LSI_Bruhn wrote:Dear wildhorseinc, but what would you suggest to make it better ?
Hello LSI_Bruhn,
I agree with wildhorseinc. I have been working with Silverfast AI 6 (all updates applied) for a month now and I'm still confused sometimes and have to search features. It may well be that SF is efficient and fast to use for people who have known the program for ages, and that my suggestion will make some tasks harder for an experienced SF user, but in terms of usability and according to style guides they would be improvements.
Silverfast is surely a great program and the architecture behind it as well as the image algorithms look good to me (I'm not a photography professional, though).
But the usability is very bad. I have had some involvement and experience in software development and style guides. Here are my main gripes:
1. Silverfast produces too much waiting time.
* It freezes every time the scanner does something, and often lets my scanner readjust itself (if that's what it is) when I'm not actually asking for a preview or scan.
I don't know if and how this is necessary, but my Reflecta Proscan 4000 makes SF wait all the time. For example, I have a set of negatives to scan.
I put the negatives in the scanner.
SF freezes until the scanner has arranged the negs.
I click on the overview button to see all slides on the film.
Scanner works for 10 seconds (why? there is nothing to do yet!), SF freezes.
The overview appears (but with the wrong pictures. Can SF detect whether the film has been changed and erase the pics in the preview?)
I click on "create Preview" (the Play button - why is this a "Play" button? And why does the explanation for the buttons while hovering over them, appear in SF's MAIN preview window, and not - like the other buttons - in a tooltip popup? Please make these text buttons, the icons are really misleading. IMHO.)
wait for some minutes until all previews have been scanned
click on one picture
wait for some minutes until a bigger preview has been scanned
etc.
* Batch settings. Maybe I haven't understood enough of SF, or I'm not the typical SF user. I want to scan in about 300 negatives with as little manual intervention as possible. I haven't found out yet whether SF readjusts the "auto" setting (second button from the left in the main SF window) for each negative it scans, when in batch mode, or how to automate this setting.
What I would like is:
- insert negatives
- automatically scan all thumbnails and all previews (this takes time)
- let me adjust all settings for all pictures, switch between them at will, *without* starting up the scanner again
- let me press "Start" (or whatever) and then scan all pictures (this takes time)
2. Silverfast violates just about every GUI style guide in existence.
* There is no "main" window and the tasks you can prepare are not seperated according to what they manipulate. There are tasks that change the scan procedure (ie ICE) in the preview window and not the scan window, and there are tasks that change the preview in the scan window (ie. auto-contrast settings).
* Silverfast's windows (especially the tool dialogs with the smaller title bar) don't automatically arrange themselves according to screen space and cannot be minimized or resized properly. The icon bar at the left side of the preview window (why is it at the left, and not at the top like every other program does it?) is often obscured by some tool windows.
* Silverfast's windows are very stubborn regarding window focus. The preview window stays in the foreground even in *front* of Windows error messages that freeze Silverfast (e.g. when I click "scan" and the File dialog window points to a non-existent network share, Windows pops up an error saying it can't connect, but you don't see the error, because the Preview window obscures it).
* There are menu items that open popup windows when selected [e.g. the GANE menu item]. This requires you to *re*select an already selected item when you want to change settings. This is highly unintuitive. A drop down menu and a button "Details" or "Settings" beside it would be more consistent.
* There are buttons that cannot be pressed down but *do* open a window. I don't know whether the GUI is too slow but most of the buttons in the main preview window just don't go "down" when clicked. You don't know if anything happened.
* There are buttons that should be radio buttons or checkboxes because they toggle settings. Like the ICE button vs. the iSRD button, which seem to exclude each other, and with iSRD another button is added, which adds to the confusion.
* There are too many non-resizable windows where resizing would make perfect sense. For example, the GANE preview window.
* There are too many small settings dialogs that overlap and tend to be in the way all the time. Buttons for "OK", "Cancel" etc sometimes are at the bottom, sometimes somewhere else.
* The "Exit" button is right next to the "Scan" button (easy to hit accidentally) and between(!) Scan and Options buttons.
* The densitometer belongs to the Preview window, not to the main window, and is not a setting related to the actual scan process, i.e. should not be a tab in the main window.
* Often it is not clear whether a window is modal or not. E.g. when the overview window is active there is no indication that you *cannot* use the Negafix window or the preview window (why not?). Clicking in the main window causes a flashing title bar, which is OK - why don't the others?
These are some of the improvements I'd like to see. I would like to see Silverfast behave like a normal application. This would probably require a major interface overhaul, however.
Please spend some time thinking about this. I would appreciate it.
Jens