Mixer GUI improvements
As you know I am currently working on improving patch selection in the mixer.
During my working on the musical production score which has been preventing me from focussing on MuseScore development for the last 9 months, another weakness in the Mixer GUI has emerged.
Simply, the current patch selector has Mouse-Wheel focus, which often results in the unintentional changing of patches whilst navigating through the parts of a large score.
It would be better I feel to simply have the patch selector respond to a Mouse Click, leaving the wheel for scrolling up and down the parts.
Does anyone have violent objections if I make this change during my work on improving patch selection?
I know a little more now about how to generate menus in Qt, so once this musical production is over at the beginning of October, I should have some space to write some code.
The plan is to make a context menu appear when the patch selection button is clicked which will list the GM standard instrument classifications. This will then have sub-menus off it which will list the patches available in that category in all banks.
The result will be less confusing for the user than the current long list of patches.
Comments
By "patch" do you mean the list of instrument sounds? If so, then I can confirm both that I do use the mouse wheel to navigate it, but that I too have been annoyed when it scrolls when I was trying to scroll the whole mixer dialog.
Perhaps the solution is to only allow scrolling *after* the user clicks and expands the list. (Maybe that was what you were planning?)
In reply to By "patch" do you mean the by shoogle
I've simply developed the habit of positioning the cursor over the scroll bar before scrolling, but I agree that it's a problem that should be fixed, and shoogle's suggestion sounds best of all.
In reply to By "patch" do you mean the by shoogle
I hope that actually scrolling won't be necessary, although some users with a lot of soundfonts loaded may need to scroll.
So yes - the popup patch list will be scrollable if necessary - I may have to revise the plan. It depends whether Qt automatically assigns wheel focus to menus or not.
In reply to I hope that actually by ChurchOrganist
If not, I can try to help I don't have a lot of expertise on this, but I did learn a thing or two while mentoring Andrei who did the most of the accessibility work last summer, and we can also ask him. These sort of interactions can be tricky to get right. But since I'm on the subject, let's be sure to keep keybaord control in mind too.
I can confirm I don't like how focus works here in this respect - too easy to change sounds when you just want to scroll. I fear that in practice, it may be more difficult to get it to feel "right" than one might first imagine, but maybe I'm wrong. Anyhow I agree the way it is now does not feel very right, so it's worth trying alternatives.