fagustree wrote: Sun Dec 01, 2019 9:43 pm
the cyoa site
I've seen this! It's a different direction to what I would have done if I was building a similar app (see my above posts for what I would do)
Hmm, what a timely and convenient excuse to keep on rambling. Here's my take:
I think we have to admit to ourselves that the benefit of using such an app is
very low (edit: at least, for the videos currently existing that would benefit from interactivity): it saves the user from jumping to a timestamp once or twice in a session. And for the user considering using the app, there's likely a cost-benefit analysis going on: if that benefit (saves jumping to timestamps) is low (and it is!), the benefit must outweigh the cost (the amount of effort the user has to go to to use the app) to make the app worth using. So, the only way to achieve this is to make the cost tiny. Otherwise, the small benefit the user may gain from the app is just not worth the effort of using it.
Consider, if using an app means using a possibly janky web based interface, readjusting to a new and probably inferior UI (compared to VLC or Plex), losing or relearning all common keyboard shortcuts that the user may have (such as skip back and forward), potential security concerns, potential performance regressions, makes opening the video file harder (than just double clicking it in explorer), or (big one IMO) losing the capacity to stream the video to another device... then the user just won't bother using the app. It's just not worth it. And you couldn't blame the user for this - the app just doesn't provide a compelling solution, because using it is more effort than it's worth. It's the developers and the designers fault for providing a bad solution to an existing problem.
I'll throw out another flashy term that I won't pretend I know much about: change aversion. It's a documented negative effect that occurs when a user is forced to switch to something new, even if the new thing is better, our short-term reaction is that we don't like it. I won't say much more because I'm not at all qualified, but it does seem relevant here. Forcing a user to fundamentally change the way they play videos, something they've been doing for
years, is not going to end well.
I think all the approaches I've seen so far to building this kind of app are destined to fail. I think that the amount of people who would be willing to use and support these apps will be very low, just because the benefit gained of using these apps will be substantially lower than the cost (effort) of doing so. If you want such an app to be the de-facto way to watch and distribute CH videos two years from now, I don't think this is it.
I think when designing this kind of an app, the key focus should be:
how can we reduce the burden on the user (to use the app) to the absolute minimum? How can we
preserve the user's current processes (for watching videos) without requiring them to dramatically change? For my solution to these, see my posts above. TLDR on those: quiet app runs in the background, interfaces with VLC and Plex, possibly through their remote control APIs. From the user's perspective: all they do is download and runs an .exe. That's it. They then play videos as they normally would do through VLC or Plex, and keyboard shortcuts now magically work.
Sorry for the negativity. I'm very happen to be proven wrong. Also very interested to hear thoughts on this, especially if you disagree.
Right-click the Computer icon, then select Properties, then Advanced System Settings, then Environment Variables. Select PATH, then click Edit.
I don't know about others but when I play a video, any kind of video, I browse through a directory from the genre I'm interested in using the OS's standard directory browser, and double-click the filename. Very simple! And for Cock Hero Inferno Canto 1, I now click a batch file. Business as usual! No Artificial Intelligence system involved. 
