[vlc-devel] Re: Prefs UI?

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

Hi there Tim,

Great to have you on board.


On 10 mrt 2004, at 05:05, Tim Omernick wrote:

> DJ,
>
> I'd like to rework VLC's preferences window so that it's a lot more  
> user friendly and approachable.  I was thinking we could make it more  
> like the preferences panel in Safari, Mail, etc., with a toolbar on  
> the top, with icons for each category.

I love the idea :)
But who is going to create the icons?
What are the most used preferences? I think this might be a bit  
difficult to determine, but possible.

The last problem would be maintainability. For the last past months i  
was the only developer, and i was busy on other things as well. i was  
lucky if I could add one new OSX feature per time, the rest of my time  
was spent on fixing things that were broken and working with the vlc  
core. However, it seems that there in the future might be more than one  
developer, so this might work.

> We could move the most common (i.e., non-advanced) preferences into  
> these categories, and then make the current preferences UI available  
> under "Advanced".
>
> Apparently you had done some work on the preferences window a while  
> back, but there were some "problems".  Could you go into detail about  
> that?  Is there something I should be aware of while I'm cleaning up  
> the UI?  Is there something that's currently broken in the preferences  
> window that needs to be fixed before I can continue?

The problem was time on my side :)
With the current version are several large bugs.
The hotkeys widgets can have multiple changes, but only the last is  
registered.
The multiple int with string descriptions shows up as a plain int.
The prefs are complicated.

The last one is of course not easy to solve, because of VLC's  
modularity. I think it can be done better, but it would require major  
changes at it's core, something which would need to be talked about  
with the entire team.

I was creating special widgets for each type of preference item. They  
can be found in
modules/gui/macosx/prefs_widgets.? and are unused and completely  
untested atm.

I was starting to work on getting this into the new prefs window, by  
redesigning modules/gui/macosx/prefs.? but i had to reverse these  
changes.
They can be found here

http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/vlc/ 
modules/gui/macosx/prefs.h?rev=1.14&cvsroot=VideoLAN&content-type=text/ 
plain
http://developers.videolan.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/vlc/ 
modules/gui/macosx/prefs.m?rev=1.40&cvsroot=VideoLAN


Some important things.
- We don't use CVS anymore, we use Subversion.
- Beware of things that don't work on 10.1 if possible we would like to  
stay compatible with this until 10.4
- Beware of editing .nib files. announce this to fellow OSX developers  
(bigben,titer and me (thedj)) bigben is probably the most important  
commit'er you need to level with atm. You cannot merge these files  
which makes it really dangerous, when two people do interface work :)

TODO
- itunes sliders in the intf
- move the playlistwindow into the controller like with iTunes.  
probably use a NSView that gets resized/(un)loaded when checking the  
green button.
- fix the audio problems
- a firewire DV input for VLC based http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/DVTS/
- better multimonitor support
- more testing of open GL video output (titer)
- playlist item properties info (bigben is working on this)
- add postprocessing menu item
- GUI skins port
- add new file extensions
- fix lpcm -> audioconverter problem (too few/small samples? Meuuh  
fixed this once before)
- demuxdump option isn't working
- raw and some other options missing from VLC stream output dialog
- create a stream output wizard (zorglub is working on this for  
linux/windows)
- fix the "open subtitles" dialog (needs fontsize and encoding options)
- VLC and Codetek Virtual Desktop3 beta can't work together (see a mail  
somewhere on the devel list)
- libcdio needs to be ported to OS X
- DVD controls ?? perhaps.

---
Universiteit Twente
Derk-Jan Hartman (d.hartman at student.utwente dot nl)
http://home.student.utwente.nl/d.hartman

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