Henno wrote:
Solving it is difficult because we (=empeg team) have to cramp a
lot of functionality into only a few buttons.
This isn't quite so much of an issue on the remote which has more buttons
available than the front panel. I think of the remote as a sort of cache
of most commonly-used features. You can do all the same operations on
both, but it is important for the remote to give easy access to the most
needed features, even at the expense of absolute generality (which is
always available through the menu interface anyway).

Two of these buttons are already dedicated to the two features I am
discussing; that should be plenty to control info on/off and selection.
The problem is that the functions of those two buttons do not map well
to operations this user wants to perform. I never want to change visual
while looking at the info screen, because the info screen now totally
obscures the visual. So it seems daft to keep a button for this function.
But one thing I often want to do is see the detailed info for the track
now playing, then dismiss it, but the buttons now don't let me do this easily.

On the display, this is alleviated somewhat by allocating dual
functions to a single button by differentiating between single and double
presses.
It's actually short and long presses, isn't it? Certainly some
other computer interfaces have used double- and even triple-click for
different functions, but it's always seemed a bit clumsy to me. I'm
not too keen on the long-press operations either, but they are just
short-cuts for things you can do another way.

I suggest to carry this over to the remote (if possible).
This would allow: a single key press to cycle through all the track-info
screens, as it is now, and a double press to toggle the one last selected
on-or-off (or better yet to turn the last selected one on for 3-4 seconds)
Holding down the info button to make it display for as long as you
hold the button (or for a timed period) would make some sense.

I still think the select-visual-while-info-showing function should
be replaced by something more useful, and see no reason why it couldn't
be info selection, freeing the info button to be a toggle.

--
Robin O'Leary