PB's newgui

PB's GUI work is being done here:
bitbucket.org/PhracturedBlue/deviation-newgui
Snapshots will be periodically available from the 'Downloads' tab on the above link

To avoid confusion I start a new thread for the new GUI of PB.
I have a few observations, and probably will have more...


1. When you exit the main page config window, the menu becomes the one of the standard gui. You have exit to the main page or step in a menu, which exists under the advanced gui to reset that behaviour.
This probably relates to not having the left/right pageing buttons...

2. The header is too crowded on the devo 8, yet still have not enough place for the left/right pageing buttons.

3. A cosmetic one: labels X and Y should be white on the dark grey background, at least all header text used to be white...

4. For first glance it was not obvious why the element type spinbox doesn't pick up the type of the selected element, but then I realized, that it is only for creating new ones. In the end this means it is not obvious...

5. The tab order is strange, probably it is the order in which the elements were added.

6. There is no way to enter editing of the element properties with the mouse, it opens only with the enter key. A long mouse click could be used for that...

7. The options dialog should have some easy way to close with the keyboard. I know you can tab to the OK button and press, but it would be easier if the long ENT or long EXT worked...

8. For the simplicity we used to index things from 1, while here the trims, bars and toggles are numbered from 0.

9. What can I select on the option page of the trim bars? I can't change the value in the spinbox at all...


to be continued...

10. When you close the elements' editing popup, the text of the selected element become black instead of white, which is barely visible on the toggles and bars, because they have dark grey background.

1,2,4)
Yeah my problem is I am completely out of space on the devo8. Here's an alternative:
I could replace the spinbox with an 'Add' icon, which has a pop-up that lets you select the item type with a proper label and ok button
It is still really tight to get the x, y, exit, left, right, and icon buttons into the header though. I experimented with putting the 'X' and / 'Y' labels inside the spinbox, but while it fits, it is worse. Another possibility is to forego the X/Y labels, but then you have no idea what the spinboxes do until you play with them.

5)
I'm not sure what to do about the tab order, at the moment it cycles through in creation order as you said.
Other options:
* cycle in creation order but group by element type
* cycle by sum of x/y coordinate (this will be roughly a diagonal from upper left to lower right)
* cycle by x then y (this will be unreliable if objects aren't perfectly alighned
I'm definitely open to suggestions

6) I was going to have any press on a selected object open the box (not just a long one) The only question is if that is too easy on a real tx, since the screen sensitivity i snot great without a stylus.

9) You should be able to choose which trim to select (it should say 'Trim1' through 'Trim6', I just forgot to implement it since it didn't port from th origiinal GUI)

The rest are all easy bugs and I'll get them fixed.

PhracturedBlue wrote: 1,2,4)
Yeah my problem is I am completely out of space on the devo8. Here's an alternative:
I could replace the spinbox with an 'Add' icon, which has a pop-up that lets you select the item type with a proper label and ok button
It is still really tight to get the x, y, exit, left, right, and icon buttons into the header though. I experimented with putting the 'X' and / 'Y' labels inside the spinbox, but while it fits, it is worse. Another possibility is to forego the X/Y labels, but then you have no idea what the spinboxes do until you play with them.

While it would mean one more click, I like the 'Add' icon more, because it would be more intuitive, not to mention that on the dialog there could be some more options too, like clearing the whole page, or some rearranging/realigning function, or a load from template option...

PhracturedBlue wrote: 5)
I'm not sure what to do about the tab order, at the moment it cycles through in creation order as you said.
Other options:
* cycle in creation order but group by element type
* cycle by sum of x/y coordinate (this will be roughly a diagonal from upper left to lower right)
* cycle by x then y (this will be unreliable if objects aren't perfectly alighned
I'm definitely open to suggestions

Not that important, it was just a bit weird...

May be we will have some reordering function later...

PhracturedBlue wrote: 6) I was going to have any press on a selected object open the box (not just a long one) The only question is if that is too easy on a real tx, since the screen sensitivity i snot great without a stylus.

No good.
When you are trying to arrange/align the controls the simple press should only select the control. It would be disturbing if you would have to always close the popup...

Is it possible to move object by mouse/stylus press and move? It will be useful for draft arrangement of objects.

Rbe did dome experimentation with drag-n-drop, but the screen refresh is just too slow, at the moment. I'm going to eventually play with a more efficient redraw solution that may help, but this may end up being one of those things where designing new interfaces is best done on the PC, and so it may be best to write a Windows app to do so.

I'm more interested in making the current GUI as good as it can be. I think creating basic templates that can be loaded will alleviate much of the need to make heavy modifications to the gui, so that'll be next on my list once the initial interface issues are worked out.

Instead real drag-n-drop you can at once place the selected object (left top corner) into point where stylus lose touch with the screen.

Or, first touch will select object, second touch will activate 'move' mode (dashed border), third touch on free space will move object to the point of touch.

I don't see any reason why display all this info will cause the system to become unstable. I guess the only issue would be if it takes so long to calculate the elements that it can't get done in 100msec. That doesn't seem very likely though, as calculating them should be quick.

The display problem is due to the changes I made to how dialog boxes are caclulated. I'll need to look at it again.

Currently, the Devo12 is limited to 27 widgets. This is a reasonable number for the Devo8, but we'll want to increase it for the devo12. how many more do you think you need? another 20?

I have uploaded a new emu. It fixes all of the issues listed so far in this thread, as well as increasing the number of elements on the devo12 to 50.

I would appreciate it if you keep this thread focused on the usability and bugs of the layout interface. Enhancement requests like new widget types should be filed via bitbucket.

Thanks. It is because you set the src = 'None'

I have checked in a fix that will continue to load these elements so they won't disappear. At the same time, I made it so that elements with src=None are hidden on the main page (but not on the layout page), and fixed the 'Timer256' bug when a box has a 'None' value.

New download available.

You won't ever be able to save templates, but you'll be able to create them by editing your model.ini and saving the result back to the /layout directory.

I've only started implementing that though, so it isn't ready yet. For now, it would be useful to post your model.ini to this thread. I will add the templates you guys build (that are generic enough) to the release so that they'll be available to everyone.

I may also add a 'load template from model' capability so you can clone an existing model's layout