Re: [Octal-dev] octal's tracker heritage [was re: text params]

[Edward Coffey]

> (the status bar will display an ox_desc for the value under the cursor,
> like buzz does)

And updated dynamically while the user is dragging a slide-bar in a control
box as in Buzz?

> > or a mini widgit possibly something like a
> > progress bar, showing empty for 0 and full for FF or FFFF for "small" or
> > "large" respectively.
>
> How could such a thing be edited, though? The slider will be taken care
> of by the "control boxes", which are the little slider-heavy dialogs
> that come up in Buzz when you double-click a machine. But having
> anything other than digits in the tracker matrix demands an answer to
> how the user will edit such a representation. When it's digits, the user
> puts the cursor over the desired digit and types the new one.
>
> Displaying the result of ox_desc in a tracker column makes no sense
> because there is no way for octal to edit this user-defined string and
> have the result be meaningful. The ox_desc string has a format that is
> totally defined by the machine. The same goes for putting widgets in a
> tracker column, I think... unless it has predictable editing semantics,
> there is really no way to make it work.

Yeah, these were just thoughts that popped into my head.  I thought that you
could have the control box (or just the part related to the appropriate
setting) come up when someone clicked a cell that was displaying a
mini-widget or "ox_desc" output, so they could use whatever widgit was
provided there.  Of course, cells displaying the raw data could be edited
directly in the matrix.  Widgets could also be tweaked directly on the
matrix, but there would probably be a fair tradeoff between compactness and
useability.

I think the simplest way for someone not familiar with trackers to enter a
row of control codes would be directly from some form of the control box.
Right-clicking the start of a row or something like that could bring up some
form of the control box, then when you hit OK in the control box, the
settings could be put into the row.  In Buzz, the control box seems to be
useful only for experimenting while the song is running, any cool settings
you find still have to be entered by hand.