for a 3 KB (uncompressed) addon. Alternatively, you could copy the Curse Client's approach -- prompt the user, tell them what you guessed, and ask them to confirm it before you show the addon in the list as ready to update. Bazooka was marked as needing an update from v2.4.0 to v2.3.1 (older version). OmniCC was marked as needing an update from 5.4.3 to 5.4.1 (older version). Postal was marked as needing an update from 3.5.1 to v3.5.0 (older version, extra letter). On second run: Startup time seems to have gotten worse since I last tried it. Having an SSD at home vs HDD at work is probably a large contributing factor here, though, so I'll run it again later at home to get a better comparison. Though I did not update everything that was marked as needing an update on the first run, no addons are now shown as needing updates. I guess having seen the update in the app before is marking it as "done" but that's obviously not correct behavior -- if I didn't actually update the addon, then it's still in need of an update.
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. Last edited by Phanx : 08-11-14 at 12:27 PM. |
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08-11-14, 01:48 PM | #9 | |
Some more misidentifications from an older installation (nothing updated in ~6 months) of WoW: Badapples wrongly identified as "Cirk's Badapples - Fan Update" (last update 2010) Edit: Just realized this is especially bad because Badapples (which I maintain) includes a WoWI-ID field in its TOC file, so there should be no way for Minion to be confused about which addon on the site it matches. Examiner wrongly identified as "Raio X" (an old Portuguese-language fork of Examiner) No sign of the "Grid Pack" that showed up during the initial scan. Other issues: The loading progress dialog remained faintly visible, and blocked mouse interaction over a large portion of the app. See attached screenshot. This didn't happen again after restarting the app. Listing 4 installations simply as "World of Warcraft" is kind of useless... maybe the install path could be shown in smaller text underneath each one, or you could go the Curse Client route and let the user pick a label for each installation. I noticed after launching the app a third time that available updates were still shown for the network install after I'd seen them in the app before and not applied them. First install still doesn't show any of the updates I didn't apply.
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. Last edited by Phanx : 08-11-14 at 06:19 PM. Reason: Forgot attachment |
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08-11-14, 07:11 PM | #10 | |||||||||||
(7) Addons needing updates should be at the top of the list. Scrolling through ~150 addons in a window that only shows 5 at a time (and only scrolls by 3 at a time) is extremely painful. (8) Tooltips on version numbers don't appear immediately. I just thought they didn't work, until I accidentally left the cursor over a version number, and noticed that a tooltip appeared after 1-2 full seconds. They would not receive the updates if it was enabled by default. What you can do now is right click on the AddOn under the installed list and choose "ignore updates".
Would you mind sharing your AddOn folder with me when you have time? Send it to [email protected] if you have time. Thanks. |
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08-12-14, 03:37 PM | #11 | ||||||
I guess I should clarify, in case it makes a difference, that the network shares Minion is scanning are mapped to drive letters; it's not going out and scanning all the shares on all ~50 machines on the network.
4 copies of WoW, as shown in the screenshot I attached. Local install, local beta install, and 2 network installs.
I'll include a second-run log in another post shortly, along with the first-run log where it's scanning network shares and misidentifying Examiner as "Raio X" etc.
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. |
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08-12-14, 04:53 PM | #12 |
After removing the .minion folder in my Windows user folder and running the app again:
(1) No minion.log was generated, either before or after exiting the app. After exiting the app and launching it again, a log was generated. Is there something special I need to do to generate a log file on the first run? (2) Fan updates seem to be posing a problem. 4 addons were misidentified as outdated fan update versions, and 1 was misidentified as an "alpha update" version that has its own separate project page on the site. (3) The initial scan hung on Detected 'Stuf Unit Frames (and Raid)' for about 2 minutes. Some other addons seemed to take a while, too, but none as long as this. There didn't seem to be any pattern; at first I thought it was taking a long time to scan large addons, but it also stuck on some tiny ones, and breezed right through DBM. (4) Re: Disappearing updates on subsequent runs. After wiping the settings and letting it start over, it seems to be showing the correct updates for the local install all the time, but is losing track of most (but not all) updates for the two network installs. (5) Attached ZIP file contains log files from various runs:
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Retired author of too many addons. Message me if you're interested in taking over one of my addons. Don’t message me about addon bugs or programming questions. Last edited by Phanx : 08-12-14 at 04:56 PM. |
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