* 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 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? Does this mean we can split up channels now? 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
* 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.
* I wish the API dropdown box + "Number of devices" button was centered like the content below it
* 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]
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.
* 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.
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Dan Wilcox
@danomatika