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ElvishArtisan / rivendell

A full-featured radio automation system targeted for use in professional broadcast and media environments
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RdAirPlay, resizable window UX/UI problems (sound panel buttons disappearing #764

Open fpeyraud opened 2 years ago

fpeyraud commented 2 years ago

Hi With Rivendell 4, it appears that RdAirPlay window is now resizable, which is GREAT now that screens are as big as a football stadium. Nevertheless, when the window is large, more soundpanel buttons appear, which disappear when the window is resized to a smaller size. This can be problematic for some users looking for their instant buttons and don't realize that the window as just been resized. After discussing with some friends, we concluded that the button count should be fixed (lines and column counts could be tuned in rdadmin just like in rdCartSlots settings), and window resize should just make buttons bigger or smaller. Capture d’écran de 2021-12-03 13-57-04 Capture d’écran de 2021-12-03 13-57-10

In the same window, the MainLog buttons on the left is limited to twelve. In some setups, the screen may be set in portrait mode and one could want to have a long list of buttons on the left and less space for other widgets. Maybe the count of instant buttons for the main log could also be set in rdadmin settings ? Capture d’écran de 2021-12-03 13-56-28 Moreover, but I think this has already been reported in #739 , the VoiceTracker button disappear the the window width is too small.

ElvishArtisan commented 2 years ago

I did experiment with that kind of behavior when implementing the resizing. The problem with it is that it plays very poorly with touchscreen setups, which is one of the major use cases for rdairplay(1).

Perhaps some sort of lock on the size of the main window, so that it cannot be inadvertently/casually resized? (Similar to the workflow for repositioning a panel under XFCE).

fpeyraud commented 2 years ago

I don't see very well what could play very poorly with touchscreen, but I feel that having a fixed size window could frustrate some users ! Maybe if they can have a sufficient (rdadmin-tunable) number of buttons for the sound-panel and the main log, this can be fine to have a fixed size window adapted to their screen.

ElvishArtisan commented 2 years ago

I don't see very well what could play very poorly with touchscreen

Mostly because, when the window size gets small, the buttons get tiny and very difficult to hit accurately. Or, if you set the button layout so they are a reasonable size at the minimal window size, you end up with HUGE buttons when maximized, which is both a waste of screen real estate was well as aesthetically ugly.

I agree that there's really no optimum one-size-fits-all policy here. Touch screen and mouse users in particular have different requirements and preferences. Perhaps two different configurable behaviors (settable in rdadmin(1))?

fpeyraud commented 2 years ago

In fact, instead of choosing between fixed or resizeable window, and fixed or on-the-fly button count depending on the window size, maybe we could let the user chose the button count through rdadmin, and let the resize the window as they want, then store the window geometry in the ''.rivendell/rdairplayrc'' file as it is done already, so that they can choose the size and count of their buttons according to their usage (mouse or touchscreen)

ElvishArtisan commented 2 years ago

That sounds reasonable, and is in fact the sort of thing we do elsewhere --e.g. RDCartSlots configuration.

fpeyraud commented 2 years ago

Hi Do you plan to embed this semi fixed button count in the stable 4.0 release ?