New Recording UI

[farazs]

As discussed in #586, I would like to try out a new (and possibly improved) UI for recording. @dideler said that the idea was worth exploring.

The improvements are that there would be a way to leave the recording mode after "Prepare to record" is pressed, for the user to alter the talk information or select a different talk to record (for eg. if for some reason the order or schedule is changed and a different talk is happening first). Also, there won't be a button suddenly appearing in the UI as the "Play" button does now but all the buttons will be persistent and just disabled/enabled depending on the state.

Here are the mock-ups :

And the google drawing links https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/18G03c7RliUQMY00hXA4HO55W5TZQEkqMWVhXD-gPF6w/edit https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1DB5594kg1qb6Oejct9lxVISBmpCQ43fZam6mFx0EI0E/edit

[farazs]

The mock-ups don't have the Auto-record button though. I will try to come up with a design that has Auto-record.

Does anyone else have any ideas about how to incorporate that while also indicating that the "Prepare to Record" option is more important, significant etc?

Sidenote: I feel like the auto-record screen should have a button in the top right corner that lets you leave auto-record since it full screens itself. Thoughts?

[dideler]

How would you stop a recording? Does the "Record" button double as start and stop recording?

I feel like the auto-record screen should have a button in the top right corner that lets you leave auto-record since it full screens itself. Thoughts?

+1

[farazs]

Yeah all the buttons would work as they do now (record button doubles as record and stop currently I believe), just their location would be different and they would always be there. The addition would be the "Leave recording mode" button and the "leave/disable auto-record" (not sure if I'll have time for the latter in my schedule). If I don't get to the "leave auto-record" button i'll create a new issue for it.

I'm thinking of working on this before the other configtool changes. Francisco said my plugin config changes may not overlap with his but there's no downside to starting on this first. By the time I get to the other issue Francisco will probably be done and there won't be any chance of conflicts.

[farazs]

Right now some of the media buttons in the Recording UI have a backup icon (incase a system media icon isn't found), and some don't. What do you think about having backup icons for all the media buttons, and then making the media buttons be only the icons (no text)? Record, play, pause, and stop are all pretty easily conveyed through the right icon. Imo it also makes an app look nicer.

Where would we be able to get icons that we can use?

[dideler]

I'm not opposed to using just icons for the very common operations (e.g. record, play, pause, stop). But instead of using system icons, I think we should provide the icons so they're consistent across all platforms.

[farazs]

I agree. zxiiro agreed to this on IRC as well.

I'll be putting up the PR soon after looking over the changes myself

[farazs]

Right now, when recording is started, the recording button (which now turns into a stop button) stays pressed ("checked" in terms of the code). The logic uses whether the button isChecked() to figure out if the program is in a recording state, though this makes it look like the stop button is pressed which is really weird from a users point of view. I factored out this recording state into a separate variable so that the stop button doesn't have to look pressed to the user. Do you guys agree that it's better this way?

[dideler]

Sounds good to me.