Re: [Audacity-quality] TCP revised dropdown menu

[Peter S. <pet...@ya...>]

Hi Paul,
no I don't build - never have, never intend to ...
I rely on the nightlies for Win that Gale builds and partly this isto simulate for QA a closer experience to the average user 
So no I haven't seen your other fork with the even shorter menu 
>Right-click does nothing else in TCP yet, I think.AFAIK & AFAICT no it doesn't - so the door's open for you
>How do you like the idea of TCP changing appearance as the mouse moves over -- showing and hiding the triangle next to the name?Not sure about that - what I would like is hover-help
>As it is I provide you two ways to switch view type instead of one!Yebbut, I don't like the alternative switch made from the View Settings dialog ;-)
>What you you think of the name "View Settings..." or is "Appearance..." better?"View Settings" is fine for me, seems clear enough - much prefer it to "Appearance"
>Steve thought it was not clear enough that this means, whatever is in the Preferences dialog.  Some rewording?In which case I'm confused too - I thought it meant Audacity's OOTB factory default settings (that is how Leland uses the term with the Effects with his Manage Button which offer "Factory Presets").  Maybe you could do with two checkable options: "Factory presets" and "User Presets" which would get its settings from what the user set in Prefs.
@Paul, did you get my other review of the Vertical Ruler stuff- It hasn't appeared back in my inbox so may well be stuck in my sent/outbox
Cheers,Peter.

Peter Sampson
Tel: +44 (0)1625 524 780

      From: Paul Licameli <pau...@gm...>
 To: Peter Sampson <pet...@ya...> 
 Sent: Friday, July 31, 2015 3:14 PM
 Subject: Re: TCP revised dropdown menu
   
Reducing the seven view types to two is done in master, but in my fork I go farther and shorten other things.  Have you tried it?

https://github.com/Paul-Licameli/audacity/commit/701f25ac1cb9259f00606c5f10a2afbc010f5560

Notice what I have done with the "Channels" sub-menu which is now appropriate to the kind of track, mono or stereo.  The Move items are also in a cascading sub-menu.  The menu for wave tracks now has only eight items, compared with nineteen in 2.1.1.  I did not put this in master because I was warned that there might be strong opinions against it.  I await other opinions about it.


On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 9:50 AM, Peter Sampson <pet...@ya...> wrote:

On the whole I think I'm quite liking the revised, shorter, Track ControlPanel dropdown menu that Paul has provided.
1) I'd *really*like to see the menu also available as a right-click option in the TCP.

Right-click does nothing else in TCP yet, I think.

How do you like the idea of TCP changing appearance as the mouse moves over -- showing and hiding the triangle next to the name?

This could make the menu a bit easier to discover.
 

2) I would prefer the View Settings menu to be context dependent so that when you are in Waveform you *only* see the Waveform settings withoutthe option to toggle to Spectrogram settings and vice versa.This would have the advantage that the Waveform Settings dialog could be appropriately smaller (there's a lot of empty real-estate in it right now).

As it is I provide you two ways to switch view type instead of one!

What you you think of the name "View Settings..." or is "Appearance..." better?
 

3) I really like the fact that the user can easily select "Defaults" in the viewsettings.

Steve thought it was not clear enough that this means, whatever is in the Preferences dialog.  Some rewording?
 

4) If we are going to have the settings for Spectrogram view in the Spectrogram'sview settings then I think we should  the Spectrograms entry in Preferences.

I'm guessing that Paul has done it this way so that Prefs can be a globalsetting while the TCP setting is local to that track.  If that is the case then

Exactly.
 
I would prefer to still remove the Prefs>Spectrograms - and add a local/globalswitch in the Spectrogram's View Settings - as this means it can all be managed by the user in one place and they don't have to flit from Prefs to viewstings.

Steve has strong opinions to the contrary, that a context menu should not affect global settings.

I wrote this to work as Peter suggested, but added a few lines of code disabled the changing of globals, to satisfy that objection.
 

5) As you might imagine, I *love* the little switch in the Spectrogram's ViewSettings for "Enable spectral selection.  I do however thing that Spectral Selection should be capitalized in this dialog as it is a specific Audacity entity.
6) I agree with Steve that the dialog for the Spectrogram's View Settings issomewhat daunting and techy - but then so is the existing Prefs>Spectrogramsand indeed so are spectral views and spectral editing anyway  They are notfor the faint-hearted o the un-knowledgeable.  But I am happy with that as I'mpretty sure that most users will never stray from the default Waveform viewanyway.  We almost certainly need more spectral help in the Manual but thatis well beyond my experience and skill-set.

If Luciano's project goes through, the Spectrograms page will get even bigger with color choices.  Perhaps that should be done as a modal pop-up dialog from a "Colors..." button.

Maybe the more exotic spectrogram settings could be hidden in an "advanced" tab.  The Preferences dialog and the View Settings... can have an expanding and collapsing tree of page names in the left column.

Or maybe we just need to think about the sequence of the items on the page and push exotic things to the bottom.



7) While we are bent on making the TCP dropdown menu shorter, why don't weconsider hiving off the channel management block into a separate dropdownoff the main TCP dropdown with a rollover?

Aha, so I see you did not build and test my fork.

I think those opposed to the cascading menu don't like it that keystroke shortcuts might be one key longer, for the VI who don't use mouse.  Against that, though, I say that with fewer items in each menu, there is less conflict over assigning keystroke shortcuts, and so the keystrokes can be more mnemonic.


 

8) I don't like the way the View Settings menu can be used to change the view from Waveform to Spectrogram or vice-versa - but if my point 4 is accepted andimplemented then this would no longer occur anyway.

Once the menu has stabilized we can start work on the update to the Manual.I have already placed a P1 there for that, but it will be a fair bit of work and weare likely to need help with the techy Spectrogram's View Settings stuff as thatgoes right over my head ...
Cheers,Peter.



Peter Sampson
Tel: +44 (0)1625 524 780