thcilnnahoj.
thcilnnahoj– I think a logical consequence of mixer strip resizing is that the BSMR buttons should just be centered when they are drawn on top of the meters. I’d say this should also happen on MIDI tracks (that have no meters).
They are now centered. Note that the pixel width of meters are uneven, and buttons are even, so they cannot be centered exactly above the meter.
I was thinking more of centering them inside strips, not around the meters, unless the minimum size strips themselves have an uneven width.
– There’s some space wasted where the B button usually is. Maybe this space could be reclaimed when you don’t actually have a track visible on which bouncing is enabled. If there is one, it would push down the SMR buttons so they’re aligned again on all tracks.
I can remove it if there are no bounced tracks at all. I won’t remove it if just the currently visible tracks don’t have a bounce button. It would be very confusing that the BSMR buttons would jump up and down as you scroll along the mixer strips.
Well, I meant to say when tracks are hidden by tag selections, for example, not when they’re simply scrolled off-screen.
In beta2 I’ve gone back to painting the entire strip background with the select color. The reason I changed it to the frame some time ago, was because the old flat track controls did not blend well with the select color. Since then the new track chain panel with real buttons has been implemented. I think this works better with a full select color background. If no one objects to this, I’ll do the same with the track headers.
Besides that it usually creates a very strong contrast, can clash with button colors, and generally makes controls harder to see (especially empty selectors)… honestly, I preferred the look of the frame. If I remember correctly, it came in the very same release in which the flat controls were replaced by selector buttons, actually.
Explain why you preferred the old style?
I cannot. I wasn’t happy when you switched from single round tool buttons and rectangle transport buttons to ‘beans’ and joined toolbars either, but it has really grown on me since. The change-over from group panel to selector buttons was simply fantastic. But those buttons without shadows look flat, and out of place to me, and the tiny rounded corners everywhere don’t do it for me… In my opinion, the visual style was nothing short of perfect already before this release. Seems, though, everyone else actually likes the new style better – I’ll just have to take a break and see if I can get used to it again. 🙁 Anyway, you did great work on the resizable mixer strips.
LiquidProj3ctMaybe this could seem a step backwards, but honestly I would prefer the old frames in the mixer strips. They were consistent with track strips, easy to see, you can still see the color of the track, and they were pretty classy.
Full color mixer strips is screwing up the most of my colors schemes and it seems “cheap”.
Best regards
Zynewave@ninjawarrior wrote:
If i can suggest, do something about those faders. To me, they don’t even look like a faders.
I didn’t design them with real physical faders in mind. The fact that they are translucent came in handy for the new compact design. Otherwise I would not be able to overlay the faders on top of the meters, and so the strips could not be zoomed all the way down to 25%.
Also you could try to put fader center and left channel output meter goes left side on fader, and right channel output meter goes right side on the fader.
That would pose problems with mono and surround meters. The current design scales easily no matter how many channels are shown in the center meters. Having the L/R meters on either side of the fader would also mean it would be hard to distinguish the meters from the previous and next strips. The distance between the R meter of one strip and the L meter on the next strip would be closer than the distance between L/R on the same strip.
Zynewave@druid wrote:
So, before I start, I will say that I use a 40″ LED TV screen, full HD (1920×1080) and my eyesight sucks, so I have Windows 7 set to … 125% text size, I think. Windows 7 then increases the size of most text, scrollbars, icons etc. You *could* look at this in Windows also, to determine how you should size the interface. It would allow Podium to be more compatible with general system settings.
I could understand why you might not want to bother with such a thing, but as a steadfast user of larger-than-100% font/scrollbar/icon/etc size in Windows now (on my laptop too) it’s sure nice when other programs, like internet browsers, recognise this setting and render the text larger for me too.
Currently only the button size is scaled with the new adjustable setting. In a future update I’ll experiment with scaling font sizes.
Zynewave@Trancit wrote:
After a closer look to the mixer, I have to say, you should definetely work on the Solo/Mute/Record buttons… 😀
Especially when resizing the mixer channels, they are far to big and “ugly”…
I think they are by far not so important to take so much space…
I think there are plenty of users that would say solo/mute/record are quite essential in a mixer. Making them smaller would go against the button size conventions I use throughout the Podium UI. I’ve tried my best to make them not look “ugly”. Do you have any suggestions to what should be changed?
Did you change the colour of selected track in the new beta??? Especially the mixer channel this blue is so dense and bright, it´s hard to see any details anymore and this bright colour doesn´t fit the rest of the colour scheme…
I did in beta2, and I gave my reasons for this in my previous reply before your post. Anyway, in the new beta3 I’ve changed it back to a thin frame.
Zynewave@thcilnnahoj wrote:
– I think a logical consequence of mixer strip resizing is that the BSMR buttons should just be centered when they are drawn on top of the meters. I’d say this should also happen on MIDI tracks (that have no meters).
They are now centered. Note that the pixel width of meters are uneven, and buttons are even, so they cannot be centered exactly above the meter.
I was thinking more of centering them inside strips, not around the meters, unless the minimum size strips themselves have an uneven width.
The meters are centered horizontally in strips, so centering the BSMR buttons will make them appear centered above the meters. I was just pointing out that the buttons will appear to be a pixel misaligned, due to even/uneven pixel widths. And yes, mono/stereo strip widths are always uneven, to ensure meters are center aligned.
There is a new beta3 up. I’ve rolled back some of the changes I made in the previous betas.
The menu buttons are now rounded corner, instead of rectangular. The old larger drop shadow is restored in the inspector rack, and on the BSMR buttons. I’ve kept the smaller shadow on the chain panel controls in the track headers and mixer strips. The old focus frame is restored in the mixer.
Furthermore in beta3:
Added “show frame around focus track” option to the mixer region dialog.
Fix: Resizing the channel header panel in the sound editor did not update the wave display area.
Please give it a try, and let me know if there still are some design issues that needs tweaking.
Trancit@Zynewave wrote:
@Trancit wrote:
After a closer look to the mixer, I have to say, you should definetely work on the Solo/Mute/Record buttons… 😀
Especially when resizing the mixer channels, they are far to big and “ugly”…
I think they are by far not so important to take so much space…
I think there are plenty of users that would say solo/mute/record are quite essential in a mixer. Making them smaller would go against the button size conventions I use throughout the Podium UI. I’ve tried my best to make them not look “ugly”. Do you have any suggestions to what should be changed?
It´s not the button itself, it´s more, that it stays at full size while everything gets smaller…and of course the buttons are essential in a mixerstrip, but they are not so important, that they take nearly the most space in a small mixer channel…
What looks ugly for me is, that when you zoom out of the mixer, the level meter and it´s fader get smaller and shorter, the channel strip gets smaller but the buttons stay the same and visually getting bigger and bigger in comparison to the rest the more you zoom out…
Trancit
ZynewaveBeta4 is up. It has bug fixes and more refinements to the graphics. The track header BSMR buttons and the group bars (with the collapse buttons) now resize with the button size setting. The blank bounce button row in the mixer is removed if there are no bounce tracks.
Tomorrow I’ll start implementing the slide and zoom tools for the mixer.
AndrzejI have an idea. When mute or solo several tracks we can then unsolo or unmute all tracks with one button over the track headers. But when klick that button one more time mute or solo setup don’t go back to last mute or solo setings. Agree anybody with me that this will be a usefull function? I know, I can do it by Ctrl+z but often one do any edits in the meantime.
thcilnnahojI’m sorry if I’m getting obnoxious, but I’m not yet sure if I should continue to “fight” (:wink:) or just accept it as is.
Could you give a reason why you separated the color strips from the tracks like this? In my opinion, it just makes it seem like they don’t belong together. Besides, the rounded corners on mini-mixer strips make me think of towers in Islamic architecture. 😉 Also, it looks, um, weird now when you don’t use vertical meters on track headers.
More stuff to nag you:
– Are you going to switch to using rounded corners on most other interface elements, too? Just my opinion, but mixing the two (or even three) styles doesn’t go very well. Also, what about scrollbars?
– Why did you decide to keep button and scrollbar size separate? It would seem natural that they’d be resized together.
– I know it’s still in beta state, but the labels on empty so/in selectors seem to be a mess. There’s normal (non-dimmed) text on them on track headers and the rack now, but none at all in the mixer.
– Without shadows (and text), I find empty selectors to be barely noticeble.
– Having the frame as an option hidden away somewhere seems like an unhappy compromise to me. If you really feel it looks terrible, you should decide on an alternative like, for example, making the buttons just a bit smaller (it makes no difference to me whether I can read “zPE(” or only “zPE” on tiny strips), or use full-colored backgrounds despite what us users say, if you prefer them.
druid@Zynewave wrote:
Currently only the button size is scaled with the new adjustable setting. In a future update I’ll experiment with scaling font sizes.
Sounds good. I have to say, despite me thinking it’s a good idea, I can’t say I’d really push for it and I’d certainly understand if you never really got to doing such a thing.
The flip side is, however, that if you’re looking at touchscreen stuff, there are platforms that are small-screened with a resolution large enough that meshing with Windows sizing, or at least having one setting to control “zoom” of the UI elements (including text of course) seems logical, as it must be pretty hard to read on some of the small screens out there.
My uh .. 40″ screen is probably fairly rare. And mostly ’cause I use the computer for entertainment, mind (and I moved the good speakers out to big screen too) so ordinarily I’d rather use a “normal” display for music work. But thought I’d make mention of it anyway, as I started using UI size on my laptop, too.
ZynewaveBeta5:
Using the mixer zoom slider will lock the zoom on the focus track. To lock zoom on a specific track, hold Ctrl+Alt and use click+drag or the mouse wheel over the strips.
The slide tool can be used on the mixer strips. Hold Shift+Alt and click+drag, or hold Alt and use the mouse wheel.
Changed the mouse wheel horizontal scroll shortcut from Shift to Alt, to match the Ctrl+Alt shortcut for horizontal zoom.
This beta also includes a lot of minor graphic tweaks to the mixer layout. It can now extend down to 20% instead of 25%.
Let me know if you still have issues with the mixer layout.
LiquidProj3ctThose shortcuts changes where good. They were two request from my personal and ‘fat’ to-do list for Podium.
edit: the mixer’s fader highlight seems a little buggy when the strips are thin (it isn’t although, it seems only)
Zynewave@thcilnnahoj wrote:
Could you give a reason why you separated the color strips from the tracks like this? In my opinion, it just makes it seem like they don’t belong together. Besides, the rounded corners on mini-mixer strips make me think of towers in Islamic architecture. 😉 Also, it looks, um, weird now when you don’t use vertical meters on track headers.
In the latest beta, the 1-pixel gap between the group bar and the header is toned down. In 2.35 and previous releases, the separation between the two was made by painting a 1-pixel drop shadow on top of the left side focus frame. What I didn’t like about that was that the left side of the the frame did not appear identical to the right side. The problem became more apparent with the new 1-pixel rounded corner.
– Are you going to switch to using rounded corners on most other interface elements, too? Just my opinion, but mixing the two (or even three) styles doesn’t go very well. Also, what about scrollbars?
In this case I assume you mean the 1-pixel rounded corner, and not the adjustable button roundness. I intend to make most other clickable areas use the 1-pixel rounded corners. What about the scrollbars?
– Why did you decide to keep button and scrollbar size separate? It would seem natural that they’d be resized together.
Some users, myself included, always use mouse shortcuts for zooming and scrolling, and so the scrolbars only serve as visual indicators. In that case it’s nice to keep them smaller than regular buttons. On a touchscreen interface it may be more relevant to increase the scrollbar size so that they are the same clickable size as buttons.
LiquidProj3ctThere is also a little bug showing latency compensations:
To reproduce it:
1. Keep inspector opened
2. Create toooooooooooooooooooooooooooonns of tracks and use an small zoom value until you need use scroll to see all the mixer.
3. Then scroll the mixer in the way you like
4. Close inspector
btw you could create a new way to display latency info when strips are very thin.
Edit: 😳 😳 😳 To reproduce it you only need slide the mixer while open and close the inspector, you don’t need to zoom out it.