Some more UI stuff for 2.0: Change the proportions of the instrument GUIs.
Currently each instrument GUI is a fixed 250 x 250 px in size. I propose changing this to 400 x 200 px. This requires redoing all the background artworks, but it's not that big a deal since we now have the layered files for almost all of them. It also requires some reorganization for the UIs. The benefits for the new size: - slightly less vertical space used, better fit for widescreen monitors (horizontal space is cheaper than vertical) - bigger on-screen piano - wider graph widgets possible for wavetable synths = higher quality wavetables - we can fit more stuff in the top bar (where vol/pan knobs, fx selector, pitch knob are) At the same time, to match this change, the FX rack width would be also changed to 400px. The height of the FX panels themselves could be made smaller. I would also change the FX racks in such a way that we remove the decay/gate knobs from the FX panel, and instead of having those for each FX, just have common decay/gate knobs for the entire FX rack. Because in practice, the autoquit affects the entire FX rack anyway, if one effect is still running then the entire FX rack is running, so there's no point in having these knobs for every FX. Just have them once for the FX rack. This means that the FX panel would only have the W/D knob, and lots more space (because of the 400px width). So what to do with it? Inline controls. I think we can easily fit 8 knobs in that space, so with the W/D knob, that leaves either 7 other knobs, or 6 knobs + the controls button. So, for simple FX, all controls could be inline. For more complex FX, the most commonly used controls could be inline, and the rest in the FX GUI, accessed from the controls button. The benefits of this are obvious: Less subwindows! Easier access to FX controls! For native FX plugins, each plugin could define for themselves which controls they want displayed on the front panel. Maybe they can even be other things beside knobs (switches, leds, etc.). For LADSPA plugins (and other external FX if we get the support for those) we can just "stupidly" take the first 6 knobs and show those, because there's really no way to guesstimate which knobs are most important. For mono plugins, just take first 3 for each channel. The one possible drawback I can think of is that this makes the FX mixer wider. However, horizontal space is cheap, so I think the benefits would outweight it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ LMMS-devel mailing list LMMS-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/lmms-devel
