Audacity Logo Redesign

[victorwestmann]

Hi steve,

thank you for your answer. When you say that Audacity could move to HTML 5 UI... do you have any special framework or library in mind?

Are there any low hanging fruit tasks that designers could do to help the project move forward?

Thank you for your time.
Victor

If we have a newer, fresher, and more modern UI

One of the primary considerations when thinking about developing the UI, is that it is built with WxWidgets (https://www.wxwidgets.org/).
WxWidgets has long had a reputation for making ugly UI's, though much less ugly these days than back in the days of Windows XP.

WxWidgets was chosen in the very early days of Audacity (pre version 0.8) as the GUI toolkit because it was the only mature cross-platform toolkit to provide the features required by Audacity and also a guarantee of a permissible open source license. There are now tens of thousands of lines of code in Audacity that use Wx features.

There is speculation that Audacity may eventually move to an HTML5 UI, though that is likely to be years away.

[steve]

Any move to HTML5 is a long way off, and any framework used is likely to be heavily modified to meet requirements. Many of the tools that will be required do not exist yet.

[WedzMantra]

Trebor I do agree with you that there are similarities in form ...

I think the design of your Audacity logo is excellent,
but if something similar already exists in the same marketplace there could be brand confusion / litigation.

Good point. I completely agree with you, there coud be a path to ligitigation. If the concensus of the Audacity community was in favor of this redesign I would be more than happy to approach AAMS with a redesign proposal.

[victorwestmann]

AAMS? What type of redesign proposal? What would be the scope of this?

Inkscape 1.0 was just released and they implemented a super cool new feature related to themes. If we could work on this (interface, skin, look and feel) on the audacity I believe it would help the project to become even more popular and even wider adopted. Just my 2c

[steve]

If we could work on this (interface, skin, look and feel) on the audacity

Keep in mind that for cross-platform support, Audacity is built with wxWidgets. Theming the GUI in wxWidgets is not just a matter of designing some image files, it is much more complex. There is no such thing as "skins" in wxWidgets.

The current wxWidgets manual is here: https://docs.wxwidgets.org/3.0/
Google search will bring up quite a few discussions about theme support in wx applications.

[victorwestmann]

Hi steve, since you are the big boss of the project (or at least one of them), I need to ask you this: Is it ok if we discuss a way to make Audacity (alongside wxWidgets) themeable somehow?

The reason I am asking you this is because if you don't like/approve/foster this type of discussions no one will waste their time thinking on ways/possibilities/icons or whatever and we will put this to sleep until it is time to start thinking about this. At least to make some discussions should be healthy in case this is authorized/approved.

Going to Google and searching for the terms "theme support wxwidgets" (in the search they were not in quotes, just putting them here in quotes so everybody knows exactly what I used).

The results that showed up were:

1) Theming wxWidgets components (https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=34742). Last answer was on 2012. wxWidgets 2.9.3

2) can wxWidgets support skins? (https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=4196). last answer was on 2005. (wxwidgets version being discussed is unknown)

3) GUI themes/skins? (https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=945) last answered on 2005. wxWidgets 2.6.0

4) Help with the theme of a program (https://forums.wxwidgets.org/viewtopic.php?t=36877) last answer on 2013.

I read all of them and got most of what they were discussing (even though I don't know how to code in C++).
It seems that the latest replies, at least in this small and quick research I did on Google, like you mentioned, took me to answers dated at least 7 years back. Which in the software world it is a lot. With that being said my questions are:

Q1) are those problems solved or are they still challenging to overcome?
Q2) Is it possible for us to change to GTK, Qt or an Electron app? What is the next natural path we can start discussing UI changes for audacity if we stick with wxWidgets?

Are there more people from the project we can talk to or is it only you steve?

Thank you.
Victor

[steve]

the big boss

We don't have bosses (big or small) in Audacity. We do have "roles" that certain people do, for example, one of my roles is administrator of this forum, and one of waxcylinder's roles is main editor of the Audacity manual. Waxcylinder also helps out on the forum (and other things), and I also help out with the manual (and other things). It's very much a matter of pitching in and helping where one can.

Is it ok if we discuss a way to make Audacity (alongside wxWidgets) themeable somehow?

Absolutely OK.

My comment in the previous post was just for information. I think a lot of people imagine that theming Audacity can be done as simply as theming the old WinAmp player - just design some nice graphics and slice them up to skin the various interface elements. It's actually a lot more complex than that.

Audacity does have some support for themes but it is quite limited. (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/themes.html)

At least to make some discussions should be healthy

I agree.

Q2) Is it possible for us to change to GTK, Qt or an Electron app?

Audacity has hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Many of them include wx code. Porting to a different toolkit would be a massive task.
Audacity does use GTK on Linux, via wxGTK.

Are there more people from the project we can talk to

Audacity is open source, which means that anyone can contribute to the project, or modify for their own needs. Other than myself, it is quite rare for Audacity developers to visit this forum. They are usually too busy doing code.

[victorwestmann]

Hi steve, thank you for your quick reply.

So, do you think it is ok if I transport this thread to the dev mailing list just so we can get a clear comprehension on where are we (volunteers/designers/UX/UI people...) allowed to contribute? And how we can better contribute.

I believe that people do amazing mockups in the hope that they will be useful for the project but I think the time has come for us, volunteers, to understand what is the proper way to contribute to the UX/UI side of the project in a tangible way. People want to design a new interface, splash screen in a way that there is a chance it can be implemented in the real current project.

Do we know all of the limitations of the wxWidgets library and how can we overcome them? Do you know if there any gains in theming capacity on newer versions of wxWidgets?

Thank you so much for your time.
Appreciate it.
Victor

[steve]

There are two graphics that are currently required. Favicons for the Audacity wiki https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Auda ... _Home_Page and the Audacity alpha manual https://alphamanual.audacityteam.org/man/Main_Page and logos for the image in the top left corner. Currently these images are the same as in the Audacity release manual https://manual.audacityteam.org/

The graphics need to use the current Audacity logo.
The graphics need to be different on the three websites so that editors can see from the logo which document they are looking at.
The release manual will retain it's current graphics.

Many of Audacity's in-app graphics can be found here: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/tree/master/images

[trodoo]

I remade an image you wanted to include on https://manual.audacityteam.org/

I don't know where to post it though to change it or send it to the devs. So I'm including it here:

ddwsiwg-4e2c16a2-8199-4284-ade8-0165e50d5c6c.png (31.58 KiB) Viewed 450 times

I also have a SVG version of the full logo.
Can you give more in-depth info on how to contribute images to the project Steve?