New GUI improvements

[diskdiddler]

Many might be forgetful of the fact that this is all open source free software. There should be level of gratefulness involved here.

Hence, this is not a complaint and/or request to change anything. This is more of a recommendation based on an observation.

How about just adding a dark theme instead of going through the whole process of a complete redesign of UX. Something like what Pfsense does. They have just a couple of themes and the dark one is almost just an inverting of colours. Just adding a dark theme almost has an immediate impression of something more sophisticated and refined.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 

[danb35]

How about just adding a dark theme instead of going through the whole process of a complete redesign of UX.

Because that does nothing to solve the problems of the UI. It makes it look a little prettier, maybe, but there are issues there, some of which are even discussed in this thread.

 

[Chuck Remes]

As a FN10 Corral user (nope, won't upgrade until FN11.1 at the earliest), I am hoping that they continue developing a new GUI. I originally installed FN9 and found it to be disorganized and dated. The FN10 GUI was, IMHO, light years better.

So, I'm hopeful they continue working on the new GUI.

 

[D-Tijori]

Because that does nothing to solve the problems of the UI. It makes it look a little prettier, maybe, but there are issues there, some of which are even discussed in this thread.

Should have been clearer - as long as the functional & non-functional aspect of UI is high priority e.g. different functionality of icons on top bar vis-à-vis similarly named side bar icons. However, if you look at it, improvements in UI is typically done to 'make it prettier' or more presentable/marketable/to make it contemporary more than functional & non-functional & platform based attributes.

 

[zambanini]

Stop using the GUI, use the shell!

 

[D-Tijori]

Stop using the GUI, use the shell!

But the little rodent would get lonely...

Sent from my HTC 10 using Tapatalk

 

[lukyjay]

Why not let users upload their own theme files and have community created themes

 

[danb35]

Why not let users upload their own theme files and have community created themes

I don't see the point, honestly--as long as the design is reasonably clean, and everything works properly, I just don't see any need for user-selectable themes (with the possible exception of things for accessibility--font size, high contrast, etc.). But that's just me. If you have a suggestion for the devs, file a bug report--discussion here isn't going to get the devs' attention.

 

[ChrisHolzer]

I am still using Corral on my home NAS - yesterday I tried FreeNAS 11 inside VMware.

So when I look at the current state of the "new GUI" in FreeNAS 11, then I feel that it's a major step backwards from the Corral GUI.

I do understand that this is still a WIP, but what I do not understand is why the team decided to start from scratch with the new GUI instead of re-building/porting the Corral GUI over to FreeNAS 11 using the Angular framework?

I find that the Corral GUI offers vastly superior ease of use compared to what we see in FreeNAS11 (classic and new GUI). And I guess that porting over the Corral GUI would also be a lot faster than creating something new from scratch?
Based on what I see in FreeNAS 11 I am not convinced that the new design will be superior to Corral's GUI.

Btw: Primary reason why I did not use FreeNAS for a long time was the pre Corral GUI (which is the main GUI in FreeNAS 11 again).
The old GUI is simply dated and clunky. It unnecessarily increases the entry barrier and it makes configuring and maintaining the system harder than it has to be (for those who are new to FreeNAS). So the decision to create a modern GUI was definitely a good one for the future of FreeNAS!

 

[Magnus33]

I don't see the point, honestly--as long as the design is reasonably clean, and everything works properly, I just don't see any need for user-selectable themes (with the possible exception of things for accessibility--font size, high contrast, etc.). But that's just me. If you have a suggestion for the devs, file a bug report--discussion here isn't going to get the devs' attention.

The reason for the new UI is very simple.

The old UI is very dated and highly unintuitive .

You have two different menus with often duplicate function and for new users its a confused mess.
It lacks information and customizability which in this day and age there no excuse for...hell you can't even see simple system temps without doing some hacking of your own.

There are of course other things like the colors..seriously whats with the windows 8 metro Mattel colors which no one except five year olds like?

As to why people are filing bug reports its very simple the bug report system is a bigger more out of control mess then the new UI.
Anyone can edit the section with no grace period, there is duplication that often gets combined together with other reports creating a cluster..bleep.
Other times information is lost for the very same reason which slows progress far beyond what it should be.
Slowing it down, putting in a grace period before anyone can change things, put even a small degree of control into place would vastly increase flow and lead to quicker resolution of issues.
Us as consumers who have looked into the business end have walked away for this very reason most of the time since who wants this mess behind your development of fixes.

Our company spent near 30k in a storage which we upgrade last month.
It wasn't with TrueNAS among other solution which we looked at with a group of five people and when we came back and compared the issues with TrueNAS looked like we had all copied the same paper. The issues were so glaring and obvious every single person saw them and wondered how things can be left like this in a business.

Finally you get to big issues .

One is the behavior in the forums of late with mods going after people complaining or commenting.
As long as those people don't attack others or use foul language leave them be as it lets of stream and often leads to better ideas for development.
Don't pull this hard handed nonsense that there been so much talk about since these people are the ones who make it popular and this in turn effects how popular truen-ass is.
Or in other words don't pull a boxeebox and tick of the user base if there entirely no need for it.

Second there is a play of ego involved in the development of FreeNAS 11 which is causing the UI development issue among other ones.
In business it common sense to take what works and drop what doesn't.
The Corral UI was actually something that worked quite well and was quite intuitive to use which even gave you some customizability on the desktop for desired info.
But because there was a battle of egos between the guys who wanted to keep going with the legacy code and the Corral team so what worked great in Corral likely wont ever see the light of day in FreeNAS 11.

This makes no sense for people running a business and doesn't really inspire confidence.

Ohh yes this is a open source and free which people should be grateful for but let's not forget that this is also feeding development for the business end.
Ideas and new functions are tested here before they ever see the sales end of things and frankly that does make good business sense.
So in the end its a happy marriage and not nearly as one sided as some would like to point out.

Last if people are behaving and just questioning or venting politely leave them be.
If you don't agree then politely respond like others have and if you can't then don't bother posting.
They are not causing harm and when you go after them for posting or outright attacking them you do end up causing harm to development.
Because the longer this new trend in the forums keeps going on the less popular with people leaving for better options, which in the long run will end up hurting the open source development and eventually the business end.

There is much needed change needed for the future of FreeNAS and the outdated UI is just a obvious example.

 

[danb35]

The old UI is very dated and highly unintuitive .

Mostly agreed. I'm not sure why you quoted my post to make this point; the "I don't see the point" was in response to @lukyjay's suggestion of supporting (and curating) user-created themes. I don't see that there's any need for a theme-able UI, and it seems like something that would add extra complexity for no good reason. I do agree that the UI really could use some significant rework.

The FN10 UI seems to have been very polarizing--lots of people loved it, lots of people hated it. I didn't much care for it, personally--it was certainly prettier than the FN9 UI, but I didn't find that it worked nearly as well to actually do stuff (and that's ignoring its instability, browser-lock, and lack of feature-completeness).

As to why people are filing bug reports its very simple the bug report system is a bigger more out of control mess then the new UI.

So what do you propose as an alternative? The devs are writing the UI. If you want to get their attention, the best way I know of is to file a bug report. Could that system be improved? No doubt it could. But it remains, to my knowledge, the best way to raise an issue to the dev team.

 

[Ericloewe]

Don't pull this hard handed nonsense

You must be reading a different forum. It has been several months since I've seen anyone get any sort of sanction and all but one or two locked threads are due to very boring reasons (ancient thread got necro'd, duplicate thread, etc.)

The carrol UI was actually something that worked quite well and was quite intuitive to use which even gave you some customizability on the desktop for desired info.

You must've missed the memo that the framework it used was abandoned and a new GUI for Corral would've been required, too.

They are not causing harm

That's actually an interesting philosophical question. Opinions are mostly right (I say mostly because some opinions are unacceptable in any democratic society), but constant repetition of falsehoods presented as facts is actually rather dangerous, because people might believe them.
"What a silly scenario", you might say. Well, no, Corral's demise has brought a lot of that from some people. I want to make one thing clear - I'm not going to let false information be presented as an unopposed fact.

As for your bug tracker complaints, I have no idea what you're talking about. A grace period (I guess you mean a cooldown?) for posting things? What problem does that solve? Information being silently edited sowing confusion is not a problem on the bug tracker.
Some problems with the bug tracker include:

• Private tickets are excessively private in most cases. For most, just restricting downloads of the attachments would do fine.
• Milestones should not reopen if someone opens an old ticket.
• Milestones should be properly sorted.
• Finished milestones should be hidden.
• The editor is sucky and not very noob-friendly.
• Searching for issues is hit-and-miss.
• Issue titles make for poor changelog entries at times.

 

[ChrisHolzer]

You must've missed the memo that the framework it used was abandoned and a new GUI for Corral would've been required, too.

The Corral GUI design and structure does not depend on the framework it used. Yes the developers were sort of forced to use angular now, but they were not forced to start from scratch when it comes to the design of the GUI.

They could have re-built the Corral GUI using the new framework which would have :

• been much faster than building something new from scratch
• maintained a familiar user experience for those coming from FreeNAS 10

The teams decision to throw away the Corral GUI design and start from scratch simply makes no sense to me. Especially in an open source project where development resources are usually very limited.

 

[Ericloewe]

The Corral GUI design and structure does not depend on the framework it used

It's certainly conditioned by it. Given the mixed response, it's normal not to waste resources replicating its design on a different framework, instead opting for something closer to what the framework natively offers.

 

[danb35]

Given the mixed response,

It's interesting that fans of the FN10 UI seem to either miss or ignore the fact that quite a lot of people really disliked it.

 

[Ericloewe]

It's interesting that fans of the FN10 UI seem to either miss or ignore the fact that quite a lot of people really disliked it.

I didn't play with it enough to like it or dislike it, but many who did say they disliked it. It definitely needed changes.

 

[raidflex]

All I know is for a NAS, function should trump form, since generally this is not something you will need to consistently work in. I just hope the new UI is not just a re-skin of the old one and actually improves functionality and eliminates much of the disorganized duplication in the menu system.

 

[ChrisHolzer]

It's interesting that fans of the FN10 UI seem to either miss or ignore the fact that quite a lot of people really disliked it.

Yet for what reasons?

I am aware of the issues it had (they are all fixable), but the basic structure and ease of use was good. It was by no means flawed in it's core design. It brought more people to FreeNAS as it was clear, easy to use and looked good.

You will always have people complain about anything and everything. But I really don't see that the Corral GUI design was "so bad" that it could not be used as foundation for the new GUI in FreeNAS11.

All that this decision caused is that especially less experienced users like me will stay away from FreeNAS11 now, as long as the new GUI is not ready for production. The old GUI is just too confusing to use, which leaves too much room for error for people who are new to FreeNAS.

As an outsider, it looks like the remaining team was just fed up with everything labeled "Corral", and so the GUI design was tossed out, even though this meant increasing the dev time on the new GUI.

 

[danb35]

Yet for what reasons?

They've been discussed quite a bit in other threads, and I don't think I could do justice to others' positions in trying to summarize them. For myself, though, I didn't find it especially usable, though it's hard to say how much of that was design vs. instability vs. browser-lock vs. lack of feature completeness. I'll agree it looked better (though I'm not at all convinced that light text on a dark background is a good call for long-term usability, it looks nice in the short term, and it's obviously different from the old UI), but my own testing found that quite often I wasn't able to make what I wanted to happen, happen. But I don't remember any more how much of that was due to any of the following:

• The feature/function I wanted just wasn't there
• The feature/function I wanted was there, but I couldn't find it
• The control I wanted was there, and I found it, but it wasn't coded yet
• The control I wanted was there, I found it, and it was coded, but it didn't work
• The control crashed the GUI
• The control didn't work with my browser

I ran into all of these issues, fairly late into the beta, but I can't say at this point the relative prevalence of each of them. I'd say that both of the first two point to the design, though--the second is obviously design-related, but in the first case, if it isn't there, there's no way to know that the design has accounted for it needing to be somewhere. There was also the fact that it was impossible to copy text from the GUI, which makes it a lot harder to report or search for--probably a fairly minor issue, but one that was raised several times and not addressed. And yes, there could well be a bit of baby-with-the-bathwater going on, but I don't think that's entirely without justification--there was such a long series of such boneheaded decisions regarding FN10 that it'd be kind of understandable for them to have said "just burn it to the ground."

One thing that I think is shown by this whole fiasco is that UI design is actually pretty hard.

 

[pschatz100]

I work for a company that specializes in building data visualization and user interfaces, and I can tell you it is not "pretty hard", it is "really, really hard". It is not uncommon to drastically underestimate the effort necessary to do a good job. In some cases, half the effort of creating a new application can be attributed to the GUI.

I like the dashboard concept in the new GUI that appears when you first log in. I don't care for all the bright colors and I think it wastes a lot of space which makes things more difficult to read. However, it is still a work in progress...