On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:56:57 +0200, Nicolas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 07:03:08PM +0200, Herman Robak wrote:
Some suggestions on how to singnalise status in more ways:
Darkening unarmed tracks (rejected, better ideas?)
Graying "don't play" tracks (inconclusive. maybe darkening?)
Changing the mouse pointer over unarmed tracks
Having the View menu turned into a panel
Cinelerra needs a status bar. (displaying what info?)
IMO, the first action to do is to redesign the arm icon. When I switched
from the Blond theme to the SUV theme, I immediately noticed it's more
difficult to quickly see which tracks are armed and which ones are not.
That's because when the icon is selected, it becomes orange. But the
icon, when not selected, is red. If the "not selected" arm icon was
white on grey, highlighting it in red would make it far more visible.
Using colour only to indicate on/off state is bad usability, and a
big no, no in UI design. Colour blind users will be at a total loss!
We should either have a thorough discussion on how to make a widget
look like "on" or "off", or adopt the way popular widget toolkits do
it.
One of the big problems with Cinelerra's user interface is the lack of
familiarity. If Cinelerra used one of the major UI toolkits, most of
the widgets would look familiar, and users would recognise the on/off
states they had seen in other programs.
Now, if I suggest starting a total rewrite from guicast to Gtk+, I
expect to get shot down. However, we could consider making some of
the dialogs in Gtk, to get started.
Final note: Does "arm" really ring a bell? Would not "unlock"
make more sense as a label?
--
Herman Robak
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