GDC server intermittent problem

[Steve Guttag]

Frank, I've never encountered needing to scroll its playback screen. Now, the IMS3000, that is one, in its current form, where it is like looking through a slit to see what is in the playlist. On the SR-1000, it's all there on the right side. Or, perhaps you are referring to the play-by-play of it connecting/loading/playing, with time stamps?

[Ryan Gallagher]

The SR1000 control screens are fixed size and too long to fit on a standard laptop screen. It's a square window (height==width) so the bottom of the screen is always off of the current screen unless you drag your mouse down to see it. And stuff is always scrolling down past the bottom of the screen so you have to do that.

If they made their window adapt to the current size of the web browser window, that would be a whole lot better.

I think a photo would useful to share Frank. Perhaps it depends on the desktop resolution in use?

[Frank Cox]

Or, perhaps you are referring to the play-by-play of it connecting/loading/playing, with time stamps?

That. Plus the "sm connected" status message and current time at the bottom which you can't see unless you scroll down. And the "close" button on the ingest screen. And I'm sure there's more if I think about it further.

They're all past the bottom of the screen unless I scroll down to find them.

[Steve Guttag]

Hmmm. I just looked at some of the ones I'm able to log into (remotely). All of them I could see the whole thing without having to scroll. Now, if I shrunk the window down, then yes the scroll bars appear. But, I could shrink the magnification too so it all appears again. Would it be better if it automatically rearranged itself? Perhaps. I've found that those windows that can do that, also tend to have things rearrange such that some items disappear or locate themselves in odd locations.

Clearly, they were used to their 4:3 display of the original and merely ported it to HTML and then applied a Doremi "Classic" structure to it.

For the most part, I'm actually pretty cool with the SR-1000's UI. Again, how they handled the automation cues in the Edit screen is one of my bigger beefs...mostly because they made a change to cause it to be worse than the prior form. The other HUGE beef is nagging people about the warranty. That should have an option to turn off. Then again, most of my SR-1000 installations were sold with a 10-year warranty...so that nag is kicked way down the road. Kudos to GDC for offering a 10-year warranty option.

[Frank Cox]

I just set up next week's movie and paid special attention to what I was scrolling to accomplish that task.

I'm using an older HP laptop with Firefox set to the full screen size.

On ingest, when you select the source the list of directories and dcp's that shows up on the left side goes down past the bottom of the screen so you have to scroll both the window and the list of directories to see what's past the bottom of the screen. The Close button is below the screen as well, as mentioned above.

On the playlist edit screen the cue "insert" button is below the bottom of the screen unless you scroll down to find it.

On the Status screen the "shutdown" button is below the bottom of the screen unless you scroll down to find it.

And I'm sure there's a lot more but that's enough examples to show that, as I said, their fixed window size is too long for the screen.

This type of fixed window screen handling is simply sloppy programming, similar to their sloppy programming that makes the directory list on the ingest screen non-resizable so you can't see the full titles unless you click on each individual entry. The three reasons for it that I can see are don't give a damn, laziness, and reluctance on their part to pay a programmer for the extra hour or two it would take to do it right.