On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 3:33 AM, David Robillard wrote:
Ah, is that all we need? I never realised it was so
simple. Can I have them
in some dull, boring grey colour with sad square boxes? You know, something
that really inspires and that will convince every iPad user that their ubercool
GUI are a total waste of time. Can you do that for me? That would be a killer!
Even almost every GUI toolkit sliders fails when used for
anything serious in audio. Try tuning your oscillators in
e.g. AMS when the auto-resizing frequency slider happens to
have 27.142857 steps per octave.
For stuff like this you need a way to enter precise values with a
corresponding text box anyway.
Though the old fan slider idea was a pretty good one...
Every time a developer uses a text entry widget next to a slider for
entering precise value, god kills a kitten. Which means that half of
linux audio developers are in charge for the kitten genocide :)
For darktable we examined the slider from phat and created a similar
new, more usable widget which combines a label and a slider. You can
enter precise value after a right click inside the slider area, and
you can use pretty much anything as displayed unit: %, ", dB, px...
whatever. Here is an example:
http://i.imgur.com/KvwjS.png
The highlighted "-0.500" is where I right-clicked to enter precise value.
The code is here:
http://darktable.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=darktable/darktable;a…
I also managed to sell the concept to fellow Kdenlive developers, so
there is now a similar widget for Qt/KDE with few differences:
- it uses a compact area for value input next to the slider
- the right-click menu has a command for resetting value
Alexandre Prokoudine
http://libregraphicsworld.org