Ah, makes sense. What was your old account? The admin would probably help you get access to it if you asked.
Fortunately, BLF isn’t the only place where people talk about flashlights. Anduril v1 was made for BLF… but I started on Anduril 2 because of what people said elsewhere — Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Banggood, personal blogs, etc — places where people didn’t think I’d see it, where they pulled no punches. People outside of BLF had a number of complaints, some of which were worded with a lot of anger, but the underlying points were solid.
So I took those critiques / rants / reviews and looked for ways to solve as many as possible. Some of the main themes were:
- It was too complex for new users out of the box.
- The full UI had too much, but Muggle Mode had too little. People wanted something in-between, something more Goldilocks with all the basic flashlight functions, safe limits, and no disco modes or config menus. No weird modes to get stuck in.
- All the core functions needed to be as few clicks as possible, because a surprising amount of people have difficulty counting clicks or reliably executing click sequences longer than 3. It may seem strange, but more than one said they literally can’t count to four while clicking a button.
- Muggle mode was too easy to enter/exit by accident.
- Muggle mode was way too limited and felt like an afterthought (because it was).
- The term “muggle” is insulting.
- Config menus were too easy to access by accident.
- Multi-click functions were too close together.
- Lockout mode was good, but too slow to enter/exit.
- Some fairly specific extra features would be nice.
So I removed muggle mode entirely, and replaced it with something in-between, with the core essential flashlight functions and nothing more. It’s pretty similar to a “normal” UI from other companies, designed for people who just want to get stuff done and don’t want any weird extras getting in the way.
Tried to address the other main complaints people had, too.
However, I also encountered an entire category of complaints which I can’t really do anything about without turning Anduril into a completely different UI. The ideas people had in those critiques aren’t bad… they just require a different solution. And to address that, I’ve been working on something else:
People should be able to choose a UI at time of purchase, or change it fairly easily at home.
Because no single UI can be and do everything for every person. One size doesn’t fit all. It may be possible to cover 70% of what people want, or maybe even 80, in one program… but it’ll never be 100. But there’s a very simple way to get closer to 100%: Offer several different UIs so people can choose whatever they like most.
To help accomplish that, I’ve been pushing toward a few goals:
- Make reflashing easier. For example, with easily-accessed reflashing pads and commercially-available pogo pin adapters. This allows reflashing in under a minute with no soldering.
- Make firmware available to everyone. In other words, free software. Publishing everything, chasing down license compliance issues, teaching companies how to participate, etc.
- Make firmware easier to create or modify. For this, I created a microkernel and UI toolkit which handles the hardware details and allows people to write user interfaces in an easier, portable language which works on many different lights.
There’s still a big piece missing though:
- People need to actually make the other UIs they want.
I made the UI I like, and a few other examples for reference, and some documentation about how people can make their own… but people still need to actually do it.
Indeed, it can’t.
This is the most common criticism I’ve encountered in the second category — things I can’t do without sacrificing core functions. It’s not a bad idea, it’s just … a fundamentally different type of interface. It deserves to be its own UI, not just some obscure option in Anduril.
The closest I can potentially work in is the “Off -> 2H” button action. It’s currently mapped to something nobody really seems to care about, so it’s prime real estate for something else. It could be mapped to full turbo, or momentary turbo, or momentary mem, or … whatever.
But if double clicking is too slow, 2H doesn’t help. It isn’t any faster.
That only leaves the 1H action, ideally responding as soon as the button is pressed, for a true momentary… but activating turbo as soon as the button is pressed would create a ton of problems on most non-thrower lights. Like, literally every time the light is activated, it would immediately go to full power. Want to take a bathroom trip in the middle of the night? BAM! Now the user is wide awake and temporarily blinded.
So I’m not going to remap “Off -> Press button” to turbo.
However, that could easily be the starting point for designing a completely different UI…
That sounds like the beginning of a brand new UI. So… make it. Don’t use my silly toy interface; it’s designed for purposes which are completely different than your needs. It’s not what you want… so make what you want. The whole point of free software is to empower people to scratch their own itches instead of depending on someone else to do it.
As they should. Diversity is a beautiful thing.
On that note, in case it matters, there’s also another option: Add a clicky switch. Anduril already supports the use of a second switch, a clicky switch, for momentary purposes. It simply turns on at the memorized level as soon as power is connected, like most tactical-style lights. But it requires a physical button, which isn’t something I can provide with a firmware update.