Menus

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, February 20, 2012 6:18 am, Mike Holstein wrote:

> thanks for putting this together len!

Testing has been slower than I thought, I wanted more to do.
>
> i think this kind of identifying could present issues. JAMin is a great
> example. sure, its an effect, but thats not what the sub-menu "effects" is
> about. do we need a "mastering" sub-menu? i think there will be plenty

I did think Of putting jamin in the effects menu. I tried to think from a
workflow and also from what the user has been introduced to from the slide
show. I wanted to de-clutter the Audio production menu more than anything.
Jamin and mastering is one of the bigger tasks and I wanted people to be
able to find it easily. Effects, (maybe even jamin) can be loaded right in
ardour, but we expect someone may want to use it with audacity for a small
enough project, or use it as an output module for internet broadcast so I
left it out in the more main menu. On the other hand, the effects racks
seem plentiful... and all over the place and sometimes the App name does
not give a good idea what the app is. By putting them in a sub-menu people
have an expectation about what they do and they don't get in the way in
the more main menu.

Mixers were obvious. A lot of them will never be used in any set up. Most
people only have one card or two. Most have the same icon etc. What I
found annoying is that there is a mixer classification for *.desktop file
use, but most of these don't use it. I could I suppose file bugs for all
of them ;-)

Sound generators... synths, these needed to be separated because there are
too many that are "whats that?" The name doesn't make it obvious what they
are.

This is where I could use some help... I'm not on the right machine right
now, but there is actually a list of apps that is in the audio production
menu that we do not ship. This is somebody else's work (thankyou) that I
have added on top. However, there may well be some of these apps that if
installed would end up in the audio production menu that really belong in
one of the subs. I will post the list later in another post.

> also, i think it was brasero that was in the "audio"
> area, even though brasero does much more than burn audio CD's and i rarely
> use it for that. we have it in the "multimedia" main menu, though i could
> argue that i use it more as an "office" tool. when i want to download an
> iso for a linux distribution, and make a disc, or burn a backup data DVD,
> i
> go in the menu to an inappropriate item for my task. i dont really have a
> solution for this either,

It seems to me brasero is also in the accessories menu. Which is also the
utility menu. (I think brasero has "utility" as a classification) I am
willing to put it in the audio production menu as well though if that is
the general consensus... I guess I am still dreaming of GCDMaster. Ardour
does not put out clean toc files all the time. I had to hand edit my toc
file before printing to disk with brasero. I am (slowly) working on a toc
editor (TiKToc?) in TK/tcl. that will be better than nothing... though not
as good as gcdmaster is. It will be a little slow to run being script, but
should not care about what version of tk/tcl it is run on. That is it
should require zero up keep. Should GCDMaster reappear, It will already
end up in the right menu. I personally still consider it a bug that it is
not included, but don't have the skill to convert it or even compile
static to make it so. I still can't find how to put out a toc/cue file in
ardour3 (alphas or betas) though from the changelog it is there somewhere
and I can put all the track info in place. It is not in the export section
that I could see.

> as for the other issues "what will break" and "what happens when you
> reinstall"... we should try and test for these issues of course, but i
> think we go forward focused on our default application menu placement, and
> do what we can with the others as time permits, or as specific cases are
> presented.

The way it is set up it does not change the default menu, it is an extra
file. So if installed as the meta should not destroy the main menu as is
and should be removable without harm.

The photography menu should just work, I used the photography
classification as the sole criteria for inclusion. However, the graphics
menu required me to hand exclude each photography app, so a new one would
end up in both. I think I could fix that if we did as xubuntu has and
create our own menu from scratch instead of adding an exceptions file.
However this would make the meta that has the menu in it less friendly to
install over top another distro.

The video menu has a much longer list of apps than we ship and so if they
are installed they will show in the video menu and not multimedia.

> if Ralph has a particular non-default application that is a
> concern, and we can take that into consideration and place it in a more
> appropriate place, that would be great. thanks again len...

I am going to work on that pesky second panel next. It is broken right now
and I think the placement is wrong too. Ralph felt that having workflow
specific menus on there would be nice... I will see what I can do. I also
have another idea for a task-based launcher (in tk/tcl) I will try when/if
I have time(I may whip up something that has two workflows with two apps
each just to see what people think). They have tear offs, but I am
thinking a utility bar like deal that changes with the workflow.

Lots of ideas... I should have started earlier on some, but in many cases
had not thought of them yet.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net