[PD-dev] CVS GUI changes

[Adam Lindsay]

Frank Barknecht said this at Tue, 26 Nov 2002 17:30:28 +0100:

>Hi,
>Adam Lindsay hat gesagt: // Adam Lindsay wrote:
>
>> I just committed a bag of experimental graphical interface changes to
>> CVS. 
>
>It feels good to see you working on the GUI side. 

Cool. I was a bit nervous, because I know people can be very conservative
with GUIs.

>> While I was in there mucking about, I modified a few other things,
>> following some of Apple's basic human interface guidelines: 
>>   o On the Mac, the last three menus are "Audio  Window  Help" instead of
>> "Windows  Audio  Help". 
>
>OK, here's a first problem: This breaks the layout of the PD main
>window, at least on Linux. We don't have a global menu at the top of
>the screen, so now the longer menu is wrapped into the to small pd
>window, which looks like sh*t. So either the menu for the main window
>must shrink, or the window must grow. 

Okay, I can see how that is a problem. Off the top of my head, try
changing line 51 in bin/pd.tk to:
canvas .dummy -height 1c -width 12c

That's a guess... dunno how wide your widgets are, but that should give
you an idea, yeah?
Should I check that in?

>> I also revisited JSarlo's gui patches, restoring the useful dark-yellow
>> color on signal connections (but overlaying that on top of Miller's
>> method for distinguishing them). I tweaked jsarlo's shadows on the Mac to
>> make them look more like:
>> <http://mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/linux1.jpg>
>> (The shadows on the Mac were separated from the box by one pixel, which
>> is kind of odd. Movement still will cause the box and shadow to be
>> separated, for some reason.)
>
>Personally I don't like the shadows, they look cool, but thy clutter
>the patch area, that is always too small anyways. How could I get rif
>of them? 

Not sure. They were already in the devel_0_35 branch when I started with CVS.
However, since I was just in there with MACOSX ifdefs, I could put a
GUISHADOW ifdef in the same places, and make it a compile-time option.

On the whole, I've been trying to *reduce* the number of #ifdefs and
similar branches in the code, but I can see the shadows as being an issue
for others. Me, I think it really helps the visual clarity.

Any opinion on the dirty yellow patch cords?

>> I tried to set these changes off with tags, but it looks like it didn't
>> work (still have a lot to learn with CVS). All of these are in the
>> devel_0_36 branch that Guenter described yesterday.
>
>I want back my obj- and my bin-directory :)
>
>Both are gone, is this my fault while checking things out? 

Um, Guenter?
I seem to remember that bin/nada and obj/nada were taken away when I
updated yesterday. I *suspect* that might be related.


Frank, many thanks for trying this out. A single menu looking like sh*t
is a lot better than I feared. (Dump core often?) My biggest worry is on
the undo/redo updates and window create/destroy issues.

>I don't know, if it's only in your branch, but the TEXT EDITOR doesn't
>work anymore. Send or OK do not send anything to an object.

I don't know anything about that (I didn't deliberately touch it, and I
haven't really used it), but I'll look.

thanks,
adam


-- 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Adam T. Lindsay                      atl at comp.lancs.ac.uk
 Computing Dept, Lancaster University   +44(0)1524/594.537
 Lancaster, LA1 4YR, UK             Fax:+44(0)1524/593.608
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