[vlc-devel] New Mac OS X GUI: 1st Proposal

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

On 8 jun 2009, at 14:53, Dominic Spitaler wrote:
> Fellow VLC Developer Community,
>
> I've been working the last days (actually 2 weeks but with breaks)  
> on a first proposal how the new VLC Mac user interface could look  
> like.
> The design I've come up with is pretty radical and screws some  
> conventions but I think it's really for a better user experience.
> Sadly it's not fully compliant with the Mac OS X Humane Interface  
> Guidelines.
> This mockups are not polished yet, all icons and UI elements are  
> lent or just quickly made up by me for the purpose of demonstration.
>
> Anyway here it is and I want to open the thread for feedback and  
> discussion.
>
> VLC Mac GUI Iteration 1 (1.2MB, 3500x2000px, I warned you)
>
> Regards,
> Dominic
>
> (By the way: Shall we open up a wiki page for the new Mac GUI?)

I love the ideas. There are some good things in there, and I sure hope  
that the people who have stepped forward take these ideas all the way.
I have some points i would like to mention however:

* Remember that localization is done using gettext is VLC. (see  
localizedString: and delocalizeString [1]) These are basically  
"extensions to NSString" VLC does not have localization using lproj  
folders as is normal on Mac OS X, we fake this. This means that the  
Interface needs to be very flexible in String usage because what is  
short in one language, can be very long in another.

* VLC is not like most applications in that it is an Objective C  
application within a C application. That means that many things in VLC  
are being done, before that the GUI is even started (unless we switch  
to VLCKit) See also OpenIntf, CloseIntf and Run() in [1]

The key to succes here is a lot of communication, many developers  
being involved and knowing what we can reuse and what should be  
rewritten. A wikipage might be handy.

[1] http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob;f=modules/gui/macosx/intf.m;h=ddc4b1f3cdfcf34bbb693cf84d87c5be952f2898;hb=eb16d85e759173ed48e49ea95cf132f0756715bd