Miro Folder Management
I use Miro. I like Miro. It has great channels, has reasonable control over how many you pull down, how often, how long you retain them, etc. There is much to recommend it. I subscribe to probably more video feeds that I ought to, including web search “channels” to pull down vintage aircraft videos and guitar lessons. I pull down more old crummy movies than I watch. I should get more software videos, less old movies. There are great software videos. Duh.
Anyway, there is supposed to be a feature to click on a feed and drag it to a channel folder. That doesn’t work. Not even a little. Well, at least not on Linux if it works anywhere else. I don’t know what’s wrong and haven’t pulled down the code (but I don’t know how to code drag-n-drop anyway… it would be fun to learn). It works miserably poorly. If you click the folder, the big window that opens up says you can drag things to it, but you cannot. It is just busted.
Alternatively, you’re supposed to be able to select with ctrl-click and then right-click to move movies to a folder. If I right click, I’m given the option to move them to a new folder (which it will create for me) but not to move them to an existing folder. That’s a pain.
And when you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t get an option to create it in a folder. There is no right-click meno on the folder that will allow you to create the feed there, either. It’s kind of a pain.
If you have a folder, you cannot change the folder’s contents. The best you can do is select all the contents of the folder and the new feeds you would like in the folder, move them to a new folder (which you would name similarly), and then go delete the old folder. That’s not very intuitive.
Everything else Miro does, I love. I am saddened that this part doesn’t look better. Maybe I should pull down the source code and see if I can fix it. It seems like it ought to be pretty simple in concept. I know there are bsddb data files behind it all, which are not hard to work with. I wonder what makes drag-n-drop work so poorly here, and why we don’t get to create the new feeds in existing folders. If I learn anything more I’ll post it as a followup.
In the meantime, Miro is worth your time.
hey! I was behind! I went to getmiro.com and found that I’m behind the current release somewhat (1.2x instead of 2.x). I’m upgrading. Maybe the new one works better?
Comment by Tim — 2009-February-13 @ 06:17
My apologies. I upgraded my apt sources, pulled down 2.x and the drag -n- drop work great. Now I can unreservedly recommend Miro to you!
Comment by Tim — 2009-February-13 @ 06:19