[mythtv] Menu structure suggestion

Christoph Sommer christoph.sommer at 2005.expires.deltadevelopment.de
Thu Jan 20 13:16:47 EST 2005


Hello,

While browsing the menu .xml files I got the impression that the order 
in which entries are arranged in the current CVS tree do not always 
follow a logical pattern. This may be because the menus "grew" while 
more and more features were added to MythTV.

To make things a little more structured I suggest we organize the 
existing features into four big categories:

  - TV
  - Multimedia
  - Information
  - Communication

supplemented by two additional categories

  - Manage
  - Setup


My suggestion is based on the following assumptions:

Watching and recording TV is the main purpose of MythTV, so this is a 
top-level category although it would fit in multimedia, too.

"Media Library" no longer seems appropiate as a category for features 
like Radio or Games.

"Phone" need not be a top-level category.

All other features fit into these categories quite nicely.

Management and maintainance tasks got swapped out to a menu of their own 
  because they are accessed more often than "Setup" and do not really 
belong there.

"Setup" now only harbors setup and configuration related options, 
preferably in the same order the related features are found in the main 
menu.


For a quick overview I arranged the existing features according to this 
pattern and attached an outline of menu options to this mail.



Another, maybe not fully grown, idea would be to completely seperate 
both "Manage" and "Setup" from the day-to-day options, maybe move them 
to another menu plane (cf. puny ASCII art). This would also allow for 
easy switching between, say "Music", "Music Management" and "Music 
Setup" without the need to go back to the main menu.

    user             mgmt.           setup
    plane            plane #2        plane

       |               |               |
-    TV     ---  TV management --- TV setup --->
       |               |               |
- Multimedia --  MM management --- MM setup --->
       |               |               |
- Information -- Info management - Info setup ->
       |               |               |
       v               v               v


What do you think?


   Christoph


-- 
f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr
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