New issue
Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.
By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.
Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account
Make advanced options discoverable #180
Comments
This got discussed in the blog-comments https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-imager-update-to-v1-6/ |
I have to say you guys make a lot of disappointingly user-hostile decisions. You don't let users resize the window (a very standard feature), you hide the option to set the freaking wifi password. That is so beginner unfriendly!
If by "discussed" you mean "almost everyone agreed it was bone-headed", then sure. Look at the comments from your users!
I'd also like to reply to one of the two (that I counted) replies in favour:
Well for a start you literally just forgot the shortcut!, but secondly how are you supposed to remember the shortcut if you never even knew it existed? This goes against basically every UX principle ever. I could understand it if the options were super dangerous, but we're talking about setting up wifi here! What world are you living in where you think people with a Raspberry Pi are intimidated by wifi? Anyway I'll leave you to your crazy designs. |
@maxnet / @ghollingworth Is it worth mentioning the magic advanced-mode key-combo in https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/blob/qml/README.md ? |
If you actually want users to know about this very useful feature then just put a button for it in the app. Very few people will read the Readme but everyone uses the app. If you don't want users to know about this feature then you should think hard about why, because it's clearly insane to write a feature that you don't want anyone to actually discover. |
Yes, everybody working at Raspberry Pi is clearly insane 😜 Welcome to the madhouse 🙃 |
It's not even been 2 weeks and I just had to look up the key combo already. To do that I had to first find the blog post. I'll accept I have a poor memory but that aside, this was by no means resolved in the blog comments. I fully appreciate these extra options might be overwhelming/confusing to our newest users and we absolutely don't want that, but I think there is a middle ground here. Could we discuss what that might look like? |
The shortcut sort of was the middle ground. |
A command line option? Like I don't use a Mac so I don't know why that is non-trivial but I'll take your word for it. Could we add the command line option alongside the magic keyboard shortcut? Then those young Mac users with their reliable memories can deal with remembering the cheat-code they need to enter. Everyone else can start the program in a mode that has a helpful button. Personally I think a button with an informational message at the top would suffice. New pi users should still be able to read a warning message. |
Well, on Mac the application executable is not in the path. Keyboard combo was also changed to "shift" + "ctrl" + "X", to be able to have the same combination on MacOS. |
OK, thanks for that explanation regarding Mac. So to clarify, is a button with a very clear warning really off the table? Such a button could be small and placed in the bottom corner to reduce the chance of being accidentally pressed. Something like this: If someone still feels this could lead to anyone accidentally changing the advanced options, what if one of the advanced options was to always show this button? So then you only have to remember/lookup the magic shortcut once. If that is still somehow disagreeable, you could have the button hidden unless the I'm really struggling to see how this adjustment makes the tool noticeably more confusing for new users. And it's much better for those other users who do want to easily enable SSH, change the hostname, configure WiFi etc. Would you accept a pull request with such a change? |
So, would you accept a pull request with such a change? If not, what could we adjust to make it more apealing to those in charge here? |
For the moment we've already made our decision about how we're going to support this functionality. As said many times before we do not want to change the user interface at the moment since this is the easiest way for people to image SD cards. When an easier way appears we may then make this a more complex interface for more advanced users, but until then we will not be changing it. You are free to build and distribute your own version (as long as you remove the Raspberry Pi logos and wordmark from the front page.) |
Disappointing but of course that's your decision to make. Thanks for taking the time to reply. |
Hey,
Er - I am actually considering making my own version, since there are about 6 standing (I was actually got here thinking we could join efforts and make a smoother CI/CD using github actions or something more accessible) |
In general, those requests have sat idle while I think about how best to put them in. In the end, the more images that do the same thing (home automation or 3D printer for example), I'm just going to add in a secondary list. For example:
|
Nice work guysoft! @raspberrypi why did you delete his message? If there's a good reason then you should probably say before people make assumptions. If there isn't then I would strongly consider reinstating it ASAP before people realise! |
Hey, just to update that I spoke to Gordon and all is good. No need to make any assumptions :) |
Hold the phone, has this feature now been added ? |
Yeh. It was. Great. Thanks. |
I submitted two issues (#178 and #179) to do automatic setup of SSH and wifi. Turns out that feature already exists, which is fantastic!
Unfortunately it's completely undiscoverable. There's no way to know it exists unless you magically already know.
There should be some visual indication that the option is available - "do you want to set up advanced options?" sort of thing.
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: