Names of plug-ins should be brief and preferably provide a reasonably intuitive indication of what the plug-in does.
Avoid using a colon (
in the file name as this is a reserved character for Chains.
Ideally the name should use only the usual “safe” characters “A-Z, a-z, 0-9, - _”
Is it not time to change the minimum supported resolution from 800x600 (2011) to at least 1024 x 768. Who usesa 800x600 screen 2019? And then of course extend the window size of the plugin dialog.
I don’t know exactly what you are referring to, but this is a very old topic (started in 2010), so some of the information is now out of date.
In modern versions of Audacity the plug-in GUI can be resized by the user (not possible in old versions of Audacity). If you create a large GUI, Audacity automatically gives it a vertical scroll bar. In short, for modern versions of Audacity, the size of the GUI is less important than it was in older versions of Audacity.
When designing the UI, there’s a balancing act between flexibility (lots of controls) and usability (just a few controls). If there are too many controls, it will take ages to make all of the required settings, plus the annoyance of having to scroll down the GUI. As a rule of thumb, I try to keep the number of control less than 10.
Sometimes it can be appropriate to combine controls. For example, on a compressor you may want a longer “look ahead” when the “attack” is longer, in which case you could tie an “attack” control to set both the attack and lookahead:
;control attack "Attack and look-ahead" float "ms" 10 0 1000
...
(setq attack (* attack 0.001)) ;attack time in seconds
(setq lookahead (* attack *sound-srate*)) ;lookahead = attack time in samples
...
Yes it was a really old topic, I had not noticed that the effect dialogs were resizable. Thanks! That makes it easier. Yes I agree that to minimize the number of controls is something to strive for. Now I am exploring the possibilities of exposing two or three functions in the same dialog, but maybe in the end it is not really workable/practical. We shall see…