Re: [Om-synth] om-synth: improving usability

[Dave Robillard]

On Sat, 2005-29-10 at 16:56 +0200, Antonio wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm now an happy om user but there are some tings that I would like to
> see improved regarding the usability. Take this as suggestion from a
> users, and as a starting point for further discussion. Fell free to
> criticize them as you like ;-). I hope that some of these seems good
> to the developer(s), and are easily enough to implement without much
> effort.
> 
> On the canvas side:
> * Would be nice that, when selecting a group of widgets, the
> "Disconnect All" contextual menu will disconnect all the connections
> starting, ending or between the select objects. Also a "Delete All"
> command would be useful to delete all the selected objects (only in
> Om, obviously this doesn't make sense in patchage). The "Delete All"
> command should be accessible also though the Canc shortcut.

This has been brought up before, it's a good idea.  The multi selection
stuff is new, there's lots of features that need to be implemented with
it.

> On om_gkt:
> * When saving a session I think would be useful to save the jack and
> midi connections too. Not all the jack and midi connections, of
> course, but only those connecting to, from or between om's patches. So
> lashd it's not required if one uses om only to play some patch.

No.  Om is not a patch bay, and this is a horrible idea for numerous
reasons.

I think the idea of "session" is going to go away completely in Om
actually, in favour of just saving everything in a patch.  Session is an
unecessary arbitrary layer I now realise.

> On lash_panel:
> * Should be possible to open a session, make some modifications
> starting from there and then save a new session without deleting the
> old session. The current way of deleting the old session on rename
> makes very laborious to create a set of similar sessions, because one
> has to create from scratch every session or manually copy the
> directory of one session and them one and modify the copy.

This entire area needs to be looked at.  Saving to directories is a much
more annoying problem than just saving to files.

> * Should be nice that lash_panel could start the lashd server, if
> wanted. This should be selectable through  a command line switch
> and/or through a button in the GUI. Ideally a windows that shows the
> server messages would be the optimal solution, but also the basic
> functionality to start the server would be a nice improvement. In this
> way one have to run only one program (after jack, of course) and from
> there can quickly load any desired session.

Yeah, eventually.  And lashd will be able to start jack, so you don't
need to manually start any daemons at all.

-DR-