4. A Confusing Option

What are mouse shortcut icons?

I ran into my first quandary on screen 9 of the installation. "What in the world are these 'mouse shortcut icons' and what will happen if I decide not to use them?" To be safe, I opened up the SageTV PDF manual and looked them up. Unfortunately, the answer did not provide me with enough information.

Screen capture of the mouse shortcut icons section of the SageTV manual

"Scroll icons on the program guide" was pretty self-explanatory, but "control icons during video playback" conjured up an image of Windows-style icons obstructing my view of video playback. While this was unlikely, I still did not know what these "control icons" controlled, and whether I would miss them if I chose not to display them. After poking around a little bit when I finished the installation, I found that the control icons appear as part of a progress bar that is only visible when there is mouse or remote control activity during video playback. They did not affect the functionality of any aspect of SageTV.

Unless the company plans to explain them further, Sage should remove this option from the configuration wizard and enable the mouse shortcut icons by default. People who are bothered by the icons can change them after they have a chance to find out that they are there. My guess is that most people will not even realize that they exist...