Re: [Traverso-devel] Some glitches with 0.40.0

[Nicola Döbelin]

Hi Remon,

> About your problems with 0.40.0, I think it's much much much much better
> to solve them now, wether they are real or not (== build problems vs real
> bugs) in 0.40.1 !

I agree.

> The issues you described that are related to the contextual interface, 
> and that it isn't a solution for all situations, of course, but that's 
> not a bug or glitch, or something else, it just means we're not there 
> yet!

Sure. Actually, the only things the term "glitches" was referring to were the 
drawing problems, which turned out to be a configuration problem. The tool tips 
were meant as small but important improvements, which should be simple to solve 
and should thus make it into the next release, before we focus on major changes 
and forget 'polishing' 0.40.0 a bit more.

The thing with the fades and key actions, well... you know we have very 
different approaches. While you have a very clear idea of how the contextual 
interface should be implemented in a consistent way, I just load a project from 
time to time and see how far I get with mixing as compared to Samplitude (until 
I reach a point where I need feature X to go on). In these situations I look at 
it purely from the user's point of view, and I usually find lots of minor 
issues that are not at all obvious from the developers point of view. When I 
report them, it's not my intention to say "that's crap, fix it!". Instead I 
want to hear your opinion, maybe discuss it, or just make sure you registered 
it and will consider it in future design decisions. My comments were meant to 
be constructive criticism, not nagging, but then again I can absolutely 
understand that even constructive criticism can be inappropriate in certain 
situations and cause a lot of frustration.

> I think it's something that's used elsewhere, but perhaps different. The
> point is that an object could be too small to be edited contextually, so 
> we 'select -> magnify' the object, and it becomes large enough, while the 
> rest of the viewport remains the same.
> 
> Say you have a clip of 20 pixels height, and 10 pixels width, selecting
> the area -> magnify, magnifies the selection part to say, 100 height, 250
> pixels width. Within the magnified area, you can use the contextual
> interface just like you was used too, including scroll, zoom, split, 
> well, you name it....
> Until implemented, it's hard to know if it will work, but what do you 
> guys think ?

My spontaneous ideas are:

Contra:
- difficult to implement
- it could be confusing, but as you say, we'll have to test it first
- there might be simpler solutions, see below

Pro:
- it might actually work ;-)

What I would like to have is the possibility to change most of the parameters 
of a clip numerically. E.g. opening a clip editor which allows to set:

- start position
- length / end
- gain / normalize value
- fade length / mode / strength / bending
- plugins

(I haven't mentioned yet that I would like to have plugins for individual 
clips. Please ignore it for the moment ;-) ) Being able to enter these values 
numerically is important IMHO. Maybe such a dialog reduces the need for the 
zooming function you described above? OTOH one must be able to select the clip 
in order to open this dialog or to zoom the clip. So selection is still not 
solved in both cases. How about zooming clips below a certain width threshold 
(around 20 pixels) a little bit, say to 20 pixels, as soon as they have mouse 
focus? Similar to buttons indicating focus with a graphical effect.

> > I'll think them out a bit more before getting on your nerves O:-)
> 
> Hah, yeah, you actually did work on my nerves .... :)

I realized that. Sorry again.

> Remember that the contextual interface isn't the solution to everything,
> and that there are numerous more ways to accomplish something, so don't 
> try too hard to bypass the limitation of the contextual interface that
> are there due it's nature!
> 
> Another commonly used solution is to show the 'clip edit widget', docked 
> somewhere when you select a clip with all the stuff you want to edit with 
> comboboxes, sliders, buttons and so on....

Oh, I should read before writing. So we agree on that one :-)

Greetings
Nic

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