Controls are too small

[David Sinclair]

I really like Camect, but an ongoing frustration for me is that the hit areas of the controls are too fiddly.

At a basic level, I think all of the in-video controls should be double the size, to make it easier to click them (on my Mac).  The buttons each have 16 pixels of height, which is a little tight; more like 24 or 32 would be easier.

The timeline is worse, though: it only has 9 pixels of height, so when moving the mouse pointer along the timeline bar to click a time, any vertical drift will go beyond the clickable area, making it more fiddly to click.

I realize you don't want the buttons covering too much of the video, but you could extend the clickable region beyond the drawn border, or draw the border with some transparency.  For the bar, I know you can't extend the clickable region above the bar, due to the quick review and zoom buttons, but you could make the entire area below the bar clickable, to the bottom of the video.  Or could move the review and zoom buttons upwards a bit.

If you didn't want to adjust the size of the controls for some reason, another idea could be to only double their sizes on the single-camera views.  Tiny controls on a camera view displayed full-screen on a 27" display looks punitive.

[Eric Meeson]

FWIW I definitely wouldn't want the icons to be any bigger, enough of the video is already covered as it is. Have you tried zooming your web browser window? Should be Command & + to zoom in, otherwise it's in a Chrome dropdown, I don't remember exactly where on a Mac.

[David Sinclair]

I don't want the videos to be larger, just the buttons.

My suggestion of not increasing the apparent size, but just their hit regions, wouldn't block any more of the videos, but would allow a bit of inaccuracy in clicking.  A standard technique for small buttons or situations where input isn't precise (e.g. mobile).

[Rob Taft]

I’ve shared this same feedback in the past. I think the whole UI needs to be reworked. It’s too difficult to use on mobile which is where most users are going to be using it.

I personally think they are trying to accomplish too much in one window. Separating out the alerts into a list view on a separate page would work far better (like Blue Iris).

I’ve reached the point where I use Camect for AI/notifications only and if I want to review video I go straight to my camera’s app.

[CamectArup]

David is actually talking about the sizes of buttons on a desktop. However, we are listening to all of you and thinking about what we can do, both in the short term and in the long term. 

A first cut at a list view of alerts is coming very soon now ... probably in the next week or two. 

[AAron nAAs]

I look forward to the change.

I agree that the icons on the mobile app are hard to be precise with.

[Eric Meeson]

Increasing the hitboxes would be a good way to do this, I agree.

Just so you know, if you zoom the browser window the video only scales until it hits the edges, then stays that size while the controls continue to scale as you zoom. Not necessarily the ideal behavior as the scaling on other things gets weird, but still better than nothing I think.