I found several small issues with CPN and BOINC yesterday. I don\'t know the best place to report them. Is this a good place? If not, where should I put them?

For example, in BM 5.10.45 and hadcm3i version 5.44, the text on the left side of the graphics says, \"Use keyboard keys in change view. Use CTRL + key when in screensaver mode.\" That behavior worked sometime before 5.2.13, but was no longer working in 5.2.13 or since then.

I think this confuses newbies (and this slightly reduces recruitment). It certainly confused me. It took me a couple of hours to find the correct way to do this.

Thanks,

Pat

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Pat,

This is a good place to put suggestions and corrections. In practice, the moderators collect ideas from lots of places and try to get things to happen. Sometimes suggestions relate to BOINC itself rather than the CPDN science application, in which case the BOINC boards are the best place to go. Other times it is a CPDN problem and attempts are made to put it on, or push it up, the project\'s to-do list; however, that list is rather long and the project resources rather limited.

I have long thought that there are lots of small things that could be done to significantly improve the user experience of CPDN, but we are where we are. The control key issue is well known.

In their defence, I should say that the project has put a lot of effort into improving the reliability and range of the science applications, which makes a lot of sense. They clearly regard the safety of participants\' computers and getting good science as high priorities: perhaps the scientific frame of mind just isn\'t suited to communication ...

Iain

Hi Iain,
Thanks, I\'ll put stuff here then.

I know that safety and good science are the most important goals. I\'d like to argue a little bit that improving the user experience is also important to this project, like all projects that recruit volunteers. (I\'m the volunteer coordinator for one non-profit right now, and have been same for a couple of others in the past. Keeping the volunteers happy enough to do good work was pretty much my entire focus.) (Also, I know you\'re not the person I need to convince.)

Here\'s my argument:
1) This project depends completely on volunteers to run the programs.
2) Prospective volunteers come in lots of flavors. For some, the science is the most important thing, and they will work through any frustrations of using the program. (These people tend to be the most similar to scientists.)
3) For others, the \'good feelings\' of contributing are the most important. These people tend to be less able and less willing to deal with frustrations. (These people tend to think differently than scientists.)
4) People like this tend to quit running a program that frustrates them. In order to keep more of those people, the fewer frustrations in using the program, the better.
5) In order to reduce the frustrations, it would be good if the developers put \'user experience\' as a very close third to safety and science.

If you believe this logic (and I do), then the more attention paid to the user experience, the more compute hours people will donate.

Pat

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Pat
I informed the programmers of the \"control key message on the graphics display\' issue a few weeks ago on our beta test site.
This may get changed when the next lot of models gets released on this public site.

However, there is a new release of BOINC with [i]major[/i[] changes to it, on the way. A lot of it is to do with difficulties caused by the new security measures in Vista, but there has been talk of changes to the way that imgaes are handled.
First it was said that the display graphics would NOT be backwards compatable. Now it\'s being said that they will be. This version is still in alpha testing, so it\'s not possible to say what it will be like. But it\'s possible that one of changes may be to make the control key function work again.

As the the climate models will need to function with the new version of BOINC, the programmers on all of the projects will have access to the ideas being tried out, and test versions of program modules as well, so that they can be ready for it.

The best advise at the moment is: they know about the control key issue, so there\'s no point in constantly telling them.

PS
In a different post somewhere, you expressed surprise that a re-boot of your computer was required to get the graphics changes to work.
Re-booting a computer is a well known way of \'fixing\' a lot of problems with BOINC projects.
Some, perhaps a lot of it in some projects, is to do with \'memory leaks\'.
But a re-boot often works wonders.

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