User:James/Quick Fix

What is 'Quick Fix'?

Quick Fix is a menu item in Audacity that may provide a way out of a stuck-in-a-mode problem.

Microsoft's Troubleshooters

Microsoft's 'troubleshooters' sound like a good idea, but in practice they are useless. Steve talked about their problems. I think their main flaw is that they promise to do something, like fix networking, and then when you go down the rabbit hole of following the steps they take a lot of time, and don't deliver. That is why I am doing quick fixes - There is no rabbit hole where you wait ages for the quick fix to diagnose a problem and go through lots of steps. Either your problem is listed or it is not.

'How do I?' Items

• I do not want to extend the quick fixer to add
  • 'How do I select audio?',
  • 'Where has chains gone?' and
  • 'I can't find vertical zooming'.

That is not the point of Quick Fix. It's for 'How do I stop Audacity doing something I don't want it doing', not 'How do I make Audacity do something I do want'.

Stop Gap - Better alternatives

We want to avoid the need for Quick-fix by better UI design. Quick-fix is in many ways a stop gap for better UI design. We have the quick-fix because no one is currently putting energy into better UI fixes for these, and meanwhile we have many users who are being caught out.

Current Quick Fixes

• A better fix for unwanted sound-activated-recording is to stop it being a preference. It could operate more like timer record.
• A better fix for stuck-in-sync-lock is a redesign of the feature.

Possible Quick Fixes

• Unwanted meta-data editor is better handled by a don't-show-again or similar button on that dialog.
• A recording-error dialog should have a help icon rather than the quick-fix dialog diagnosing that a bad audio host choice has been made.

More help on the Dialog?

• I disagree about adding more text (or diagrams) about the modes onto the quick fix dialog.
  • A user who is stuck WANTS a quick fix.
  • If they repeatedly get stuck, and repeatedly use quick-fix then they can click the help icon.
  • The help icon takes users to the manual. If we need diagrams and more text, that is where it should be.