Proposal Improvements to the Manage Effects/Generators/Analyzers GUI

From Audacity Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Proposal pages help us get from feature requests into actual plans. This page is a proposal to improve the interface of the Manager for Effects, Generators and Analyzers.
Proposal pages are used on an ongoing basis by the Audacity development team and are open to edits from visitors to the wiki. They are a good way to get community feedback on a proposal.


  • Note: Proposals for Google Summer of Code projects are significantly different in structure, are submitted via Google's web app and may or may not have a corresponding proposal page.


This proposal is a spin-off from Bug #1018

The Problem

Gale 09Jun15:

  1. Gives an impression of too many controls to "see the wood for the trees" while not being all that easy to use.
  2. No one-step way to just select all the shipped effects.
  3. No one-step way to revert to only the enabled shipped effects.
  4. Checkbox selection could still be useful - not all users know how to SHIFT-select or CONTROL-select.
  5. SHIFT-selection is wrong on Mac or Linux - pressing the opposite-direction arrow key does nothing, then finally adds items instead of removing them. Widgets issue?
  6. No seek by typed letter on Mac or Linux.
  7. If you have more than a few dozen effects it is very hard to see what you are doing and where an effect is in the list.
    • Should there be a "Type of effect" column?
    • Should there be a search box for effect name?
    • Can we sort mixed case as even case-sensitive OS'es do, not lower case at the bottom?
  8. Too much RSI to enable/disable. Right-click over selected row(s) > Enable or Disable would help a *lot*.

Peter 09Jun15: As the person who has been using this facility fairly extensively in the course of documenting it for the Manual, I basically have to disagree with Gale here regarding steps 1, 8 and 7.

1) I found it a readily understandable and usable interface. The documentation page is quite short and I believe quite sufficient.

8) As it's a one-off or at worst a seldom-used piece of functionality "RSI" shouldn't really enter into it. This is a set-up task which yo do and then forget about most of the time.

7) I didn't find it too hard to find what I was looking for - may be harder on Mac give Gale's points 6 and 5 I guess.

  • Gale: 09Jun15: Thanks, for adding this page, Peter. One of my mystery shoppers adds effects most days or sometimes several times a day. He gave the RSI comment. Perhaps Peter does not have many effects in all the different classes? That surely is the acid test of this GUI.

Proposed Feature

TBP


Developer/QA Backing

TBP


Use Cases

TBP


Details

TBP


GUI Examples

TBP


Previous Feature Requests relating to this proposal

TBP

Retrieved from "https://wiki.audacityteam.org/w/index.php?title=Proposal_Improvements_to_the_Manage_Effects/Generators/Analyzers_GUI&oldid=32840"