Various UI enhancements

[GoogleCodeExporter]

After having ripped a pile of CDs with rubyripper I have compiled some
suggestions for enhancing the UI. I hope it is okay to collect them in one
issue. Here goes:

1. Summary page: "Traffic Light" icon for success status
After ripping a CD you have to look fairly closely to find out if the rip
succeeded. I would suggest displaying an icon with traffic light coding:
green for "None of the tracks gave any problems"; yellow for "Some tracks
needed correction, but could be corrected"; and red for "... could not be
corrected". 
This way you could see with one cursory glance whether you should sort the
disk to the "problem pile" before you pop in the next. Maybe the bulb icon
that is already there could glow in different colours?

2. Summary page: Stating album title in summary 
When I get distracted for a while during ripping a pile of disks and come
back later it can happen that I don't remember if I have ripped the current
disk already or only wanted to. (Embarrassing, but it can happen.). It
would be great if the summary page stated the album title/artist, so there
is no need to look it up in the file system. That is not out of character
for a summary, and there is enough room.

3. Disc info page: Variable length fields for artist/album
Like the trackname fields the textboxes for artist and album title should
grow to use the available space. With longer titles, only a part of the
text is visible even if the window has enough room to display all of it. Is
it possible to fix the genre/year fields to the right border and let the
artist/album grow or shrink to use up all of the remaining room?

4. Disc info page: Undo feature
Probably a GTK thing. Is it possible to activate the undo feature in the
text fields for artist/album/tracknames etc.?

5. Track selection page: Scrolling
If you have more tracks than fit into the window, a scrollbar is added to
the panel. Now, when you move from one line to the next with the keyboard's
arrow keys (or the tab key) and get beyond the last visible line, the
cursor jumps to the invisible line, as it should. But that line remains
invisible and you can't see what you type. Instead, the list should be
automatically scrolled so the item that contains the cursor is always visible.
It probably sounds like a very minor issue, but it can cause major
annoyance when you go through a longer track list. You have to take the
hand off the keyboard several times to scroll the list using the mouse.

What version of rubyripper are you using? On what operating system? Are you
using the gtk2 or the commandline interface?

SVN 195, Ubuntu 7.10, GTK2 interface 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by dj.gg...@johannis.net on 24 Jan 2008 at 8:09

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for reporting these problems. I'm in no way a GTK2 expert or a user 
interface designer by heart. So your participation and reasoning is most 
welcome :)

If anyone want to add any suggestions that are also related to user interface 
improvements, please post them to this thread.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 24 Jan 2008 at 8:37

• Changed state: Accepted

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Keyboard accelerators for the common buttons would be nice. 'P' for 
Preferences, 'S'
for Scan drive etc. ctrl-Q should quit.

Original comment by hha...@gmail.com on 8 Feb 2008 at 8:34

[GoogleCodeExporter]

A button to cancel the ripping process would be nice. ATM one can only exit the 
whole program. In addition after ripping the 'Open tray' button should turn 
into 
'Close tray' when the disc was ejected. I already tried my hands on these but 
didn't 
get far due to lack of time.

Very nice app btw!

Original comment by j...@rapidrabbit.de on 20 May 2008 at 10:49

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Here's a patch to fix the eject button. Basic stuff, not even worth a patch 
actually, but maybe it helps.

Original comment by j...@rapidrabbit.de on 20 May 2008 at 4:16

Attachments:

• eject-button.patch

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Another patch attached. This one turns the 'Exit' button into a 'Cancel' button 
during the ripping process. It switches back when the ripping is done or in 
case of 
error. Could be refined I guess, but it does the job. Only problem is, that it 
throws some gettext error:

/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/gettext.rb: line 229
   Gtk-CRITICAL **:gtk_text_layout_get_iter_location: assertion `GTK_IS_TEXT_LAYOUT 
(layout)' failed

I guess the translations would need to be updated for this to work properly.

Let me know if this is helpful.

Original comment by j...@rapidrabbit.de on 20 May 2008 at 5:10

Attachments:

• cancel-button.patch

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Forgot to mention, it's rubyripper 0.5.0 I'm patching for.

Original comment by j...@rapidrabbit.de on 20 May 2008 at 5:12

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for sending patches :) I'll try to merge them when I've some time.

You can try ./configure --update-lang and see if it solves the gettext error.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 20 May 2008 at 5:23

[GoogleCodeExporter]

[deleted comment]

[GoogleCodeExporter]

No problem. I need to learn some Ruby for my work anyway. :)

Unfortunately I don't seem to get around that gettext problem. The error 
message 
only disappears when I don't touch the label text of the 'Exit' button. I 
surely 
overlooked something.

BTW: I just recognized that the .rb files in the source archive have different 
names 
than the ones on my filesystem which I used to create the patches. So you might 
need 
to change the filenames in the patch files.

Original comment by j...@rapidrabbit.de on 20 May 2008 at 8:17

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The eject-button thing is merged in svn r288.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 6 Aug 2008 at 12:55

[GoogleCodeExporter]

The summary page now shows the artist and album info in svn r289.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 6 Aug 2008 at 1:15

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Disc info page now fuly allocates space for album and artist since r290.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 6 Aug 2008 at 1:36

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Added accelerator keys for the main buttons in r291. The shortcuts will depend 
on
your language. Normally ALT + the_underscored_letter.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 6 Aug 2008 at 2:38

[GoogleCodeExporter]

One other enhancement - at present I know know way to tell what version of Ruby 
is running within the GUI (I 
had multiple versions installed at one point and was trying to see about this.) 
Usually there is an "About . . ." 
option in the menus which shows this. Just a suggestion, obviously not a big 
deal.

Original comment by Jer....@gmail.com on 29 Jan 2009 at 10:42

[GoogleCodeExporter]

You did notice that the rubyripper version is always mentioned it the log files?

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 31 Jan 2009 at 7:45

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Aha. Did not notice. Thanks for the info!

Original comment by Jer....@gmail.com on 5 Feb 2009 at 7:52

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Fixed the 1st issue with commit (well, sort of):
http://github.com/rubyripperdev/rubyripper/commit/7979e7f0095913ca1d380a452e612a
4b0657
273a

That means only 4th and 5th point are still open?

Original comment by boukewou...@gmail.com on 26 Apr 2010 at 8:24

• Added labels: Type-Enhancement
• Removed labels: Type-Defect