[PD] UI developer volunteering to help

Tue May 20 07:07:12 CEST 2008

Here's a revised copy with a few minor changes (the "startup flags" field
now expands to fill the window, you can resize the startup command popup
arbitrarily).

I'm wondering about the protocol of introducing dependencies in PD.  It
seems that BWidget gives us a widget that we can use for the listbox (
http://tcllib.sourceforge.net/BWman/ListBox.html), however, it's perhaps not
distributed with older distributions of Tcl/Tk.  BWidget is distributed with
Tcllib, which is apparently a default library packaged with most installs of
Tcl, http://wiki.tcl.tk/12099 says that it comes by default with the
ActiveState distro, with .deb and .rpm packages, and it was installed by
default on my Mac OS X 10.4 distribution.  But it's not guaranteed to be
installed with ALL distributions of Tcl/Tk - I just have no idea exactly how
many users might lack it.

Failing that, the popup should behave exactly as inline editing does, even
though it looks a little strange.  You can still use the keyboard to
navigate: down, down, enter, type, enter, up, enter, esc...  Just think of
it as inline listbox editing with extra window chrome :)

On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>
wrote:

>
> Oops, found a little bug:  double-clicking on an empty cell through up an
> error dialog.
>
> Also, an idea: if you just draw that popup entry box just below the listbox
> with the OK button, add a Cancel button, then use "pack forget" when the
> user hits OK or Cancel.  Just a thought.  That mini-popup window is the only
> thing about these panels that is weird, I guess that why I still am thinking
> about how to ditch it.
>
> .hc
>
> On May 19, 2008, at 7:09 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>
> Looks good to me.  This is already a massive improvement over what is
> there.  I don't know if you are sick of working on it, but I thought I'd
> throw a couple of minor ideas:
>
> - it would be useful if the "startup flags" entry widget would stretch with
> the resizing window.  Then you could see more of those flags.
>
> - perhaps the windows should open above the Pd window instead of the center
> of the screen?  I think you can get that info using [winfo rootx .] and
> [winfo rooty .]
>
> .hc
>
> On May 18, 2008, at 7:26 PM, David Golightly wrote:
>
> As requested, I've put back the "Edit" and "Delete" buttons and added
> BackSpace as a Delete event for Mac OS X.  I couldn't get Cmd-BackSpace to
> fire effectively, but perhaps someone knows something I don't about getting
> that to work.
>
>
> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 7:15 AM, Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> Very nice!  The mouse/keyboard interactive is well done, I only worry that
>> the buttons are now too sparse.  I think delete and edit buttons would still
>> be useful, maybe people don't use keyboard shortcuts at all.
>>
>> Also, on Mac OS X, Delete is not commonly used, so it would be good to
>> also have BackSpace work for deleting.  Or maybe Cmd-BackSpace since that is
>> what is used for deleting in the Finder.
>>
>>
>> .hc
>>
>> On May 18, 2008, at 9:46 AM, David Golightly wrote:
>>
>> A note on the latest changes: I removed all the list manipulation buttons
>> and added the following bindings:
>>
>> - The list items can be re-ordered by drag-and-drop.
>> - Clicking on a list item allows you to edit it.
>> - Clicking anywhere else in the listbox allows you to add a new list item.
>> - You can also traverse the list using up and down arrow keys, then press
>> "Enter" to change the selected item.
>> - Press "Delete" to delete the currently selected list item.
>>
>> I kept around the "New..." button, since it may not be immediately obvious
>> to newbies how to add new things to the list.
>>
>> I also removed the "Save all settings" button and folded its action in to
>> the "Apply" command (and, by extension, the OK command).  I played around
>> with trying to get an in-place editable listbox control for the Startup
>> dialog, but to no avail - it's apparently no trivial task in Tcl/Tk.
>> Perhaps for a future revision.  However, the popup dialog functions
>> effective the same, as "Enter" will submit your edit and "Esc" will cancel;
>> once you get used to it it shouldn't be much different.
>>
>> I'm also now centering the dialog windows on the screen.  I'd like to do
>> this also (especially) for the "Properties" dialogs that are used to edit
>> GUI controls.  Tk like to try and "cascade" new dialogs as they appear; this
>> is too clever by half, and really annoying once if you do a lot of editing.
>> But I've only tested this centering behavior on my own Macbook 15" screen,
>> so it would be great if others could verify it's still usable on other
>> screen sizes.
>>
>> One other thing: these dialogs can now be resized, but they appear at
>> their minimum size, so you can't shrink them any further (you can only
>> expand them).
>>
>> Please let me know what you think and as always let me know if you run
>> into any trouble!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> David
>>
>>
>> On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 6:06 PM, David Golightly <davigoli at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Ok, with the path/startup dialogs, this is about the feature set I'd like
>>> to end up with for now.  Please, everyone, review it for usability & obvious
>>> bugs, and if it looks good I'll submit it as a patch.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> David
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 11:53 PM, Steffen Juul <stffn at dibidut.dk> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 14/05/2008, at 0.16, marius schebella wrote:
>>>>
>>>>  David Golightly wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> david,
>>>>> if you spend 1 hour on coding and one hour on documenting of how to get
>>>>> to that step, (instead of 2 hours coding), then the chance that more
>>>>> people will be able to jump in is bigger. tcl/tk is new to most people.
>>>>> being able to concentrate on design and ui aspects would make life
>>>>> easier. the hard part is to get started.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Especially since the names in Tk are to my experience somewhat different
>>>> to what one put in the search bar, ie. of my/your(?)/normal vocabulary.
>>>>
>>>> Example: tabs ~= notebook. See http://wiki.tcl.tk/2298
>>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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