Audacity Forum

I just grabbed the SVN HEAD (late the night of 14Oct2010) and have been using it today for production. Prior to that my production suite was using an older version which had the "chain" tiles. Because the chain tiles for oriented diagonally they didn't have the problem that I am having with the clock tiles. If you look at this picture: You can see that only a tiny bit of clock is visible on the extreme left edge of the selection and it is next to impossible to see where the actual selection starts especially when the audio track is stretched vertically to fill most of the screen and is extremely rich in data. With a little work, I can make the selections such that there is only a single pixel on the round edge of the clock showing where the edge of the selection is – and if I get really creative I can size the selections such that only a single pixel of the clock shows on each edge of the selection.

I also find the clocks to be so dark that they are visually distracting but I suppose that is a matter of taste.

I thought the latest build was supposed to have the clocks arranged diagonally and not vertically.

And anyway I personally preferred the chains to the clocks ...

WC

The background appears to be set in ThemeAsCeeCode.h but this is an auto-generated by Theme.cpp and I've no idea how it's generated as there does not appear to be a related image in the 'images' folder.
The 'sync-lock' button also looks very amateurish, but when I asked on the developers mailing list they were not forthcoming about how to modify these.
@Edgar are you able to work out how these images are created and how they can be changed?

stevethefiddle wrote: The 'sync-lock' button also looks very amateurish, but when I asked on the developers mailing list they were not forthcoming about how to modify these.
@Edgar are you able to work out how these images are created and how they can be changed?

A "fix" was promoted but never applied to SVN. There may be a tiny bit of contention amongst the Development Team about the visual aspects of Sync-Lock and as it is not scheduled for 2.0 anyway, I think there is a less than feeling of urgency (from reading between the lines of threads on -devel) on making changes to the "way it looks".

I posted here in the hopes that "real world users" would chime in and give the Developers some place to go to look at that level of feedback.

As for making the changes myself for my own use, I did work out how to make this general kind of change but ended up with a real mess when I started changing all the colors to black--one by one--in an effort to identify which color to change to make the cursor's vertical bar to something brighter with more contrast and therefor more visible. It turned out that I made some change that was pervasive and even after deleting all of Audacity (from my hard drive, the registry and from the Roaming folder) it left me with a mostly black project window when I downloaded and compiled a new Audacity. There is a software switch in the source code which turns this ability on/off--even to this day if I turn the switch on I have an all black project window; the switch is in experimental.h: EXPERIMENTAL_THEME_PREFS, play with it at your own peril!

Edgar wrote: There may be a tiny bit of contention amongst the Development Team about the visual aspects of Sync-Lock and as it is not scheduled for 2.0 anyway...

Yes there has indeed been a fair bit of discussion on the devel list about the visualapsects (and the behaviour) of Sync-Lock. I thoght that they had eventually decided on the clocks - but also decided that they should be tiled diagonally - so as to avoid the problem you posted abot at the top of this thread Ed.

And I thought that they were planning to turn Sync-Lock on for 2.0 - BillW is certainly planning to document it. He has already drafted some of the text and is awaiting a final decision on the grahics so that he can work on the screenshots for the 2.0 manual.

WC

waxcylinder wrote:And I thought that they were planning to turn Sync-Lock on for 2.0

Yes that was my understanding - Sync-lock would be enabled, but not selected as the default.

stevethefiddle wrote:

waxcylinder wrote:And I thought that they were planning to turn Sync-Lock on for 2.0

Yes that was my understanding - Sync-lock would be enabled, but not selected as the default.

Right, enabled but not on-by-default. Sorry, I used a poor choice of words initially.

And I do hope they get around, before 2.0 release, to fixing the problem that was recently identified of Sync-Lock remaining on for the next project if turned on in the current one.

We discussed that recently on the "Adding Features To Audacity" - in fact I transferred it to the Wiki "Pending Feature Requests" page just this lunchtime. However that page is not normally visited by the developers, so this will be "invisible" to them. Do you think that we should be raising this as a bug - or as a Proposal Page in the Wiki - or even directly on the devel and quality mailing lists? Thoughts?

WC

waxcylinder wrote:Do you think that we should be raising this as a bug - or as a Proposal Page in the Wiki - or even directly on the devel and quality mailing lists?

The Development Team generally does not read this forum, rarely looks at the wiki, and with a few exceptions do not read the Quality mailing list. That seems to leave only the -devel mailing list but the Developers get very antsy when people are who do not have "commit rights" encourage this kind of discussion on that list. It seems to be a "Catch-22". That is why I try to encourage "real world users" to discuss this kind of issue on the forum so that maybe we can come to a consensus on what we want. At that point we can impose on one of the "forum elves" who have the attention of the Developers to summarize that position.

As a real world user, the tiles need to be diagonal so that the edge of the highlighted area can be clearly seen regardless of its exact position (assuming that tiled images are to be used).

I was not particularly keen on the chain link effect from an aesthetic point of view (too prison-camp like), but functionally it was superior to the current shading.

I'd also like to see some indication that Sync-lock is enabled in the ordinary selection shading. When selecting a region the attention is on the region, not on the little clock symbols in the corner of the track info, or the state of the Sync-lock button. Perhaps a negative version of the tiles or something?

I can't "patch" Audacity for better appearance, but if people want to throw in their ideas I can make some mock-ups (which would provide a concrete proposal to put to the developers).