Re: [Bino-list] GUI polishing

[Joe]

Hi!

> On 22/04/11 21:46, Joe wrote:
> > Please see attached patch for loading theme-specific icons - so far only
> > working on Linux. I would like to add other icons from theme, because I
> > like when the programs fits into the desktop environment - especially
> > when QT has good support for adapting look and feel to the desktop.
> > Would you accept similar more complete patch? Windows and MAC does not
> > support themes, so there would have to be theme icons delivered with
> > Bino. I would vote for oxygen theme, because I really like it and for
> > example my favorite media player Smplayer use oxygen theme on Windows
> > as well. What do you think?
> > 
> > Here is the specification of theme icons:
> > http://standards.freedesktop.org/icon-naming-spec/icon-naming-spec-lates
> > t.html
> 
> I like this very much! I did not know about the icon theme
> functionality, thanks for pointing this out.
> 
> I pushed a patch based on your suggestion that uses icons from the
> current system theme and falls back to built-in icons from the Oxygen
> theme if this fails:
> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bino.git/commit/?id=ac84c5f0f614911a60c1c9a
> 374015bd8cb91ec1e

Great work! 

> This is a preliminary patch. Two current problems are
> 1. there is not standardized icon for the "center-view" button, so I
> misused the "view-restore" icon.
Well I did not find anything in standard as well, so we could keep misusing 
"view-restore". The only handy icon i found in oxygen theme is "transform-
move", but it could be ever worse misuse.

> 2. there is only one icon for forward and backward seeking, so I made
> the different seeking buttons slightly smaller or larger depending on
> the amount of seeking. Is this ok?
There is the "media-skip-*" icons, so we can use them as well for longest 
seeks. However we are still missing one icon ... maybe scaling one seek icon 
down a bit and the second scale a bit up, so even the icon will be a bit 
bigger? 
> Please comment on this. Should this be done in a different way?


> > Also, do you have something against GUI created using QT Designer? I
> > think it is much easier and more flexible to have GUI in Designer and
> > generate it during build. Would you accept remake of Bino GUI in QT
> > Designer?
> 
> Do you know of other free software projects that use Designer?

I think almost everyone that use QT for GUI is using Designer :-) And also 
everyone is using QT resource files. Personally I have never created a GUI in 
QT without Designer.
 
> The GUIs created with designer I saw recently (at work) often had severe
> problems, for example using fixed sizes for widgets so that the layout
> does not behave properly when choosing fonts of a different size or when
> the user resizes the window, and I sometimes hear complaints of the type
> "yes, that should be done differently, but I don't know how to do this
> in Designer".

As far as I know, Designer just generates series of standard QT commands 
(practically will generate the code we already have) and therefore I think 
that it is possible to do almost every sane GUI inside Designer, because you 
just create everything that you can using Designer and then you code the rest 
if necessary.

The problem with GUI scaling you mention is definitely not true. It's just a 
default behavior for main application window to have absolutely-sized widgets. 
Just one click and you swap it to dynamically resizing. QT is the best 
framework I know for scaling GUI and Designer support it well. Especially 
placing spacers (for scalable GUI quite important) is very difficult directly 
from code when you don't immediately see the result.

> I did not use Designer myself yet so please correct me if I'm wrong, but
> my impression is that it is only good enough for small quick-and-dirty
> GUIs that never do anything unusual.
> 
> I agree that the current GUI code in player_qt.cpp is not very nice and
> could use some cleanup, but I'm not convinced that Qt Designer is the
> right solution.

I think all the current GUI can be created using Designer and I want to prove 
it :-) Hopefully I will find the time to recreate current GUI in QT Designer 
tomorrow. But as I have seen so far, you are damn quick, so I would not be 
surprised by receiving an email from you with GUI in Designer in five minutes 
:-)

Bye,
Joe.