UI scaling

[Pimentoso]

This is more of a feature request than a bug. I like this player a lot but it's almost unusable on my work 27 inch imac, the font and the icons are just too small. See screenshot

https://imgur.com/a/DoK5M7s

Thanks for the hard work on this project.

[kartik-venugopal]

Thanks a lot for the feedback and issue report. I appreciate any and all feedback, and especially when people include screenshots - that helps a lot 👍

One of my big limitations is that I only have 2 Mac machines to test my app - both are 13" Macbook Pros, with the max scaled resolution being 1680 x 1050. So, thus far, I have only been able to see how my app looks on these smaller displays. I did anticipate this problem.

I suppose one way to solve this problem would be to let the user choose between 2 scaling options, (e.g. "Default text size" and "Larger text size") and the app could then resize all its fonts and icons based on which option is chosen.

It seems like resizing the text would have a pretty significant impact on all the UI fields/controls ... resizing the playlist table views on the fly can be challenging because of the Cocoa framework ... in my experience. In other words, implementing this fix could involve a fair amount of reworking.

Let me see what can be done. I haven't been able to put time into this project in the last 6 weeks or so, so I'm not able to promise a fix, but I will definitely keep it in mind.

Thanks again !

[Pimentoso]

Yeah I have zero experience with UI building and the cocoa framework so I have no idea how much the scaling functions actually automagically work (usually they don't) and how big would this fix be. Thanks for taking the time to respond anyway. Please let me know if you need more screenshots, I can provide one for each scaling level.

[kartik-venugopal]

Yes, I would love to see more screenshots showing things like the track name displayed (in the player window when a track is playing), and what would also be really useful is a comparison between Aural Player text and the text of another app (side by side) which shows text in a good font size for your display, so that I have a reference as to what would be a good size for your display.

Thanks !

[Pimentoso]

This is interesting, I tried it alongside the other program I'm using, and turns out it's not a matter of UI scaling, but only font size and icon spacing. The two programs scale identically when changing resolution.

https://imgur.com/a/j1Cn2AA

The main issues I see are

• font is too thin (and maybe a bit smaller)
• playlist items need more spacing
• control icons need more spacing too
• some icons are too cluttered (bottom playlist controls, volume/balance sliders)

So basically in the end it's not an issue but a matter of my personal preference. I think it would benefit just by simply spacing things a little.

[kartik-venugopal]

@Pimentoso

Hi, I am working on a fix for the issue you mentioned ... at least to fix the font size.

My new work should allow the user to choose between "Normal", "Larger", and "Largest" text font sizes.

As of now, I have done this only for player text resizing, as a trial. I plan to also allow resizing of Playlist and Effects window text.

[kartik-venugopal]

@Pimentoso

Hi, after a lot of thought and trial and error, I have implemented and released a solution to the text scaling problem. I now offer users 3 preset text size settings, that can be adjusted globally or per app window. A demo on how to do this in the app is here.

The new release is here.

If not ideal, I hope this will at least mitigate the issue you brought up, somewhat. Icon scaling/spacing is perhaps a bit more challenging, at least because of the constraints I have set up. I'll leave that for another day.

If you're able to try this out and let me know what you think, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks again for bringing this to my attention. This issue is now closed.