[PD] UI developer volunteering to help
David Golightly
davigoli at gmail.com
Tue May 13 21:44:26 CEST 2008
This is all great feedback, guys - keep it coming. Keep in mind I'm still
learning Tcl/Tk, so some of these ideas, while excellent, are a little
beyond my technical grasp at this point and may be improvements that we make
incrementally over time. Also, I have a limited amount of my time to budget
for this kind of work - I also work full-time and make music too - so I
think prioritizing some of these ideas into subsequent releases is probably
the best way to get them into Pd.
Some points:
- On the Startup dialog: I wasn't satisfied with the popup box for editing
each list item, and also tried to look for a way to edit list items in
place, but couldn't figure out how to make that work in Tcl/Tk, so I settled
on the popup box. The bug you saw with that not working, Hans, I've since
fixed.
- I played around with the idea of multiple select in the listboxes, but
wasn't wholly satisfied with it and found that it introduced more problems
than it solved. For example, what if you select multiple Paths and then
click "Edit"? What is that supposed to do?
- Having buttons inline with the list items in the listboxes would also be
really cool, but it seems like it's a lot more work to do that, since Tk's
default listbox widget only wants to deal with arrays of strings.
- I agree with the idea that the "Save all settings" button should be
removed everywhere and folded into "Apply" ("OK" does "Apply" + "Cancel").
I think what it originally was supposed to do was give you an opportunity to
test settings without saving them, but for that, I think it's best to have
something like a "Revert settings" button instead. Also, I think this
functionality is so marginal that we can remove it altogether.
- I also agree that the four Preferences menus (Path, Startup, Audio, and
MIDI) should all be different tabs in the same dialog. However, that seems
like a feature that can be added at a later time; for now, I'd like to focus
on finishing up the improvements that we already have, so we can try & get
them into Vanilla, then perhaps go through the menu system at some point and
re-evaluate how that's structured, maybe do some further improvements with
some of the other menus too. Plus I'm itching to get on to improving the UI
widget settings boxes.
- I'll see what I can do to remove those extra buttons. I really like
having everything keyboard-accessible, which includes stuff like tab order,
so I think it's probably best to keep around the buttons for list editing
commands for now, although we can certainly investigate ways to reduce the
size they take up on the screen.
I'm going to spend some spare time over the next few days working out some
of the remaining kinks, then I'll re-post the patch for review before
submitting it to the tracker. Thanks again to everyone who has taken time
to look at the proposed changes!
If anyone has specific ideas to improve the layout of these dialogs, it
would be amazing to see some sort of low-fi sketch of what you have in mind,
just black outlines with text on a white background would be fine. Also, if
anyone has some more advanced Tk wizardry they'd like to impart, or could
point me to some better resources, I'd be most grateful - Google has been a
lot less helpful than I've experienced with other languages/platforms.
Thanks,
David
On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 7:57 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>
wrote:
>
> Oops, one other detail with the "encode" proc. While namespaces are
> probably the current way to handle function names, they are not used for any
> other functions in u_main.tk So for this function, I think it should be
> called something like pdtk_encodelist without the namespace, then grouped
> with pdtk_encode. Something like this:
>
> proc pdtk_encodelist {listdata} {
> set outlist {}
> foreach this_path $listdata {
> if {0==[string match "" $this_path]} {
> lappend outlist [pdtk_encodedialog $this_path]
> }
> }
> return $outlist
> }
>
> Then perhaps namespaces can be introduced later as a more systematic
> approach.
>
> .hc
>
> On May 11, 2008, at 3:15 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>
> I just thought of one other thing: I think it would be very useful if
> Path, Startup, Audio Settings, and MIDI settings where all tabs in one
> panel, instead of four separate panels.
>
> .hc
>
> On May 11, 2008, at 1:29 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>
> Wow, what an improvement! I like it a lot. I have some comments:
>
> - minor thing, maybe there could be less space on the sides, so the panel
> would be narrower?
>
> - about the Apply button, I think it should only show up on platforms
> where it is a common thing. On Mac OS X, it should just be OK and Cancel.
> On Windows, there should be Apply. I think GNOME has moved away from
> Apply, but I don't know anything about KDE.
>
> - some separation of the buttons on the right column would make things
> clearer, I think. Like maybe Up/Down on the right side, and then Add...,
> Edit..., and Delete on the bottom? Or maybe just changing Up and Down to
> arrows?
>
> - the startup thing is trickier. I think that the textfield for entering
> values should be embedded into the panel instead of a popup. Also, it
> doesn't seem to work for me (I am using 0.41-4 vanilla). I can't add items
> to the list.
>
> I think once this is worked out, the best plan would be to submit a patch
> to the tracker and assign it to Miller. Then I'll also include it in
> Pd-extended.
>
> .hc
>
> On May 11, 2008, at 2:25 AM, David Golightly wrote:
>
> Just verified against my own install of Pd-extended-0.40.3 on OS X 10.4 -
> enough differences exist otherwise in the nightlies that this version of the
> file will only work with 0.41.4.
>
> Attached is an updated (slightly bugfixed) version.
>
> So... what's the procedure for checking in to svn :)?
>
> -David
>
>
> On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 4:24 PM, David Golightly <davigoli at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Well scratch that then, perhaps that will only work when you're building
> > pd on your own machine. If you launch Pd from Terminal, you might see error
> > output in that terminal window - that would be helpful to have.
> >
> >
> > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 3:17 PM, marius schebella <
> > marius.schebella at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I tried this with pd extended 0.40-3, but did not get a startup pref
> > > window at all and the path window was very small and empty. (os x, 10.5.)
> > > marius.
> > >
> > > David Golightly wrote:
> > >
> > > > And, here's a version with an updated Startup dialog. Simply copy
> > > > this to bin/pd.tk <http://pd.tk> (make a backup first!) to try it
> > > > out.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 12:48 PM, David Golightly <
> > > > davigoli at gmail.com <mailto:davigoli at gmail.com>> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 12:36 PM, Steffen Juul <stffn at dibidut.dk
> > > > <mailto:stffn at dibidut.dk>> wrote:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On 10/05/2008, at 19.48, David Golightly wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Ok, after a busy week this is what I've been able to come
> > > > up
> > > > with for the Path dialog.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Looking really good! The browse functionality is a fair idiom
> > > > in
> > > > a such GUI as oppose to entering text, i think.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Thanks! I've often been kind of frustrated that I have to type
> > > > in
> > > > the full directory name rather than simply browsing to it. For
> > > > the
> > > > keyboard-inclined, however, text entry should still be possible.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > "One" comment: I have a beef with the functionality of the
> > > > buttons. Not the Cancel one. The others. 'Apply' does
> > > > something.
> > > > 'Ok' does 'apply' plus 'cancel'. 'Save...' does 'Apply' plus
> > > > saves. But it says the list is only gonna work from next time
> > > > Pd
> > > > is lunched, why i don't get the 'Apply' and 'Ok'. 'Ok' should
> > > > do
> > > > save and cancel. Thats all one wants, anit?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I agree. I've preserved the pre-existing functionality for those
> > > > buttons from before, but do we really need both "Save" and
> > > > "Apply"? Currently, "Save" also "saves preferences" (verbose & use
> > > > standard
> > > > extensions). I think that should also happen when you click
> > > > "Apply", so we can do away with the "Save" button, and also make
> > > > sure that the message about needing to restart PD pops up when
> > > > you
> > > > click "OK" or "Apply".
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I'm thinking about adapting this UI for the Startup
> > > > dialog -
> > > > shouldn't be hard to do - except instead of choosing
> > > > directories you want to enter arbitrary text.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I haven't checked your code but i suppose most "proc's" can
> > > > be
> > > > reused?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > I've set up some various key bindings so I want to make
> > > > sure
> > > > it seems usable for everyone.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Nice. What are they?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Default key bindings for the listbox widget give you "up" and
> > > > "down"
> > > > keys to select, I've added "Delete" to delete the current
> > > > selection,
> > > > and "Return" to open the browse dialog (same as pressing "Edit").
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > So far I've only tested this on Mac OS X
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > OS X.4 here.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
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> > > >
> > >
> > >
> >
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