31 Jul
2004
31 Jul
'04
9:55 p.m.
I'm pleased to annouce, after a solid month of heated debate with X11,
the initial public release of PHAT, the PHat Audio Toolkit. From the
website (www.gazuga.net/phat.php):
"PHAT is a collection of GTK+ widgets geared toward pro-audio
apps. The goal is to eliminate duplication of effort and provide some
standardization (well, at least for GTK+ apps). It's open source
software, licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2.0 or later."
The debut and flagship widget is the fanslider, designed by Thorsten
Wilm's. The LAU folks may not be too interested in the library as
such, but might like to play around with this widget (hence the cross
post). It comes with a demo program, "phatfantest," which displays
the sliders in all their glory.
Tarball: www.gazuga.net/phat-0.1.0.tar.gz
Docs: www.gazuga.net/phat/index.html
Let's actually go somewhere with all this debate about widgets and
standards and such. Contributions are welcome (hint hint). I hope we
can put an end to the Linux Usability Curse, at least in our own
little neck of the woods.
--
Pete
www.gazuga.net
=====================================================================
"I saw the movie 'I, Robot' recently, a film based loosely on a book
written by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. In case you're not
familiar with Asimov's writing, here's a list of things the movie had
in common with the book:
* The title."
[maddox.xmission.com]
=====================================================================
1 Aug
1 Aug
4:42 a.m.
Additions to the Announcement:
Holding down ctrl freezes the precision axis, so
only the value can be changed.
Holding down shift freezes the value axis, so
that you can scale the fan up without worying
about unintended value change.
There will be a context menu with copy, paste,
(reset to) default, center, previous value
(like undo).
Sine the standard middle click action will not
work that good with sliders, we thought about
using it for reset to default or center. But
we would like to see some standardization here,
so what other actions are assigned to middle
click in other (linux) audio apps, and what
does everybody think about this?
There have been some drawing errors happening
when moving the fan out to one side and then
the other in one go. But they are actualy hard
to trigger, so please stress test the demo and
report to Pete, so we might find out where the
problem lies.
---
Thorsten Wilms
4:59 a.m.
On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 09:39:51 -0400, Pete Bessman wrote:
I'm pleased to annouce, after a solid month of
heated debate with X11,
the initial public release of PHAT, the PHat Audio Toolkit. From the
website (www.gazuga.net/phat.php):
Hmm... nice. One thing that I find a bit jarring is that it turns off the
mouse cursor. Is that neccesary?
It occurs to me that the same UI technique would also be good for ranged
sliders, when a single slider is representing two values, eg. an upper and
lower bound.
- Steve
5:24 a.m.
On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 09:44:18AM +0100, Steve Harris wrote:
Hmm... nice. One thing that I find a bit jarring is that it turns off the
mouse cursor. Is that neccesary?
Hiding the cursor gives a clear view. And otherwise we would have a
problem when the fan goes beyond screen edges. To still allow full
range manipulation it would have to be possible for the cursor to
leave the screen. Would have to jump back to somewhere on the screen
afterwards.
With the current implementation the cursor relocation (if you imagine
a virtual cursor during slider manipulation) happens always and
fully predictable.
Not to forget that having the cursor back where things started
is quite practical and might speed up things.
---
Thorsten Wilms
8:10 a.m.
On Sat Jul 31 21:39:51 2004 Pete Bessman wrote:
I'm pleased to annouce, after a solid month of
heated debate with X11,
the initial public release of PHAT, the PHat Audio Toolkit. From the
website (www.gazuga.net/phat.php):
I tried the demo and I like the concept of the fanslider.
Did you think about displaying the current value in the fan?
With the demo it is easily possible to move the fan over the spinbuttons
which hides your feedback and makes it impossible to control the exact
value.
You could even add more information like the unit of measurement and the
parameter name to the fan label (e. g. "Input gain: -10.7 dB", although
I know that *this* is not a unit of measurement).
You could make this label appear as soon as the fan is big enough.
At least with the hfanslider it could even be permanent.
--
Jan Weil
http://linuxaudioblog.jawebada.de
10:28 a.m.
At Sun, 1 Aug 2004 13:54:50 +0200,
Jan Weil wrote:
On Sat Jul 31 21:39:51 2004 Pete Bessman wrote:
Cool, glad you like it.
I'm pleased to annouce, after a solid month
of heated debate with
X11, the initial public release of PHAT, the PHat Audio Toolkit.
From the website (www.gazuga.net/phat.php):
I tried the demo and I like the concept of the fanslider. Did you think about displaying the current value in
the fan? With
the demo it is easily possible to move the fan over the spinbuttons
which hides your feedback and makes it impossible to control the
exact value.
I did, but I think this information is better left to the app's
discretion. To provide sufficient flexibility for value display
(location, format, prefix) would require much added API complexity,
and the end result would be less useful than simply writing custom
callbacks.
And personally, I think the cleanest way to display such information
is in a statusbar, or perhaps a tool tip. I also don't see the
usefulness of exposing values to the user in an audio app (generally).
Panning might be stored as an excess-127 unsigned char, or a [-1.0,
1.0] float, or a LUT index, or a percentage. I, as a user, don't
care; just so long as panning follows the slider position I'm happy.
I'm not opposed to this feature being implementing (just so long as
it's done well, and if you don't use it it's not there). However, I'm
not going to be doing it myself, at least not any time soon.
--
Pete
www.gazuga.net
=====================================================================
"I saw the movie 'I, Robot' recently, a film based loosely on a book
written by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. In case you're not
familiar with Asimov's writing, here's a list of things the movie had
in common with the book:
* The title."
[maddox.xmission.com]
=====================================================================
7214
days inactive
7215
days old
linux-audio-dev@lists.linuxaudio.org
5 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
-
Jan Weil -
Pete Bessman -
Steve Harris -
Thorsten Wilms