On 07/30/2013 03:16 PM, Dan Wilcox wrote:
On Jul 30, 2013, at 2:55 PM, Jonathan Wilkes <jancs...@yahoo.com
<mailto:jancs...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
* the Apple interface guidelines generally frown on "Apply" buttons
like the "Connect" button in the audio/midi dialogs. The expected
behavior is that you also connect when you select the device in the
drop down, the idea being you don't require 2 steps. At least that's
how I would do it. It's a niggle, but thought I'd throw it in.
But then what about the blocksize, samplerate, and callbacks? If
those don't immediately update then the user would have to switch
devs to get them to update. If they immediately update then the user
would need to press <tab> or click somewhere to make the text entry
lose focus. Both of those seem problematic, but if there's an
Apple-like HIG solution I'll try to implement it.
-Jonathan
Yeah, as I said, it's a niggle and more Mac specific but you do it
this way, for instance, in the GUI pane.
The Apply button concept is more firmly entrenched on the other
desktops. I really only understood that after writing a Mac-only app
and trying to make it work like the other native apps. There are
certain situations where you need to start and stop things which does
have a separate button. In some cases, certain options are disabled
(greyed out / deactivated) when changing them has no effect and
deactivated based on another control, say starting/stopping some
background process.
At the very least, I think "Connect" is a bit confusing. It implies
that there can be an unconnected state when the main purpose of the
dialog is managing which things are connected. Maybe "Apply Settings",
"Update Connection Settings", or even "Update", etc is better.
Ok. I think "Update" or "Update Connection Settings" is probably best.
Ok a few more now that I'm looking more closely:
* the MIDI channels text box should probably be filled by default aka
"16". Better yet, maybe it should be a drop down box? Also, we weren't
able to set the number of channels per device in the old Midi settings
dialog?
I'm a little restricted because I don't have any MIDI devices to test with.
Does this mean we can split up channels now?
I haven't changed anything on the C side, nor really any of the settings
in the MIDI dialog.
Say use two devices but give them only 8 each? If we can't, then maybe
you don't need this text box.
* in the MIDI dialog pane, I get an error when I switch to Multiple
devices then back again: can't read "::midi_inchan2": no such variable
Ok, sounds like a bug on my part. I'll check it out.
* in the Audio dialog pane, you could shorten "msec" to "ms"IMO, and I
would add some text to explain what "Use callbacks" and "Delay" mean
and why there's a setting for them. Everything else makes sense
really, but those always bothered me.
Actually, I still have some work to do testing with Jack and probably
changing some of those settings when it's the API, because I don't think
"Delay" has an effect in that case.
Also if you notice the "Help" window for the Audio dialog, you will see
I clearly explained "Use callbacks" with
"???". :)
I haven't looked at the API code closely enough to understand what it
does. If anyone can supply a nice
user-facing explanation I'll add it.
* I wish the API dropdown box + "Number of devices" button was
centered like the content below it
Hm... I'll try that.
* The toggle nature of the "Use single/multiples devices" never made
sense to me. IMO is should really be a toggle button: Use multiple
devices? [x]
Ah, yes! That will help a lot on OSX, too-- a disabled button doesn't
really look disabled for some reason...
Better yet, there wouldn't need to be a direct control if there was
a [+] [-] mechanism in the device section itself. The option would be
implied: if you are
only using 1 device then yeah "Using single device", as soon as you
add a second one, then "Using multiple devices". This makes sense for
both
Audio and Midi. I know this is probably more work on the GUI side,
but I thought I'd bring it up from a UI point of view.
Yeah, that's probably the right way to do it.
* in the GUI dialog pane, I'd put the color swatch buttons first, then
the labels. This way they'd be aligned to the left better.
That should be pretty easy to test out. I'll try it.
Thanks for the feedback!
-Jonathan
--------
Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com <http://danomatika.com>
robotcowboy.com <http://robotcowboy.com>
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