Some thoughts and ideas about LottaNZB's usability

What could be done to make it easier for users to set up LottaNZB? I've been thinking about this for the past hours and for example, the following crossed my mind:

Away with the local front-end mode!

Let's have a look at the current situation first. Right now, a new user is presented with the usage mode selection window, which contains much visual clutter and many technical expressions (daemon, HellaNZB, stand-alone, front-end, etc.). While the underlying code has become quite mature, the corresponding UI reflects too much what's going on under the surface.

The lion's share of our users just want to have LottaNZB set up as fast as possible. Ideally, the shouldn't have to do more than entering the address or the news server and optionally his/her username and password. Don't distract the user with a variety of technical terms he doesn't really need to know.

However, we don't want to exclude existing HellaNZB users. They can have various intentions: Some might want to connect to a HellaNZB daemon on another computer. Some might want to connect to the already running HellaNZB client on the same computer and some might want to completely manage the downloads using LottaNZB and thus import their existing configuration.

Overall we can make two different groups of people. Most of them want to download stuff on this computers and some of them want to manage the downloads of another computer. This distinction doesn't require any knowledge about HellaNZB, what a daemon is or what "frontend" means, compared to the three usage modes we have right now.

I've created a mockup of a possible welcome dialog:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3218/3133170870_b6a2022b21.jpg?v=0
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3185/3133170868_7f7aa7c3da.jpg?v=0

Notes:
This is already done: LottaNZB looks for an existing configuration file and imports it automatically.
There's no "Authentication required" checkbox. If the users uses an anonymous news server, the two fields can simply be left blank.
In the second screenshot, there's no "Port" entry. We will make it possible to enable remote access using LottaNZB and we will use the default port for that. Users who want to use another port (which I think is extremly unusual) most probably know how to concatenate an IP adress and a port number. LottaNZB should therefore look for a port number in the address field. The same applies to the address field in the first screenshot.

In the distant future we might even add a "Search" button next to the address field and look for avah -services provided by LottaNZB on the local network.
When an existing HellaNZB configuration file is imported and the HellaNZB client is already running. We can silently restart it with the imported, LottaNZB-managed configuration file.

I didn't create mockup so far that shows what happens if LottaNZB cannot find the HellaNZB executable and how it handles other errors.

Besides, the mockups are far from perfect. There's always room for improvement.