[LAD] How to develop guis for LV2?

[David Robillard]

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 06:35 -0600, Gabriel M. Beddingfield wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 8 Nov 2009, Nedko Arnaudov wrote:
> 
> >>    + The plugins may provide a GUI interface.  Its width will be
> >>      200, 400, 600, or 800 pixels.  Its height will be a multiple
> >>      of 100 pixels.
> >
> > I don't get why such restriction is needed.
> 
> So that the host application can lay out the plugin widgets cleanly.[1]
> 
> +---------+----------+----------+----------+
> | Foomatic Synth     | Reverb   | O-Drive  |
> | () () ---|----     | --|----  | ()   ()  |
> | () () [1:Buzz    ] | ()  ()   | ()   ()  |
> +--------------------+----------+----------+
> | LinuxSampler () () () () () () () () ()  |
> | [16: Piano      ] ------|-- () () () ()  |
> | --|------ () () ()                       |
> +------------------------------------------+
> 
> After reading your comments, I suppose I was thinking of "internal" GUI's 
> where the widgets are layed out by the host application.  For example, if 
> I was writing an application, I couldn't use zynadd's UI because it's way 
> to large (both the overall size and the size of the widgets).

This is a good motivation, but pixel widths are the devil and should be
avoided whenever possible.

On a related note, plugin UIs should be heavily encouraged to be as
SMALL as possible.  Some UIs are obscenely large, and all the wasted
space seriously sucks for environments that embed them.

> I (personally) really don't like having plugin windows flying all over the 
> place.  I think they should be layed out in the host application.  (And I 
> also think they should be widget-toolkit agnostic -- 
> Qt/GTK/FLTK/whatever.)

++

-dr