Opinions wanted: FujiNet Config (Atari) UI enhancement/change.

[Schadret]

I'm working on some enhancements to the FujiNet config program for the Atari and wanted to get the community's opinion on one of the changes I'm looking to make to the UI.

 

When you mount an Image to a Drive Slot you are currently shown the full path of the image - however due to certain size limitations you only see the first 35 characters. On TNFS servers that are starting to use more and more subdirectories this makes the display, in my opinion, unusable.

 

In this screenshot, 3 images are mounted - the only one where you can see the actual full name of the image is the one in Slot 1 because the full path was < 35 characters and fit.

 

 

Since it's not obvious due to the way it's displayed, the other 2 images are:

 

The image in Slot 3 is "/ATARI/networking/CHATARI-0.8-IRC-Client.atr"

The image in Slot 5 is "/ATARI/Holmes_CD1/ATR Games/Games_A/Aardvark.atr"

 

My proposed change is to just display the image name itself, stripped of the path. That turns the above into this:

 

 

Down the road I want to look into the Atari side having access to the host and the full path the image came from and then figure out a way to display that.. but that's a larger enhancement (right now it doesn't actually have that data, it only has access to the 35 character string returned by the FujiNet, so I'd have to get into changing stuff at a lower level. In other words even if I wanted to rearrange the screen above to let text wrap around, the full file name beyond 35 characters isn't available to the program (another enhancement I want to make down the road)).

 

It's also possible to do something in-between - for path+image lengths < 35 chars I could show the whole thing, and for ones > 35 just the image name.. or something like that.

 

Thoughts? I personally think that the image name itself is more important to see than part of the path and/or truncated image name but want to hear opinions of users.

 

[mozzwald]

20 minutes ago, Schadret said:

I personally think that the image name itself is more important to see than part of the path and/or truncated image name

This makes sense to me, image filename is more important than the path

[+Stephen]

1 hour ago, Schadret said:

I personally think that the image name itself is more important to see than part of the path and/or truncated image name

Agreed.  If you really want to get fancy, you can make the lines of text that are too big to display scroll back & forth.  Not sure how much RAM you've got to play with in the config program, this is just a suggestion, not an ask.

[+mytek]

3 hours ago, Schadret said:

Thoughts? I personally think that the image name itself is more important to see than part of the path and/or truncated image name but want to hear opinions of users.

I also agree. However, take a look at the loader in Jon's U1MB BIOS for a way to display more when arrowing down to a given selection (hint: per Steve's suggestion, it scrolls to show the entire path).

 

Actually there are quite a few things in Jon's BIOS that would make perfect sense to implement for FujiNet, such as remembering the last directory you were in after launching an app and then later coming back into the menu. And for those that don't want it to remember, there is an enable/disable for that feature. It would be beneficial for someone with a U1MB and SIDE cart (or XEL-CFx) to study all that Jon implemented

 

[bfollowell]

I agree with the others. Barring scrolling names with path, etc., then I think the actual filename is the most important part to keep.

 

[Schadret]

10 hours ago, mytek said:

I also agree. However, take a look at the loader in Jon's U1MB BIOS for a way to display more when arrowing down to a given selection (hint: per Steve's suggestion, it scrolls to show the entire path).

 

Actually there are quite a few things in Jon's BIOS that would make perfect sense to implement for FujiNet, such as remembering the last directory you were in after launching an app and then later coming back into the menu. And for those that don't want it to remember, there is an enable/disable for that feature. It would be beneficial for someone with a U1MB and SIDE cart (or XEL-CFx) to study all that Jon implemented

 

Thanks, I'll take a look.

 

One thing to point out - the SIO call to the Fuji from the Atari to get the mounted image names has a set buffer size and can only return 35 characters for the filename.. I can manipulate what's sent, but still only have 35 characters to work with, for now. Increasing that buffer and being able to send more data is a larger enhancement (it may not be that difficult, but it would be new territory for me so I'm just starting to investigate it), so I figure this is a good first step.

 

Ideally I'd like the Atari side to have access to the full path, the image name, and the host that it was mounted from - that way when browsing a host I will be able to figure out "oh, I already have this image mounted" and show additional info in the host browser (as requested here: https://github.com/FujiNetWIFI/fujinet-config/issues/20), plus show more info on the main screen as you suggest above.

 

Thanks for the input!

[flashjazzcat]

Showing the start and end of long strings with the discarded middle characters signified by an ellipsis (...) is another option.

[E474]

I was wondering about a light weight config program, as I understand things, you need a 32K machine minimum, but you could fit the config program on an 8/16K machine (you might have to page in code though). This would be going for a 6502 re-write, so less portable to other systems.

[_The Doctor__]

another route is a 64 column software display that gets tossed out when you leave the tool, since the config should clean up after itself leaving much of anything behind at exit anyway