On 07/30/2013 03:16 PM, Dan Wilcox
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