Ferdy wrote:It is more clearer rather than relying on Load First Engine.
Well, I am not so keen on having many dialogs that are practically clones of each other. I consider it already bad that there are separate firts- and second-engine dialogs. But initially I had a single dialog with a first/second combobox, and that really did not work at all in practice. If the problem is that it is not sufficiently clear to users that 'Load Engine' also means 'Install Engine', it can also be solved by just changing the name of the menu item to "Load or Install First/Second Engine".
I always considered it strange that users expect that they have to do something like 'installing' an engine. For one, it is a misnomer; 'installing' software in general means getting it in your machine, and should apply to the process of downloading it and unpacking the archive. It is pretty ridiculous that this is not enough to immediately use the engine on every Chess GUI that is present on your system, but that you now for each of those has to open a special dialog, invoke the file browser, navigate to the executable, provide some info the GUI cannot know, and the user can only know by first digesting a README file that came with the engine, to 'register' the engine for use. Totally ridiculous, in fact. All of this should have been fully automatic. Then 'Load Engine' would only have to present you the listbox with engines from which you could choose. And perhaps some Up/Down/Delete/Group buttons to resort/organize the list to his preference.
What makes the Load/Install issue a bit different from the First/Second Engine problem, is that it is actually extremely rare that a user would
not want to 'register' an engine. So if the only functional difference between Load and Install would be whether the engine is added to the list, or not, a simple checkbox that gives you the default you would virtually always need seems a good solution. An alternative would be to simply always add it to the list, and in the rare case people did not want that, just have them delete it again.
As to the Uninstall; I am not sure if this is worth a separate menu item + dialog. It would be rarely needed, much less than Install (which is already rare), as usually you install engines to keep them. And it seems to me just one of the functions needed for managing the list. Sorting and grouping items in the list seems much more important. And I don't think it would be optimal to have a menu item "Manage (Engine) List", as at that point it would not be very clear what list this is about. So I'd rather have that kind of stuff in the same dialog as that displays the list itself, i.e. in Load Engine. That would make it much more obvious to the noob user, like "hey, that is cool! I actually have control over how this list I have to select from looks!".
Something like having a group box labelled "Organize List" next to the list, with buttons Up, Down, Cut (to delete the selected entry), Paste (put back the previously Cut entry above the selected one, disabled before anything is Cut). And a button 'Group', only enabled if an accompanying text entry 'Group Name' is not blank, to make the highlighted engine into a singleton group.
