#54 improving UI

[Anonymous]

Needless to say, I'm impressed by your software :)

And, as you requested, I have some feedback :)
Just some quick thoughts which could improve the UI and
workflow by making it faster and simpler.

Rationale:
In sound file editors, the sound file is naturally the
focal point to the user. So everything should be
arranged around a view(s) to that sound file.

Users center the part they are working on in the middle
of the view, be it sound or image or layout. So
everything IMPORTANT should be grouped around the view
to the sound file and things not that important should
be at the edges or in the menus.

Suggestions:
Currently in ReZound Play/Stop/Pause are far away in
the corner when they should (IMHO) be horizontally
arranged under the view, Play(s) at the centre. Some
different play buttons could maybe be removed by adding
a single loop button under Play button. The buttons
should also be larger and most used one (Play) should
be the largest one.

The big horizontal zoom wheel under sound view could be
better implemented by a wide and thin view showing
whole file at once in which users could select and pan
some slice to be showed in main view. (+/-/Fit buttons
are very good!)

Other wheel gimmicks are also little problematic, since
it's hard to see their min/max/centre positions. Maybe
a vertical scale bar would be better? Or a knob?

Middle button pan and mouse wheel zoom in main view
would be very useful.

Timeline could be printed on top of main view for
time-accurate positioning of selections and coolness
factor. Are there other time domains implemented than
natural hours/minutes/seconds? BPM and timecode could
be very nice additions, if not.

Icons in menus makes it harder to read what action
really does. I find them quite pointless, since all the
menus work normally (by left click) and do what they claim.

Left click only could be used for selections if it
would know it's place. On the left of the selection
center it would adjust left margin, on the right of the
selection center it would adjust right margin. This
would free up right-click for quick pop-up menus if needed.

Contents of Control menu should maybe be divided to
View and Control menus.

Color scheme should be darker. It would be easier to
eyes when working extended periods. And since your
editor is very good, it will be used in production
environments - this is, extended periods :)

Cheers,
alt

[Davy Durham]

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Okay, I'll take some of this into consideration.

And for some of the specifics:

For play controls, I ultimately plan to have (and make
configurable) all controls mapped to keys on the keyboard.
You keep one hand on the mouse, and one hand over a set of a
few commonly used keys and you never have to move the cursor
all the way up to the top-left. Curently, 'a' and 's' start
and stop the audio. 1, 2 and 3 do seeking.. more to come on
all that later when I address that topic in ReZound.

I do eventually want the timeline to have selectable units:
seconds, BPM, SMTPE(or whatever it is), etc

Icons on menu items are just for coolness like you argue for
the timeline.. perhaps I could give a toggle for them on or off.

If you want the control menu broken up.. all menu items are
currently configurable. Take the menu.dat file from
/usr/local/share/rezound and copy it in your ~/.rezound
directory. You can edit it to your liking.. (perhaps there
will be a GUI to configure that information someday too).

As for the color scheme.. I'm just waiting for FOX to
implement themes.. (they keep talking about it).. then I the
theme could be dark, light, and such..

There actually is a way to set the default colors in FOX,
but I don't recall how now.. you edit or create some file on
~/.foxrc and define the colors you want for background,
text, etc... <-- but that's probably not important to you now.

Thanks,
Davy

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Okay, thanks!

You could remove playing and paused leds by making Play
controls greyscale and then just invert the active buttons
to indicate that they are active. Dark backgrounds with
semi-bright symbols/text would be inactive and semi-bright
bg with dark symbols would be active (hint hint ;)

I just thought about old Cool Edit before it became
multitrack and Adobe possessed. It had pretty excellent UI,
though I have not tried the new versions. ProTools also has
pretty clear interface.

Cheers and good luck,
alt

[Toddd]

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user_id=672646

I like the icons in the menues.