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07-21-14, 12:29 AM   #1
Phanx
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First impressions

Just noticed Minion was a thing again (actually Seerah pointed it out) and decided to try it out. Here's how it went:

#1 - The download button doesn't work when Google Analytics is blocked. I can honestly say this is the first time I've ever encountered a website where something actually didn't work because Skynet was blocked, but okay, right-click and save the file works too.

#2 - Okay, installation complete. Low contrast. Low contrast everywhere. I can't read half the text in the app without squinting and leaning in toward the screen.

#3 - There's a button at the top that seems to be two semi-transparent buttons stacked on top of each other, labelled "Update All" and "Auto Update". See attachment.

#4 - Upon entering my username and password I got a "Login failed. Please check your userid and password." message. After clearing the field to try re-typing my username with a capital P in case it was case-sensitive, I noticed the field was actually labeled "Email" and not "Username". Okay, after going into my settings to see which email account I used on here, I was able to log in.

#4a - Do you guys have any plans to support username-based login in the future?

#4b - Please use persistent form labels. I know these in-field labels that vanish as soon as you focus the field are all the rage these days, but when I'm tabbing through form fields (I guess the iPhone generation don't know what the tab key does?) I'm not scanning ahead, and if I get distracted for a second after focusing a field, I'm not going to remember what that label said. Hopefully this trend goes the way of the Under Construction gif soon. Also, dat low, low contrast. Too dark, can't read.

#5 - Stuck on "Detecting WOWGame Installs" for about 15 minutes. The app updated itself after I logged in, so I'm pretty sure it's up to date. Build ID at the bottom says 02b2a4ed106cf3bc8d6a9394c917568c6f1654b and again -- guys, seriously, I can't read that. I literally had to screenshot and paste into GIMP and up the brightness and contrast to be able to see it well enough to type it out, and even then it was difficult due to the microscopic size.

Closing thoughts:
Overall impression was not positive. I'll try it again in a few days, because I understand it's still in beta, and all else being equal I'd rather use a WoWI app than a Curse app, but without some major UI changes to fix the low contrast and tiny font sizes, it's just not usable for me.

System info:
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, US English
- 1920x1080 at 120dpi (the "Medium/125%" setting) on a 27" monitor
- WoW installed in C:\Applications\World of Warcraft
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07-21-14, 01:16 AM   #2
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After re-launching the app it found WoW, but took about 5 minutes to scan my installed addons. The Curse Client takes about 5-10 seconds to do the same thing, so I guess there's still some optimization to be done here.

More tiny text, okay, I expected that. It's also oddly fuzzy, like I'm looking at a medium-quality JPEG image instead of actual text. See attachment.

Version boxes aren't wide enough to show long version strings (eg. Git hashes). There's definitely room in the UI to make these boxes (and everything else) a lot bigger. Please do that so I can see all the things.

Scrolling through the list of my installed is fairly laggy, and the response time seems variable, producing a rather disorienting effect. My GTX 750 Ti is more than capable of handling a simple scroll box, so I'm guessing this is just another area that's not optimized yet, or possibly a limitation of whatever GUI framework you're using.

Development copies (anything with .svn or .git folder inside, or wowi:revision keyword in the TOC, and probably the Curse TOC keywords too, and possibly any addons where the currently logged-in user is listed as an author) should be ignored. All of my own addons are being shown as having updates available.

Other incorrect version detections:
  • AckisRecipeList_QuickScan showing an update from 5.4.0-1.0.8 to 5.4.0.-1.0.8 (same version, extra period)
  • Bazooka showing an update from v2.4.0 to v2.3.1 (older version)
  • ChatLinkIcons shown an update from 1.
  • DropTheCheapestThing showing an update from v3.6.4 to 3.6.2 (older version, extra letter)
  • Grail showing an update from 065PR1 to 064 (older version, extra letters)
  • LearningAid showing an update from 1.12a2 to 1.12.0 Alpha 2 (same version, different formatting, not sure it's really practical to try to detect this)
  • OmniCC showing an update from 5.4.3 to 5.4.1 (older version)
  • OPie showing an update from Nougat 3 to Lime 6 (older version, but definitely not practical to try to support hurricane style names)
  • oUF_Karma showing an update from 1.6.12r (10-05-2013) to 1.6.2r (not sure what's happening here, I just downloaded this yesterday to look at something, and it's definitely the latest download, which is from 2013, so I guess the author just forgot to update the version string on the download page when he uploaded it)
  • RatingBuster showing an update from r398 to 1.6.5 (older version, but alpha vs release channels so not really anything you can do here I guess)
  • SilverDragon showing an update from v3.0.10 to 3.0.5 (older version, extra letter)
  • Touhin showing an update from r54 to 1.1 (older version, but again, different channel so not really possible to compare unless you go scrape the release dates from Curse pages)
  • xMerchant showing an update from 140617a to 101016 (way older version, not being updated on WoWI anymore)

On the plus side, actually updating individual addons seemed to be noticably faster than in the Curse Client, so there's that! And I found that a couple of my WoWI-only addons were out of date, so those are now up to date.

Edit:
Speaking of fuzzy images, are you guys ever going to fix whatever your server is doing to uploaded images to reduce quality and increase filesize? I reported it years ago, and bumped it at least once, but nodoby ever responded, but I just noticed it again with the screenshot I attached.
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Last edited by Phanx : 07-21-14 at 01:18 AM.
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07-21-14, 10:50 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Just noticed Minion was a thing again (actually Seerah pointed it out) and decided to try it out. Here's how it went:
Thanks and I appreciate the feedback!

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#1 - The download button doesn't work when Google Analytics is blocked. I can honestly say this is the first time I've ever encountered a website where something actually didn't work because Skynet was blocked, but okay, right-click and save the file works too.
We use that to keep track of download stats, I'll see if there is some alternative way. I wasn't aware this was happening so thanks!

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#2 - Okay, installation complete. Low contrast. Low contrast everywhere. I can't read half the text in the app without squinting and leaning in toward the screen.
Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into either making a higher contrast theme or change some things. I see you've listed some areas you are not happy with further down but are there any other areas? Thanks.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#3 - There's a button at the top that seems to be two semi-transparent buttons stacked on top of each other, labelled "Update All" and "Auto Update". See attachment.
Thanks, I'm aware of this and it happens when no games are detected. Since we switched to the "Installed" tab as the default its much more apparent then when the "home" tab was the default. I have a low priority ticket in to get it fixed.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#4 - Upon entering my username and password I got a "Login failed. Please check your userid and password." message. After clearing the field to try re-typing my username with a capital P in case it was case-sensitive, I noticed the field was actually labeled "Email" and not "Username". Okay, after going into my settings to see which email account I used on here, I was able to log in.

#4a - Do you guys have any plans to support username-based login in the future?
Minion uses ZAM's global login system so email is required since usernames are only unique to each site. Some one else could have Phanx on our esoui.com site so we need to use email addresses to login. Right now during the beta there are no featured enabled that require an account. You can use the "Guest" mode too if you like. Future releases will have some features that will require an account due to the nature of the feature.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#4b - Please use persistent form labels. I know these in-field labels that vanish as soon as you focus the field are all the rage these days, but when I'm tabbing through form fields (I guess the iPhone generation don't know what the tab key does?) I'm not scanning ahead, and if I get distracted for a second after focusing a field, I'm not going to remember what that label said. Hopefully this trend goes the way of the Under Construction gif soon. Also, dat low, low contrast. Too dark, can't read.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look at updating the design to add labels above the fields instead. I'm not saying I'll make the change for sure but I will revisit the design.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
#5 - Stuck on "Detecting WOWGame Installs" for about 15 minutes. The app updated itself after I logged in, so I'm pretty sure it's up to date. Build ID at the bottom says 02b2a4ed106cf3bc8d6a9394c917568c6f1654b and again -- guys, seriously, I can't read that. I literally had to screenshot and paste into GIMP and up the brightness and contrast to be able to see it well enough to type it out, and even then it was difficult due to the microscopic size.
I've read you've finally got it to detect your Wow install. If you ever un-install (and opt to delete your settings) then re-install and have Minion re-detect Wow and it hangs again for 15min+ please send us your minion0.log and minion.xml which is located in a folder called ".minion" under your windows or osx user directory (Win: C:\Users\<your username\.minion\ OSX: ~\.minion\).

You should be able to copy and paste the buildid. In the future we will have the version number displayed. The buildid is just for this beta period.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Closing thoughts:
Overall impression was not positive. I'll try it again in a few days, because I understand it's still in beta, and all else being equal I'd rather use a WoWI app than a Curse app, but without some major UI changes to fix the low contrast and tiny font sizes, it's just not usable for me.
Thanks for your feedback and we will certainly revisit the design. If you have any more feedback on specific UI elements that would be greatly appreciated.

I will comment on your 2nd post shortly.
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07-21-14, 11:05 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
After re-launching the app it found WoW, but took about 5 minutes to scan my installed addons. The Curse Client takes about 5-10 seconds to do the same thing, so I guess there's still some optimization to be done here.
The first time during AddOn detection it will take a little time to match everything up. If you re-launch Minion after that it will only take a few seconds.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
More tiny text, okay, I expected that. It's also oddly fuzzy, like I'm looking at a medium-quality JPEG image instead of actual text. See attachment.
What resolution are you running on your desktop? The text doesn't seem that tiny to me running a 27" monitor at 1920x1200?

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Version boxes aren't wide enough to show long version strings (eg. Git hashes). There's definitely room in the UI to make these boxes (and everything else) a lot bigger. Please do that so I can see all the things.
That is a good idea however there are tooltips if you hover over the version numbers for now. I understand that its nicer to see the entire version string though. Some of the version strings are insanely long but we should be able to accommodate the majority of them.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Scrolling through the list of my installed is fairly laggy, and the response time seems variable, producing a rather disorienting effect. My GTX 750 Ti is more than capable of handling a simple scroll box, so I'm guessing this is just another area that's not optimized yet, or possibly a limitation of whatever GUI framework you're using.
How many AddOns do you have installed? I see you have 80 AddOns listed as needing updates so I'm wondering if its laggy because of that? Is the Addon list under the "Find more" tab laggy as well? If not that would maybe point to something in the update cell UI causing the lag.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Development copies (anything with .svn or .git folder inside, or wowi:revision keyword in the TOC, and probably the Curse TOC keywords too, and possibly any addons where the currently logged-in user is listed as an author) should be ignored. All of my own addons are being shown as having updates available.
I agree and we have a user story for this and it should eventually get into one of our sprints.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Other incorrect version detections:
Thank you for this list. I will go over it in detail. Just one thing to keep in mind is that Minion only sees if the version number is different and if so it wants to update the AddOn so it can make sure you have the same version that is on our site. From then on it will keep track of updates as expected. We can certainly make this better when the version numbers are simple int's but when authors start mixing alpha into their versions Minion will only be able to tell if its different. Thats one of the reasons we display both numbers.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
On the plus side, actually updating individual addons seemed to be noticably faster than in the Curse Client, so there's that! And I found that a couple of my WoWI-only addons were out of date, so those are now up to date.
Glad that went quickly for you. Minion uses our CDN so AddOns are downloaded from a server closest to you.

Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
Edit:
Speaking of fuzzy images, are you guys ever going to fix whatever your server is doing to uploaded images to reduce quality and increase filesize? I reported it years ago, and bumped it at least once, but nodoby ever responded, but I just noticed it again with the screenshot I attached.
This is something in the core vBulletin system causing this. I don't believe its happening to our Addon images if you view them raw?
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07-21-14, 11:14 AM   #5
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Almost forgot, I also want to thank you for taking the time and trying out the new Minion. I really appreciate you posting all this feedback!

We are really making Minion a focus of our development and plan to continue with improvements, fixes and new features.

Last edited by Dolby : 07-21-14 at 11:19 AM.
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07-22-14, 12:09 AM   #6
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Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
What resolution are you running on your desktop? The text doesn't seem that tiny to me running a 27" monitor at 1920x1200?
1920x1080 also on a 27" monitor, but my eyesight is horrible. I can read printed text (at normal sizes in novels etc.) only up to about 4" in front of my face. I have my browser set to force all text to at least 15px because nothing below that is normally readable.

On the addon info rows I circled in the Minion screenshot, the bigger text only measures 10px high, and the smaller text 8px -- for someone with normal eyesight that's probably at the bottom end of the readable range, but I could only read it with a lot of squinting and leaning toward the screen. I do wear glasses, but there's only so much they can correct for astigmatism, which makes it difficult to focus on fine line details like text.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
How many AddOns do you have installed? I see you have 80 AddOns listed as needing updates so I'm wondering if its laggy because of that? Is the Addon list under the "Find more" tab laggy as well? If not that would maybe point to something in the update cell UI causing the lag.
Luckily, I actually just counted my addons last night for an unrelated conversation with a friend. I have about 150 actual addons, but there are nearly 300 folders in AddOns due to so many addons having multiple folders to placate the "omg if my addons load their 200kb options modules before I actually open the options window my computer will explode" crowd.

I'm not sure why Minion thinks that 80 addons need updates, though I did notice that the number decremented each time I updated an addon. About 80 addons were shown on the list (the rest, I guess, aren't hosted on WoWI at all) but only about 25 were actually shown as needing updates, and most of those were my own addons, which are SVN working copies rather than actually out of date.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
This is something in the core vBulletin system causing this. I don't believe its happening to our Addon images if you view them raw?
Addon images also double (roughly) in size, though they don't seem to suffer the quality loss. I gave several examples in my first thread about the problem back in 2010 (though only the last example is still live) and I noticed it was still happening recently, though I don't recall exactly which addon it was on. I do need to update the images on some of my addons, so I'll post new examples on that thread when I do.
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07-22-14, 04:28 AM   #7
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Back at home now, so I ran it again.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
The first time during AddOn detection it will take a little time to match everything up. If you re-launch Minion after that it will only take a few seconds.
Total start-up time is comparable to the Curse Client now. However, it still spent a few seconds scanning for ESO related items. Ideally, once it determines that I don't have ESO installed, or once I've told it not to manage addons for ESO, it should spend zero time scanning for ESO addons.

Also, it's now showing that no addons have available updates. While technically this is correct, shouldn't it still be considering all the addons it flagged as being out of date last time to still be out of date, since I didn't update or ignore them?

(On a side note, the "Update All" button should be disabled if there aren't any updates available. I didn't actually click it because I didn't want to find out whether it would try to reinstall all of my addons or something, but it responds to mouseover and appears to be clickable.)

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
Is the Addon list under the "Find more" tab laggy as well? If not that would maybe point to something in the update cell UI causing the lag.
Nope. The "Find More" list scrolling is consistent, and much more responsive, though it's still noticably slower than scrolling the same list in the Curse Client.

Scrolling in the list of installed addons is still laggy. If I sit there and click through one notch on the mouse wheel at a time, or click the arrow at the bottom of the scroll bar, in nice measured intervals, it responds immediately, but while rolling the mouse wheel or dragging the scroll bar, there's a very noticable lag between the input and the visible scrolling action, and that lag is very variable, which is the most annoying part.

Another thing I noticed while scrolling -- in either list -- is that the mouseover highlight lags a bit behind the scrolling. The list scrolls by 3 items at a time, so if you move the mouse over the 4th visible item, the 4th row is highlighted, but if you then scroll by one mousewheel tick, the 4th row is still highlighted (because the mouse is still over it) but the 1st row is also highlighted for a fraction of a second, since it was previously the 4th row. This produces a noticable flashing effect during continous scrolling.

More detailed system specs for reference:
- Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
- AMD FX-6100 (6 cores @ 3.3 GHz)
- 16 GB RAM (but 8 GB is occupied with a RAM disk, so basically 8 GB RAM for the system)
- GeForce GTX 750 Ti (yes, drivers are up to date, I just got it last week :P)

Let me know if there are any logs I can send you to help pinpoint why the installed addon list is so laggy.

Edit:
Also, the inability to resize the window is driving me nuts for some reason. I'd really love to be able to see more listed items at once!
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Last edited by Phanx : 07-22-14 at 04:32 AM.
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08-11-14, 12:19 PM   #8
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Just installed Minion again at work (noticed some addons on my WoWI favorites were updated, so I thought I'd try checking for updates in Minion, since there haven't been any addon updates since I first posted this thread) and came up with some new complaints:

During installation:

(1) Please include an option to not create a Start Menu folder.

On first run:

(1) "Detecting WoWGame Installs" still takes about 2 full minutes, but at least it doesn't completely hang the app anymore.

(2) I was prompted to back up my addons. This prompt could use a bit of explanatory text, I think. Is it going to create a ZIP file somewhere on my computer? If so, where? Or is it a cloud-based backup like the Curse Client's backup/sync feature? If so, what information is it going to upload? Why does Minion want me to make a backup, anyway? Is it about to wreck my addons folder?

(3) There is a dire need for an additional "okay, I found these WoW installations, which ones do you want to scan for addons?" prompt between the "detecting installs" and "detecting addons" stages. Minion found two ancient copies of WoW on a mapped network drive, and scanning their addons took forever (16 minutes, to be exact).

(4) During the "detecting addons" stage, Minion appeared to detect a number of addons that I don't have installed (and aren't present in that aforementioned network copies either) such as "Raio X" (which appears to be an old Portuguese version of Examiner, which I do have installed) and "Grid Pack" (an extremely outdated bundle including Grid and some Grid plugins; I do have Grid installed, obviously, but I don't have any the plugins from the bundle installed). Unfortunately, by the time this long long process finished, I forgot about this, and removed the network installs before checking their addon lists to see if Minion actually listed these mistmatches in the installed addons list.

(5) The "Add Game" function doesn't seem to work. After selecting World of Warcraft and navigating to the game install path and clicking Select, the dialog closes, and nothing happens. Selecting the top-level program folder, the Interface folder, or the Interface/AddOns folder all yielded the same result.

Also, the treeview for selecting a WoW folder is pretty buggy. About half the time when selecting a drive, the tree panel is just blank; I have to select a different drive and then re-select the desired drive to get a list. And when I do get a folder list, the order in which the folders are listed seems totally random. It's certainly not alphabetical, and doesn't appear to be chronological either, at least according to the created and modified dates on the folders I checked.

(6) SVN working copies and Git repositories are still shown as needing updating. This makes the "Update All" feature completely useless for addon authors.

(7) Addons needing updates should be at the top of the list. Scrolling through ~150 addons in a window that only shows 5 at a time (and only scrolls by 3 at a time) is extremely painful.

(8) Tooltips on version numbers don't appear immediately. I just thought they didn't work, until I accidentally left the cursor over a version number, and noticed that a tooltip appeared after 1-2 full seconds.

(9) Clicking on an addon immediately pops up an overlay with info about the addon. This is pretty annoying, as clicking on a window is a very common method of bringing the clicked app back into focus.

(10) Scrolling in the addons list is more consistent now. However, responsiveness in general is very bad across the whole app. Scrolling still has a noticable delay between the time I turn the mousewheel and the time the UI actually scrolls. Clicking on most things (game in the left column, installed/get more/options tabs across the top, sort dropdown) has a noticable lag time (0.5-1 seconds). Typing in the search box is extremely slow (when seaching on the "get more" list, there's about a 1-second freeze after every letter typed in the box).

Specific misidentifications:

AckisRecipeList_QuickScan was marked as needing an update from 5.4.0-1.0.8 to 5.4.0-1.0.8 (same version).

ArchyFix (a private unreleased addon) was misidentified as Archy 1.6.3 Fix, an ancient fan update from 2011 (which should really have been moved to the Outdated category by now). Some kind of basic size comparison on ambiguous name matches could easily tell that an addon that's 308 Kb zipped cannot possibly be the correct match for a 3 KB (uncompressed) addon. Alternatively, you could copy the Curse Client's approach -- prompt the user, tell them what you guessed, and ask them to confirm it before you show the addon in the list as ready to update.

Bazooka was marked as needing an update from v2.4.0 to v2.3.1 (older version).

OmniCC was marked as needing an update from 5.4.3 to 5.4.1 (older version).

Postal was marked as needing an update from 3.5.1 to v3.5.0 (older version, extra letter).

On second run:

Startup time seems to have gotten worse since I last tried it. Having an SSD at home vs HDD at work is probably a large contributing factor here, though, so I'll run it again later at home to get a better comparison.

Though I did not update everything that was marked as needing an update on the first run, no addons are now shown as needing updates. I guess having seen the update in the app before is marking it as "done" but that's obviously not correct behavior -- if I didn't actually update the addon, then it's still in need of an update.
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Last edited by Phanx : 08-11-14 at 12:27 PM.
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08-11-14, 01:48 PM   #9
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Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
(5) The "Add Game" function doesn't seem to work. After selecting World of Warcraft and navigating to the game install path and clicking Select, the dialog closes, and nothing happens. Selecting the top-level program folder, the Interface folder, or the Interface/AddOns folder all yielded the same result.
After poking around in Minion's saved config file, I think I found the problem here -- the previously detected WoW installations were still in the configuration file, but had an "ignore" flag set on them. Removing the flag enabled Minion to show them again. There doesn't appear to be a way to undo ignoring an installation in the app itself.

Some more misidentifications from an older installation (nothing updated in ~6 months) of WoW:

Badapples wrongly identified as "Cirk's Badapples - Fan Update" (last update 2010)
Edit: Just realized this is especially bad because Badapples (which I maintain) includes a WoWI-ID field in its TOC file, so there should be no way for Minion to be confused about which addon on the site it matches.

Examiner wrongly identified as "Raio X" (an old Portuguese-language fork of Examiner)

No sign of the "Grid Pack" that showed up during the initial scan.

Other issues:

The loading progress dialog remained faintly visible, and blocked mouse interaction over a large portion of the app. See attached screenshot. This didn't happen again after restarting the app.

Listing 4 installations simply as "World of Warcraft" is kind of useless... maybe the install path could be shown in smaller text underneath each one, or you could go the Curse Client route and let the user pick a label for each installation.

I noticed after launching the app a third time that available updates were still shown for the network install after I'd seen them in the app before and not applied them. First install still doesn't show any of the updates I didn't apply.
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08-11-14, 07:11 PM   #10
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Originally Posted by Phanx View Post
(1) Please include an option to not create a Start Menu folder.
(1) "Detecting WoWGame Installs" still takes about 2 full minutes, but at least it doesn't completely hang the app anymore.
I'm guessing Minion is still trying to search network shares and usb devices for wow.exe based upon your feedback below. I have a ticket in to investigate this and get Minion to only search local drives if possible.

(2) I was prompted to back up my addons. This prompt could use a bit of explanatory text, I think. Is it going to create a ZIP file somewhere on my computer? If so, where? Or is it a cloud-based backup like the Curse Client's backup/sync feature? If so, what information is it going to upload? Why does Minion want me to make a backup, anyway? Is it about to wreck my addons folder?
Sorry our FAQ information hasn't been copied here yet. I'll talk to Cairenn. The backup is a zip backup of the AddOn folder for each detected game and its located in the C:\Users\<your username>\.minion\backup\ folder. We enabled this for beta so if minion did go crazy we could help people restore their addons.

(3) There is a dire need for an additional "okay, I found these WoW installations, which ones do you want to scan for addons?" prompt between the "detecting installs" and "detecting addons" stages. Minion found two ancient copies of WoW on a mapped network drive, and scanning their addons took forever (16 minutes, to be exact).
Thats not a bad idea to prompt the user with the detected games Minion has found. However we do want to fix that fact that its searching network shares for the game. That is certainly slowing things down.

(4) During the "detecting addons" stage, Minion appeared to detect a number of addons that I don't have installed (and aren't present in that aforementioned network copies either) such as "Raio X" (which appears to be an old Portuguese version of Examiner, which I do have installed) and "Grid Pack" (an extremely outdated bundle including Grid and some Grid plugins; I do have Grid installed, obviously, but I don't have any the plugins from the bundle installed). Unfortunately, by the time this long long process finished, I forgot about this, and removed the network installs before checking their addon lists to see if Minion actually listed these mistmatches in the installed addons list.
Thanks, do you happen to have the minion0.log during detection? the minion0.log is reset every time you restart Minion so I'm guessing not.

(5) The "Add Game" function doesn't seem to work. After selecting World of Warcraft and navigating to the game install path and clicking Select, the dialog closes, and nothing happens. Selecting the top-level program folder, the Interface folder, or the Interface/AddOns folder all yielded the same result.

Also, the treeview for selecting a WoW folder is pretty buggy. About half the time when selecting a drive, the tree panel is just blank; I have to select a different drive and then re-select the desired drive to get a list. And when I do get a folder list, the order in which the folders are listed seems totally random. It's certainly not alphabetical, and doesn't appear to be chronological either, at least according to the created and modified dates on the folders I checked.
When you get to the AddOn folder location you need to click the AddOn folder so that the entire path shows in the input field below. Is that happening? We need to find a better file browser, we tried some open source ones and the java default one but it was extremely buggy. I personally havent had much trouble with our custom one.

(6) SVN working copies and Git repositories are still shown as needing updating. This makes the "Update All" feature completely useless for addon authors.
We are working on a feature to detect those folders and add an option to ignore updates in under the options page. We can not roll this out as a default option as we have found many authors have distributed their .svn / .git to users.

(7) Addons needing updates should be at the top of the list. Scrolling through ~150 addons in a window that only shows 5 at a time (and only scrolls by 3 at a time) is extremely painful.

(8) Tooltips on version numbers don't appear immediately. I just thought they didn't work, until I accidentally left the cursor over a version number, and noticed that a tooltip appeared after 1-2 full seconds. They would not receive the updates if it was enabled by default.

What you can do now is right click on the AddOn under the installed list and choose "ignore updates".

(9) Clicking on an addon immediately pops up an overlay with info about the addon. This is pretty annoying, as clicking on a window is a very common method of bringing the clicked app back into focus.
I would have to disagree here. There is nothing to focus, there are no options to choose if we allowed a list item to be in focus so that would be confusing. We had double click in the past which confused many people.

(10) Scrolling in the addons list is more consistent now. However, responsiveness in general is very bad across the whole app. Scrolling still has a noticable delay between the time I turn the mousewheel and the time the UI actually scrolls. Clicking on most things (game in the left column, installed/get more/options tabs across the top, sort dropdown) has a noticable lag time (0.5-1 seconds). Typing in the search box is extremely slow (when seaching on the "get more" list, there's about a 1-second freeze after every letter typed in the box).
We are working on this lag. Some of it may be do the extra logging we have enabled during beta to help us find bugs. I have a ticket in to research this.

Specific misidentifications:

AckisRecipeList_QuickScan was marked as needing an update from 5.4.0-1.0.8 to 5.4.0-1.0.8 (same version).

ArchyFix (a private unreleased addon) was misidentified as Archy 1.6.3 Fix, an ancient fan update from 2011 (which should really have been moved to the Outdated category by now). Some kind of basic size comparison on ambiguous name matches could easily tell that an addon that's 308 Kb zipped cannot possibly be the correct match for a 3 KB (uncompressed) addon. Alternatively, you could copy the Curse Client's approach -- prompt the user, tell them what you guessed, and ask them to confirm it before you show the addon in the list as ready to update.

Bazooka was marked as needing an update from v2.4.0 to v2.3.1 (older version).

OmniCC was marked as needing an update from 5.4.3 to 5.4.1 (older version).

Postal was marked as needing an update from 3.5.1 to v3.5.0 (older version, extra letter).
Thank you this information is very helpful. Minion only checks if something is different, its not yet smart enough to tell if a version number is newer or older. Some other issues need to be fixed by attracting more authors to keep their AddOns updated here which we are working on.

On second run:

Startup time seems to have gotten worse since I last tried it. Having an SSD at home vs HDD at work is probably a large contributing factor here, though, so I'll run it again later at home to get a better comparison.
On the 2nd run how many games were in your game list?

Though I did not update everything that was marked as needing an update on the first run, no addons are now shown as needing updates. I guess having seen the update in the app before is marking it as "done" but that's obviously not correct behavior -- if I didn't actually update the addon, then it's still in need of an update.
I'm sorry I don't understand. You did not update any AddOns and then on the 2nd run those AddOns no longer showed as needing updates?

Would you mind sharing your AddOn folder with me when you have time? Send it to [email protected] if you have time. Thanks.
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08-12-14, 03:37 PM   #11
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I guess I should clarify, in case it makes a difference, that the network shares Minion is scanning are mapped to drive letters; it's not going out and scanning all the shares on all ~50 machines on the network.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
... do you happen to have the minion0.log during detection? the minion0.log is reset every time you restart Minion so I'm guessing not.
No, but I can just wipe the settings and let it start over. If it makes the same mistakes, I'll attach the log.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
When you get to the AddOn folder location you need to click the AddOn folder so that the entire path shows in the input field below. Is that happening?
Yes, but as noted in my edit, I later found that the problem was that I'd previously removed those installs from Minion. There should be some way to restore hidden games; if there already is, I couldn't find it.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
We can not roll this out as a default option as we have found many authors have distributed their .svn / .git to users.
Erm, shouldn't those be blocked like .wowmatrix and other junk files? There's absolutely no excuse for any author including repository data in their release ZIPs.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
I would have to disagree here. There is nothing to focus, there are no options to choose if we allowed a list item to be in focus so that would be confusing. We had double click in the past which confused many people.
I run dual monitors, so yes, there is "something to focus" -- the app itself. Even if it's fully visible on the other monitor, I have to click on it to bring it into focus (OS focus, not form field focus) before I can use the mousewheel to scroll the list. When 90% of the visible app spawns a popup when clicked, it's extremely annoying. People who don't run any apps maximized and have some corner or side of 5-10 apps visible on the desktop at all times will also experience this problem, though to a lesser extent. The only people who won't have this problem are people who run everything maximized on a single monitor, and switch between apps with Alt-Tab or by clicking the buttons on the taskbar. An "Info" button would be much less annoying, and would not be confusing to anyone.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
On the 2nd run how many games were in your game list?
4 copies of WoW, as shown in the screenshot I attached. Local install, local beta install, and 2 network installs.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
I'm sorry I don't understand. You did not update any AddOns and then on the 2nd run those AddOns no longer showed as needing updates?
Yes, and this has been my experience at home, too. The first time I ran the app, it showed a bunch of addons as needing updates. I installed the updates that were actually updates, but did not install the "updates" that would have given me an older version or overwritten a working copy. I did not use the "ignore" feature either. I just left them alone. On subsequent runs of the app, none of those "updates" are shown anymore.

I'll include a second-run log in another post shortly, along with the first-run log where it's scanning network shares and misidentifying Examiner as "Raio X" etc.

Originally Posted by Dolby View Post
Would you mind sharing your AddOn folder with me when you have time? Send it to [email protected] if you have time. Thanks.
Sent.
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08-12-14, 04:53 PM   #12
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After removing the .minion folder in my Windows user folder and running the app again:

(1) No minion.log was generated, either before or after exiting the app. After exiting the app and launching it again, a log was generated. Is there something special I need to do to generate a log file on the first run?

(2) Fan updates seem to be posing a problem. 4 addons were misidentified as outdated fan update versions, and 1 was misidentified as an "alpha update" version that has its own separate project page on the site.

Badapples was wrongly identified as Cirk's Badapples - Fan Update in one network install. The (SVN working) copy in the local install was correctly identified. It is not present in the other network install.

Examiner was (again) wrongly identified as Raio X in one network install. The copies in the local install and the other network install were correctly identified.

Grid was wrongly identified as Sexy Grid (Fan Update) in both network installs. The (SVN working) copy in the local install was correctly identified.

Skada was wrongly identified as Skada 4.2 PTR Fan Update. The copy in the other network install was correctly identified. It is not present in the local install.

TellMeWhen wrongly identified as TellMeWhen (Fan Update) in both network installs. It is not present in the local install.

Tidy Plates: Threat Plates wrongly identified as Tidy Plates: Threat Plates - Alpha Update in both network installs. (They're separate projects with their own download pages; I checked.) It is not present in the local install.
(3) The initial scan hung on Detected 'Stuf Unit Frames (and Raid)' for about 2 minutes. Some other addons seemed to take a while, too, but none as long as this. There didn't seem to be any pattern; at first I thought it was taking a long time to scan large addons, but it also stuck on some tiny ones, and breezed right through DBM.

(4) Re: Disappearing updates on subsequent runs. After wiping the settings and letting it start over, it seems to be showing the correct updates for the local install all the time, but is losing track of most (but not all) updates for the two network installs.

First run:

(Local) 59 updates
(Network #1) 48 updates
(Network #2) 72 updates

Nothing downloaded or ignored.

Second run:

Local: 59 updates
Network #1: 2 updates (should still be 48)
Network #2: 2 updates (should still be 72)

Nothing downloaded or ignored.

Third run:

Stuck on 'Detected HelmSaver' for about 45 seconds. The next addon listed (just occurred to me that that's probably what it's actually taking so long with) was DBM.

Local: 59 updates
Network #1: 4 updates (should still be 48)
Network #2: 4 updates (should still be 72)

Updated 1 addon in each install.

Fourth run:

Local: 58 updates
Network #1: 1 update (should be 47)
Network #2: 1 update (should be 71)

Updated 1 addon in the local install only.

Fifth run:

Stuck on 'Detected HelmSaver' again. Next addon scrolled by too fast to catch, but I guess it was probably DBM again.

Local: 57 updates
Network #1: 3 updates (should be 47, but at least it's now -1 from the third run...)
Network #2: 3 updates (should be 71, but at least it's now -1 from the third run...)

Nothing downloaded.
(5) Attached ZIP file contains log files from various runs:
  • minion-run1.xml - As it existed after exiting from the first run.
  • minion-run5.xml - As it existed after exiting from the fifth run.
  • minion0-run2.log - As it existed when created, immediately after launching for the second run.
  • minion0-run2-after.log - As it existed after exiting from the second run.
  • During the third run and all subsequent runs, the log file was 0 bytes in size.
  • minion0-run3-after.log - As it existed after exiting from the third run.
  • minion0-run4-after.log - As it existed after exiting from the fourth run.
  • minion0-run5-after.log - As it existed after exiting from the fifth run.
Attached Files
File Type: zip MinionLogs.zip (158.3 KB, 225 views)
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Last edited by Phanx : 08-12-14 at 04:56 PM.
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WoWInterface » Site Forums » Minion » First impressions

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