SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Syncronized Row Highlight / Single Side-bySide comparison

#1

LOVE Jaikoz - an amazing amount of functionality packed in there! And the UI is extremely efficient - takes a little bit of learning, but any good UI for experts is that way - and Jaikoz is very efficient and useful.

ANYWAY: the one place I get lost is in scrolling and comparing hundreds of files. I love the interface - you can take in so much information in one screen, esp. the highlighting of differences. But it can be hard for my old eyes to track which line in the top corresponds to the one in the bottom, esp. for the currently selected track.

Some suggestions for a minor improvement in this area:

  1. highlight the currently selected row, in both the top & bottom panes
    Not sure how to do this, with all the highlighting already in play - maybe at least a heavy frame or underline? larger/bold font? reverse video?

2a) add a new panel to the bottom: a side-by-side (well, top/bottom) of the selected original & fixed data - maybe repeat only the two lines (old/new values) on top of each other, in the info panel at the bottom - this would make the deltas extremely obvious, and make scrolling through with cursor keys easy

2b) same as #2a, but only show those fields that are changing in the bottom panel (ie, hide columns that are the same). But you might want to keep track name and artist regardless, for identification!

Anyway - great product - this would be icing on the cake!

#2

Thanks for your kind words

We now have a Jaikoz issue tracker:
1> Is already a reported issue http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-30

2a> I think there is no point showing fields that have not changed
2b> I don’t understand how this differs from the existing Changes tab.

#3

2b> Yes, the Changes pane is similar in concept - sorry, I was not familiar with this pane, as I used it incorrectly while first learning - the visible fields did not change when I clicked on the top pane, so I ignored it.

BUT, there are key differences:

  1. orientation: my suggestion is to do this laid out like the top tables (fields running L->R, with 2 rows being the old and the new value), This would take less space

  2. there is no highlighting of differences in the Changes pane (although easy to fix)

  3. the fields in the Changes pane are not configurable (order or inclusion), meaning some important fields can disappear off the screen, and/or require scrolling

  4. part of the power I love in the upper table is seeing the fields aligned vertically - values would be much closer using that style, than the way they are in the Changes pane. i.e. individual characters would be aligned - you could instantly see differences in field length, individual characters, artwork, etc. You could even make the row taller so that artwork could be larger for comparison, without losing too much more real estate. (comparing art in the changes browser is not easy)

The layout in the changes pane requires much more visual scanning: left-right, down, then repeat; this new way would be one scan left->right
\t- it’s also about mental effort: the Changes pane means you have to read/remember one entire value, then read the other
\t- the new layout uses visual pattern matching (ie does the top shape match the bottom), which the brain is much more efficient at, no memory required. It’s handled at a lower level in the the cognitive ‘stack’

Example: in the current view/edit table, you can scan down the artwork column for an album and tell instantly if all the artwork is the same, or one is different. This is the efficiency I want to harness. If the text in all fields were the same, the scan could be done in < .1 second. Not so with the vertical Changes pane.

A further optimization to the above idea would be to eliminate the columns that were the same - thus more columns would fit onscreen without scrolling horizontally, with less visual scanning effort. Perhaps you could configure each possible field with an ‘always show/only show when different’ toggle setting (you might want to default the title and artist to ‘always show’, just so the user knows which track they’re on if only looking at this new panel)

Again, fantastic interface already - this would just be icing on the cake and take it to the next level.