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I have to say I love the way Vuze is set up.
If I want a simple graphic way to search for content, I use the Vuze tabs, and it works.
If I want to get technical, I press the Advanced tab, and I can have full control and get as much information as I need on what Azureus is doing.

There are always a few things that could be changed/improved, but most are a matter of opinion.

I have also never seen developers as on top of things as they are here.

Keep up the great work!

-Gary

My 2c on the matter. I hate the VUSE look and always go to the advanced tab. Nothing will ever be as good as the old vs 2.

LESS is MORE... Light, robust and FAST. Its getting to be ad ware and bloat ware.

I am likely gonna move on to Deluge full time soon as it hits vs 1 out of the alpha stage.

I found really great Azureus and now, I am sorry, but Vuze is for me a piece of sh.. so I think I will probably change of torrent software if nothing change.

I think of not being the only one, for me this software is only dedicated to torrents download.

Then you will understand easily that Vuze irritates me very strongly.

I would want to be able to choose the function appearing to the starting up?

That it would be really useful for many people I think

Sorry again

Best regards

Effectively, I don't have completely read the thread but, after a second pass, I didn't still find my answer.

On the other hand I expressed exactly the same opinion as KR4P11 thus, I was right, I am not the only one of this opinion.

I don't know how to change the UI, I don't want Vuze, I want Azureus in the starting up and I do not know how to obtain it.

Thus there is a problem.

We should be able to reach this tuning very easily if it exists, what is not really the case.

If someone can help.

Well since we're all past this newly named client ver 3.1.0.0 by now, I still think that the classic UI can be somewhat "frogified" further by ways of balancing "weight" to looks. I don't see anything wrong with cuter icons so long if those can speed up inter tab (My torrents to others like Options or Details) changes. The other Vuze UI is just fine as it is but yes it's hard NOT to notice the additional heft and clunk.

I hope that future updates will take this into account.

I've read the majority of your quick-fire postings and this one comes across as the most legitimate. The rest smell too much like rant.
The biggest issue I've noticed with this name change is educating the users on what it is & isn't.

A lot of people who've been using the classic UI since the Vuze layer was added spotted the news of the name change on TorrentFreak and assumed this content layer was new and that they'd have to change. This wasn't true.

Of the low percentage of users who knew of the UI Switcher, some assumed that having the extra UI not displayed would continue to use resources. That's not true either.

Some assumed that the entire client is now written & supported by Vuze Inc. That's also not true. I'm a volunteer (but only for support). There are several more volunteers here (e.g. amc1, The_8472) who not only support the client on the forums, but contribute more of their spare time to writing the client.

The entire idea of this thread is for future development ideas on the Classic UI - I can't imagine a situation where it would disappear.

I for one, however, prefer the Vuze Advanced UI. I get all the niceties of the Classic UI with swift access the the Vuze content library. For me this is ideal. For others, it may not be, and isn't forced.

Despite a name change, Vuze (formerly Azureus) remains the most configurable, customisable, extensible client there's ever been. I may be biased, but it's for good reason!

There are a few things to address in this post (although not necessarily in order!). Please don't take my poking holes as any attack on your point of view - it's perfectly valid - this FYI and for the other readers.


You're not asking for two apps. You're effectively asking for two versions of the same app, one with Vuze (note the "z" :P ) and one without.
This was addressed in the wiki.


v3.1.0.0 introduces the ability to use Firefox 3 instead, should you wish.


This is a multi-faceted philosophical & economical topic which I'll only go so far as to say that I think this is over-simplified - a corporation made the components of your computer and a corporation hosts this site and a corporation provides you the access to read it. Open source also doesn't infer no corporation. We need corporations, they need us. We give them control over the product in return for giving us the product we want.

That was a little more than I really wanted to say on the matter. Feel free to disagree - it's opinionated waffle.


Agreed


Azureus is written in Java, not JavaScript. If you're seeing high CPU usage something is wrong - I never see usage over 4 or 5% on an old Athlon 2500+. High memory usage can be a side-effect of Java, but is also a side-effect of the sheer enormity of Azureus. As for memory usage, not only are there ongoing improvements made (see changelog), but there's also a wiki article on reducing it.


Which Vista feature are you referring to, out of interest?

"Make what columns are displayed optional, so that they can be customised. For example, I always have Comment Icon, Tracker Status, Max Download Speed and Rating shrunk down to nothing, coz I just don't use those sections and they take up space so that it has to be scrolled (well, I occasionally use the max dl speed, but for the most part, I just use the global adjustment thingy at the bottom)."

You can already do this. You can right-click almost anywhere and select Column Setup. There you can remove/add or re-order the columns to your heart's content.

Right Click -> Column Setup

Well, there's this, its not up-to-date. But feel free to update it if you want to.

It takes a lot of effort to go and add documentation through everything - it's better to just concentrate on those bits which aren't clear enough.

Yeah, I think it could do with some re-organisation. It's on my to-do list, I'll look at menus and option pages in the future.

Right click, Advanced, Tracker, Edit Tracker URL

LOL - Actually, Pixels 303, I'd suggest that Azureus started with the advanced mode. The new, one could say "noob" UI is the simpler, streamlined one that's trying not to scare the novice user with all the knobs and dials, but to let them "advance" to the Advanced Mode when they're ready and when they need to. For old salts like yourself, we'll always have the familiar UI and way of doing things, and we'll try to make the navigation easier to find whichever interface you're looking for.


Fishbowler's right that the client is written in Java, but Pixels 303 is right that portions of the UI outside of the Advanced Tab or Classic UI do run inside an embedded web browser and do use Javascript. It's certainly possible to write bad Javascript that takes up too much memory or cpu but we try to write streamlined code that doesn't do so. If we slip up and write something inefficient, then let us know so we can fix it!


You're more than welcome to call it anything you like!

I use both the Vuze interface and the Classic.

What I love about Vuze is that I can manage ALL of my torrents in it, not just Vuze content. This is a key point. If you take away (or overly simplify) the classic UI, that advantage disappears. This is why I use Vuze over other torrent based products such as Joost, Miro, etc. I think it would be a HUGE mistake to remove this ability from Vuze because if you do, you remove the incentive to use it for people who get their torrents from various sources.

The reason I use Vuze over a barebones client (such as uTorrent) is because (contrary to many old-school azureus users) I actually like all the extra Vuze stuff. I see Vuze as a future YouTube replacement for people who appreciate high quality video. What I've always hated about YouTube is the crap quality of the videos. In Vuze I get similar features (ratings, comments, friends) but with high quality and HD videos. It's brilliant.

There are some things that worry me about Vuze, however. Mainly, the current trend in torrent-based software to try to hide all the stuff about uploading, share ratios, etc.. Don't fall into the trap of thinking all of your users are idiots. Most people, when they see the word BitTorrent associated with a software, know that uploading is involved. The ones who don't know that need to be informed of it in an open and honest way and given some basic options WITHIN the Vuze interface to control it and monitor it. Look around the web and you'll find that bittorrent based software that doesn't provide FULL control of uploading in an open and transparent way is often perceived as malware. People feel like you're trying to trick them into using their upload bandwidth without consent. BitTorrent DNA is a prime example.

There are many, many people out there who use BitTorrent. My opinion is to keep the classic UI (with some modifications to make it look more Vuze-like) and make Vuze a sort of one-stop-shop for all of a person's torrent needs - great premium/social content and management of ALL torrents.

It doesn't take away the ability to add non-vuze torrents, but it's far too dumbed-down to be useful. A BitTorrent UI that doesn't even list such basic info as the share ratio of each torrent is useless. That's just one example of the oversimplification that has happened in Vuze.

A BitTorrent UI can only be reduced to a certain level of simplicity. If you simplify it past that point it becomes useless to anyone but a complete idiot or a first-time user. Certain things about BitTorrent cannot be avoided, no matter how badly you want them to be.

I think Linus Torvalds said it best when commenting about this trend in Gnome:

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of
Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will
use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long
since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Edit: While playing around with the Vuze UI a bit more I just realized that "column setup" is available within Vuze to show share ratio (my example above) and such. So I have to eat some crow here and admit that the Vuze UI is not useless for monitoring non-Vuze torrents. But the issue still remains that all of the right click context menu items that you get in the Classic UI are lost, not to mention even basic control like stopping or starting an individual torrent?

Edited by: Charlie_Freak on 3-Jul-2008 11:32 AM

That's already there as an option.

Sounds interesting (or scary?). I'll check those out. Thanks.

I think it may be more useful to give the user more information about changing the column setup (Right-click almost anywhere there are columns, select 'Column Setup' (Given for others to see)), and the ability to drag-and-drop the column-headers themselves for reorganization.

Personally, I don't want to see the Pieces or Availability upfront there, and I would much prefer the order of #...Face...Name...Done...Seeds...Peers...ETA....Down Speed...Up Speed...Save Path...(other stuff)
But this is all in how my own brain tracks the information. Your order may be optimal for you, but why do you think it is more optimal for a larger slice of the userbase?

It seems to me that the major browsers (that I've used: IE/Firefox) have the idea with: Name, Done, Size, Speed.
Sure, some of those get interchanged, but the 'Name' always seems to be first. Then again, maybe they never did UI Functionality testing with a large swath of users to see what would be more optimal.

I would like that kind of color-scheme applied to non-activated buttons as well, actually (WinXP SP2). The 2 or 4-bit greyscale effect in use now can be disturbing.

I'm running the latest beta versions of Vuze and I must say, I miss the classic UI. It was simple, but gave you lots of advanced features to use. In my honest opinion, the new interface is ugly and complicated.

With respect, don't you think it makes more sense to use the release version rather than take a version that is explicitly in the middle of being developed and then observe that it isn't finished and pretty? Graphic "de-uglification" is the last thing on the clean-up agenda. If you'd prefer to base your judgments on what we're intending to put out there proudly, rather than in-progress snapshots, do check back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I highly recommend 3.1.1.0.

Okay, I'm being a little thin-skinned today -- so let's try that one again: Thanks for trying out the beta version, and we really do value feedback. Do understand that the "visual assets" will be the last things that we slide in, so the icons are pretty ugly right now and we're still tweaking. We're focussing more on the functionality at the moment, like the behaviors of the entries in the left navigation bar, etc. That said, what would be really helpful would be some suggestions about what seems ugly or complicated and how it might be improved. (Saying "make it like it used to be" is feedback that we'll make note of, but a little more explanation of what you think worked better in the earlier UI, and why you think that, would give us more to work with and would therefore be more useful.) And if you really don't like the "in progress" look, switch back to 3.1.1 and give us a couple of weeks to put on the polish.

Edited by: pono650 on Aug 20, 2008 5:10 PM

Keep data on an IP that you've seen? That could be an interesting idea, though you would have to be real careful, since it wouldn't be too hard in some circumstances to build a really huge list of peers and where you've seen them. And, it would really only work 'well' if they all used static IPs too.

Just to get small things out of the way.

I don't think the hole concept behind Vuze is wrong, but I do see it as unrefined and buggy. To elaborate a little, it loads like a webpage. Is the entire Vuze user interface a wabpage perhaps? It also has very webpage similar issue. Just like some webpages have glitches, I find a lot of things like cutoffs in the interface (I don't know how many times I saw a video thumbnail cutoff if it was positioned on the right side). Similar to a webpage it loads incrementally. I (personally) wouldn't mind downloading 100mb+ of interface beforehand just to skip the constant lag in the interface navigation. Considering this is a application interface and not a webpage things like placeholders and or some nice animation could be used to relieve the strain. Also, prioritizing some mindless task (like say scraping 100 torrents or something) over me using the interface fluidly results in a crippled azureus. I also don't really understand the philosophy or thinking that led to it. I mean its made to be simple (and indeed some parts are) but for some reason in the development it was decided that adding all sorts of other things around those simple things was a "good idea". Ok that's more then enough about Vuze.

Concerning the Classic/Advance View/Azureus interface.

1. If Azureus is doing some task like say "seeding and checking" for example the % progress should always be the first. So instead of "Seeding and Checking 14%" it should be "14% Seeding and Checking" (or whatever variant that places the % before anything else). Not many people have really wide screens and I don't think it's uncommon for the % to be hidden because simply the column isn't wide enough.

2. I think the categories feature is just awful in its implementation. First of all if I have 20 categories I'm going to end up with 20 buttons. Presuming these categories are somewhat long I now have 4 rows or more of buttons (that's not usable at all). My other nit pick is that if somehow I open the filter dialog there's no effective way to close it. I also think it way too long and bulky. My opinion is that Categories should be renamed and redesigned as tags and also act as one-item mass item action. For example any ability you would have on a torrent would be present for tags and applying it would filter down and apply to all the torrents marked with said tag. One last thing would be a effective system of removing categorization (if there is redesign it so it's obvious since I don't see it).

3. When select an item besides the blue shade an ant line appears. Can it be removed. It kind of bothers me how it starts at the middle of the rating bar instead of one of the column edges (I think that might be a bug). The way a light gray bar remains when I switch the selection from the active torrent section to the finished torrent section (must be a odd/light row to be visible) looks unnecessary.

4. Looking at the interface I'm going to guess Developers aren't at least alien to the Eclipse interface. Could Eclipse's Perspective feature be implemented. Something like a switch between the current layout of Active/Finished (with tabbed extras) to say a uTorrent style interface (Active/Finished single screen top, info screen bottom, Library tab replacing the current finished screen) and of course maybe other variations (minimalistic interface for example). I wouldn't mind the hole concepts of the package explorer be added either. For example, group torrents with the same name to show as just one package, have torrents with multiple files show as one package with of multiple torrents - of course have packages be collapsible - (there should really be more options for torrents with multiple files besides the almost unusable priority setting; download only 2 files at a time anyone) or filter-out torrents based on certain criteria (seeding ration, number of peers or seeds etc).

5. The Queue major options seems somewhat important enough to be placed directly into the interface. Something like in the current Toolbar (the icons are too big and little ugly btw). Speaking of which how is it Azureus is incompetent enough that by default I find it doing something like Seeding with 0kb/s several torrents with 0 peers and ignoring any downloads. I'm sure there are cases where one would want to forcefully get some seeding ration before proceeding with any other downloads but I really can't understand how this behaviour is non-poweruser default. It's also extremely tricky and hard to set it since the options are non-intuitive and I can't really tell even now if I set it correctly so it prioritizes downloading at least one file over mindlessly seeding what are essentially already power-seeded files.

6. Regarding the menus. Re-work them please, I'm sure nobody is in love with them the way they are so re-working all of them shouldn't be a problem. The Preferences are probably the biggest mess, they are really made from a programmer stand point. The Modes is the biggest screw up ever. If I'm a very advanced user do you expect me to search for a option to show an option when I don't find it in what are for me the obvious places? It would be much simpler to just have a 3 way separation and of root folders rather then the current system. Though I think just somehow marking the basic option or moving the later more advanced to tabs would be a much much better solution (reorganising everything would be probably simpler IMO).

7. I think to better define the interface there should be a lot more shortcut-sugar. Programs such as photoshop come to mind where holding certain key combination (generally the alt ctrl shift are the main modifiers) and clicking on certain objects will create certain shortcuts. As a proof of concept take for example the Active Torrents frame of the My Torrents window. If I Ctrl click anywhere on the Traker Status/Up Speed/Down Speed etc I want to see a window with all relevant options (Preferences) related to it. If I Alt click on any column I want it to optimize its size so its no larger or smaller then it needs to be. If I alt click on a cell, for example lets say it's the speed of the certain torrent, I want to see all the peers with their speeds. Alternatively I could say Alt+Ctrl click to get the same effect only I would have to hold down to see it and subsequently releasing would hide it. Having a lot of things be a little more smarter would be nice as well. Sure I can resize them with the old school way but if there's only 3-4 torrents can't they be smart enough to just optimize themselves to the most appropriate size.

8. Performance wise I think Azureus is somewhat fine. I don't know what the fuss on memory is all about. I look at memory and process statistics all the time and as far as I see Azureus's problem is processor time. I think whoever the people doing the beta testing are need to push it up a notch. Azureus and especially the vuze interface beginning to cringe (the vuze interface experiences freeze or otherwise is goddamn slow) when speeds pass 2mb/s. There's also the scrape issue. If I have 100 torrents it seems to want to decide on its own to do 100 scrapes which is stupid and unnecessary (yes it does it for stopped torrents as well). I can understand it having to do it and I would not mind it taking 5 torrents at a time, but no if it sees 1mil torrents its going to connect to 1mil trakers (simultaneously) to do 1mil scrapes. When it comes to the processor I don't even think Azureus has any sort of limitations, and I think that's why all the "resource heavy" talk comes from (memory wise it actually looks a lot better then what I see in uTorrent).

Please try to include in your performance tests (in some form or another) the following: larger then 1k peer and seed swarms, speeds of 2-4mb/s (at least), file sizes of 100-200mb at least. Also torrents with multiple files of over 1gb. At least 50 files queue-ed for seeding and 50 for downloading (at least 5 downloading, 5 seeding simultaneously). Vuze's media should help with at least part of the criteria.

The performance I'm seeing isn't pretty. Azureus should never presume it own all the system resources.

Yes I was indeed running with Vuze features loaded. I'll try and see if I can just build a Vuze from the code at azureus.cvs.sourceforge.net and do some profiling to try to isolate the problem, if I have some time later that is. Although it might take me a little tinkering with the source until I figure out just what I need to build to get my test Vuze.

Fair enough -- but do check out 4.0 when it comes out. We're trying to get "the best of both worlds" -- which is a tall order and we may not hit the mark for everyone -- but we think we've done pretty darn well and really want to know what you guys think, too.

I'm afraid a Bob-interface is required if you want to get the kind of customers who would
pay for bit-torrent "downloads" .. yet another reason azureus and vuze should have been split ...

I'm not a Vuze developer, nor have I ever been an Azureus developer. All the same, I think that's a little offensive since you're on their forums...

Edited by: Fishbowler on 17-Oct-2008 08:17

How do you know which interface is being used?