PND criticism


If there were GUI tools for reading/writing and creating PND files I think this discussion about user friendliness would not be happening.


Just my thoughts. I may be right, could just as easily be wrong.

Of course you're right, and those tools are all being planned. However, before doing the tools, the system itself has to be created. That was basically just finished a few days ago.


We are getting more and more features these days that all can be done without breaking anything because PNDs have been carefully thought to work like that right from the beginning.
 
Some lad did build a Windows GUI tool (in .net IIRC) .. and had a beta out; whatever happened to that/him anyway?


jeff
 
I hope this helps to make the Pandora a bit more user friendly (fact sheets for 15 console emulators). Suggestions are welcome.





I will also create an emulator pack with all these emulators.


EDIT: Console emulator pack added to post.

Those are really nice and look very professional ! I imagine it took some time. Really appreciate it :)


BTW what software did you use (just plain openoffice/word ?)
 
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Some lad did build a Windows GUI tool (in .net IIRC) .. and had a beta out; whatever happened to that/him anyway?


jeff

If that is no longer alive is someone else currently (on the verge of) creating a GUI to PND creation?


If not I might give it a shot, although I tend to use Delphi for such things, but I may look into Qt.


Although probably Windows users are the ones having the most trouble handling PND files anyway (I expect most Linux users to be more or less fluent with the command line and there is pnd_make for Linux which is stupidly easy to use).


foxblock out
 
I made some scripts and context menus to pack and unpack SquashFS based PND files. Don't know about anyone else.

Yep I noticed those, but John Doe Average Windows user likes his GUIs (I do at least) and using these scripts still needs at least some explanation about how PNDs are structured.


EDIT: Okay that sounds wrong, I don't want to belittle Windows users, I am one myself. But sometimes I like (and I know that a lot of Win users, too) a GUI more than using the command-line.


But if there is no need for such a program in general it does not need to be created, it just seemed to me that some people would like to have such a thing (maybe it was mostly Dunny playing dumb, though ;) ).
 
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Now that I know that PNDs can be opened with 7zip, I'm all good. I think more people should know that little tidbit.
 
Now that I know that PNDs can be opened with 7zip, I'm all good. I think more people should know that little tidbit.

I just associated .PND with 7zip and made an icon so it works really well to just double click it. On my Ubuntu machine I have "Mount PND" and Unmount PND" scripts so I just right click and select Scripts -> "Mount PND" and it opens up like a thumbdrive.
 
I hope this helps to make the Pandora a bit more user friendly (fact sheets for 15 console emulators). Suggestions are welcome.





I will also create an emulator pack with all these emulators.


EDIT: Console emulator pack added to post.

Those are really nice and look very professional ! I imagine it took some time. Really appreciate it :)


BTW what software did you use (just plain openoffice/word ?)
Only PPT :lol:
 
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I personally wish the Pandora had used Zip as everyone can make/open/edit zip files and it's an established format. (keep it simple and all that).

What are you talking about? Why should any KISS grandma open a pnd or a zip file? For any simple pure just use user it does not matter, just click something.

Take the dev hat off. This does not make it easy for users.


Zip would have worked, not required any extra work, and everyone would have been able to open and edit them.


I now see I'm never going to get my ideas for ease of use being the most important thing on the Pandora across.
Why do I have to spend hours trying to figure out PND weirdness,

I think i got your point of view. YOU are to lazy to learn about the PND specs, you want this easy to use thing for YOUR development, it is YOU who wants to avoid any extra work.


If you think of PNDs in this way, you have a lesser chance in understanding the concept, no chance for understanding the reasons why the things had been done the way they are done. Without this understanding usage will fail more often and this jumping over the stave will make you fall down the ladder.


I'm afraid your decision for your re-invention of the app store is based on the same reason.

And if a _developer_ has problems figuring pnds out..

It so sad. The PND System is the most innovating feature of the pandora, imho.


It has the potenial to spread over the world, being included into upstream distros, getting popular as the openpandoras plug'n'go technique for portable usb-stick apps. Magazines could include apps on CD/DVD, users could test/use those apps without any installing issues. Just the KISS thing craig is so crazy about.
 
On my Ubuntu machine I have "Mount PND" and Unmount PND" scripts so I just right click and select Scripts -> "Mount PND" and it opens up like a thumbdrive.
Sound like a couple of good candidates to be included into a PND-tools archive.
 
Hoo, boy. A lot of hot air and a lot of too-fast conclusions. I have to mirror someone earlier in the thread (can't remember who, now), who said that now Craigs misgivings where a lot clearer. Apparently not to everybody, though *looks side-eyed at double7s post*


First off, I see Craigs point (and ZXDunnys simulated point): There is a class of not-quite-just-users, who wants to tinker around with things. Presumably, given that quite some weight is given to the argument that the Pandora is open, you can do what you want, no lockouts, yadda, yadda, then that class of NQJUser would be a sizeable bit of the Pandora user base. They are not necessarily us - They haven't hanged around these forums these last 2,5 years lapping up every bit of information, don't reread the wiki once a week to see if there are any changes, haven't got a virtualbox image specifically dedicated to pandora development and pnd hacking. They might even have a life.Now, they buy a pandora, expect it to be open and tinkerable, and they can't even open the packages...That is a problem. Whether Craigs solution would be the best or not is debatable, but it would be rather short-sighted to not see that that is a problem.


And stop the silly "If you can't be bothered to read and understand the PND spec, you shouldn't tinker". That is smelly elitism, at best. Of course both Craig and ZXDunny and most anybody here are able to deal with a PND. That is not the point - The point is that someone who doesn't do this every day also need to be able to understand how to do this.


There are at least some ways to resolve this:


1) ZIP-PNDs. As far as I gather from the discussion here, there is really no reason why the pnd system could not actually contain a zip, just as it now can contain squashfs or a ISO, right? Yes, it might be less than ideal - Might take up more space, might be slower - but it would work? Then, by all means, code in that possibility. Make it possible to download the same pnd in different formats. Johnny NQJUser might not quite have his head around squashFStools, but he could understand this on the repo/archive/Appstore/whereever:


DOWNLOAD


MassiveGame.pnd - Optimised for performance and space


MassiveGameZ.pnd - Sligtly slower, but easily hacked and modified


2) Tools. There is, as people have said at different places in the thread, a need for somewhat-user tools for these things. Particularily for a windows environment. People have mentioned a pnd browser (similar to something like winZip) in order to open and modify pnds. Possibly something even simpler - a pnd extractor/repacker would work as a start (the program unpacks a given pnd to a directory, or repacks a directory into a pnd). If the above idea gets implemented, maybe a converter from/to a zip-pnd might be an idea. Anything that is a) a selfcontained application (no need to install squashfs-tools or virtualbox images or whatever) that B) allows Johnny to open up and re-wrap his pnd.


Bounty these, or something. This is something that, realistically, would be quicker to code up than to implement new pnd functionality (probably quicker than to agree on said functionality, even). Make a good requirements spec:


- needs to be selfcontained


- needs to be able to handle both squashFS and ISO pnds


- needs to follow fairly ordinary windows UI guidelines


- needs to make a sanity check before rewrapping and give a sensible error message if rewrapping is not possible (i.e. "main application missing or renamed - Please check foo.pxml")


...and some other things possibly, and post a reasonable bounty for it. Or possibly two - A smaller one for an extract/repack thing, and a larger one for the complete burger.


Whilst we're at it, why not a windows-style installation application? Something that opens a nice window which allows you to select a pnd, select an SD card (or auto-selects whatever SD-card is mounted) and lets the user decide, through a simple button press, whether s/he wants the pnd to appear in the menu, on the desktop, or both. Press OK, the app creates the necessary folders (if they're not already there) and then copies the pnd to the right place. This is so simple, almost I could do it, yet I think it would help new windows-based user a lot. It could even be associated with .pnds, so that it starts when a pnd is opened.


3) Documentation. We are in serious need of some good old IA work here. All this information exists (I've learned a lot throughout this thread) somewhere, but to know it one must be one of us (even to know where to look, one needs to be one of us). Even for the things that are on the wiki, it is sometimes quite difficult, even for me, to find things that I know are there. We need to think quite hard about documentation from several angles:


- User profiles. Entry pages for "I am a new user and know absolutely nothing", "I am somewhat experienced and want to tinker about a bit", "I am a power user and wants to get hairy technical details". Possibly better names for the pages, too :)


- Task-oriented pages. Entry pages for specific task groups - Installing software, Hardware modification, Updating firmware, opening pnds, trouble-shooting...


- Application-oriented pages. Everything about particular apps - one page each for GnGeo, Gnumeric, Thunar, Picodrive...


- Host system-oriented pages. One page each for Windows, MacOSX, Linux, for those guides and hints that apply precisely to users from that environment.


- Use-case-oriented pages. Entry points for where one wants to emulate system x, use a gps, draw, make music, type notes, surf the web...


Someone might argue that those points overlap. Yes. That is the point, really. Someone else might argue that the information already exists over there *points in random direction*. Yes, I know. But it needs to be in one place (the wiki) and to be accessible from several angles in order to be findable for several kinds of users. And it needs to be updated - All these indexes (as it is, really - Several indexes to the same pages) needs to be kept up-to-date whenever new information is added.


This last point is, I'm afraid, the only one I could be of much use in (and even that not so much until my work load lessens), but it needs to be done. Right now, Johnny NQJUser cannot open his PNDs because he lacks the tools and he don't know where to look for them. Ideally, we'd solve both those problems and a few more on the way.
 
This, I think is about the size of it - no doubt that Craig has something else in mind though; we can't know until he posts specs (which is unlikely, given past performance).


What we really need is something I outlined earlier -


1. Pandora boots directly into an "app desktop" which shows all installed PNDs, like minimenu/panorama.


2. One of the apps, non-removable (possibly) is the app-store. Which app-store is up for debate, but PNDStore looks like the business.


3. This PNDStore (for want of a better title ;-)) checks for updates and presents say, the contents of a "repo" or whatever in a nice manner, allows you to download and installs automatically.


4. All of this is totally platform-agnostic as far as interface goes. No command line, no arguments to PNDs, no "start menu".


This doesn't mitigate the problem of "where do the ROMz go, dude?" - but to my mind a file manager could be launched on a per-PND basis - maybe from a context menu, which says "explore storage for this PND" or whatever. Maybe from there you could have an option to "USB Connection here" which opens that PND's appdata folder as a USB drive visible to a connected PC?


All this will make things a little easier for the new user, I feel. No need for text files containing instructions left on desktops - that's just a lame cop-out because you can't think of anything better.


And if we want to make Craig happy, it should look swish. Really, really nice. FWIW, I think all Craig's ranting about how to manage updates with filenames and whatnot is pretty much crap and we should keep on with what we're doing with Milkshake's repo, PNDStore and that thing that Cloudef is developing. Add the lovely UI to that framework and we're in business.


Of course, advanced users can just turn it off and go to XFCE. Where's the problem?


D.
 
Make it possible to download the same pnd in different formats. Johnny NQJUser might not quite have his head around squashFStools, but he could understand this on the repo/archive/Appstore/whereever:

DOWNLOAD


MassiveGame.pnd - Optimised for performance and space


MassiveGameZ.pnd - Sligtly slower, but easily hacked and modified

As I understand difference between squashFS and zip is "slight" in case of small PNDs, that does not contain many files or big files. Bigger ones like java or Battle for Westnoth would be unusable as zips.


Secondly there's no way you can force developers to create two versions of their work. Even if there's official guidance from OPT some will follow it and some not.
 
Make it possible to download the same pnd in different formats. Johnny NQJUser might not quite have his head around squashFStools, but he could understand this on the repo/archive/Appstore/whereever:

DOWNLOAD


MassiveGame.pnd - Optimised for performance and space


MassiveGameZ.pnd - Sligtly slower, but easily hacked and modified

As I understand difference between squashFS and zip is "slight" in case of small PNDs, that does not contain many files or big files. Bigger ones like java or Battle for Westnoth would be unusable as zips.


Secondly there's no way you can force developers to create two versions of their work. Even if there's official guidance from OPT some will follow it and some not.

Yes, ZIPs can't be mounted as random access.


So the ZIP would need to be extracted somewhere (preferably RAM).


For smaller apps, this is not a big deal. It takes a few seconds to extract and only need a bit of RAM.


Wesnoth wouldn't work. It's about 200 MB compressed. Uncompressing the ZIP would probably take a few minutes and need 300 MB RAM - far more the Pandora has.


FireFox would work, but would need about 60 MB more RAM than before. As FireFox is a RAM eater and easily runs out of memory even now would suggest that FireFox wouldn't be good inside a ZIP archive as well.


Startup of FireFox would also increase by approx. 15 - 20 seconds (rough guess).


Maybe Apple HAS developed some driver that can mount ZIP files with random access, but I doubt that code is available.


So someone would need to code that first.


The idea having a small PND extractor / creator for Windows is probably best.


I think I could create something like that within one day... now I just need some more time :/
 
Maybe Apple HAS developed some driver that can mount ZIP files with random access, but I doubt that code is available.


So someone would need to code that first.
FUSE-Zip is a kernel module that supports mounting PND files for random access read/write. It's reasonable, but nothing will ever be as good as squashFS for random access compressed file lookup.


Doesn't look like it's in the OpenEmbedded recipes, so it would have to be built by hand, and I've no idea how ARM compatible it would be.


edit: Sorry, blah. Don't know what I was thinking. Fuse-zip is a user space program that plugs into the fuse kernel module. Same end result: need to build fuse (which should be doable, it has a recipe) then build fuse-zip by hand.
 
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Make it possible to download the same pnd in different formats. Johnny NQJUser might not quite have his head around squashFStools, but he could understand this on the repo/archive/Appstore/whereever:

DOWNLOAD


MassiveGame.pnd - Optimised for performance and space


MassiveGameZ.pnd - Sligtly slower, but easily hacked and modified

As I understand difference between squashFS and zip is "slight" in case of small PNDs, that does not contain many files or big files. Bigger ones like java or Battle for Westnoth would be unusable as zips.


Secondly there's no way you can force developers to create two versions of their work. Even if there's official guidance from OPT some will follow it and some not.

No, of course noone can force developers. Just as noone can force Johnny NQJUser to buy a pandora. :rolleyes: As far as I can gather, the actual difference between a squashFS pnd and a Zip pnd would be more or lesss nothing but the compression method, meaning that converting a normal pnd to its zip version could be done serverside, automatically, by the appstore. If one would want to. And no, it would not work for every app. Again, I believe that for the problem described, the text "This app cannot for technical reasons be offered as a zip-pnd" or something like that, might suffice to please Johnny.


What is necessary here is the appearance that someone actually gives a damn. Offering the download in a technically inferior, but easier to handle, container will look, to Johnny, as if someone tries to help him. Apologising that for this app it isn't, unfortunately, possible, will look like someone really tried. Telling Johnny that he really ought to search the forums, and the pnd spec is open so RTFM, makes Johnny return his Pandora.
 
Repeat:


Fuse (normally anyway) uses ram for open files.. Herefore fuse-zip is unusable in low ram devices


Someone go check if it can be set to small ram footprint then it mihht be diable.. But by default on my desktop, opening a giant file uses up the ram for giant file :) thats how it does random access.. All open files in ram :/


But someone check.. Might be configurable


That was why e dont have it right now


Jeffphone
 
heard of winZip? heard of winRar?


what we need is winSfs a visual app for windows/linux/mac that functions the same as winzip or winrar.


of course this would need coding.. perhaps there is already a frontend for squashfs-tools that already exists...


thats all we would need to appease people.
 
Skeezix: I know. I thought it might be doable for small apps, but on second thought that would probably lead to "Whaa, my app isn't working when I'm running this other app too - It says the RAM is RAMMED or something, so I'll RMA"...Unless that could be mitigated some other way (some gnarly swap solution?).


Still, I believe in the set of simple windows tools, and ED: Yes, you might be able to hack something together if you had time. But isn't there someone out there with enough skill and a little more time on their hands? Also: Information Architecture.
 
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