Dev:UI Reloaded

These are images of some re-designed Synfig dialog. None of these dialogs can be considered final. Some lack some final touch (e.g. incorrect spacing) All changes have been made to make Synfig a better experience for the user! :)

Changes to Existing Dialogs

The Waypoint Editor

The old dialog, as we all know it:

A preview for a revamped version:

The “TCB Parameter” section should probably be disabled when none of the interpolation type fields are set to “TCB”. Also, the separator still has to be removed and the button spacing and order is not yet correct.

Render Preview

Old:

Preview:

Another separator bar that still has to be removed. Also, I’m not sure whether disabling the edit fields for start and end time is the right way. I think that functionality should be replaced by simply entering the clip’s start and end time into the fields as default values.

New Dialogs

Note: These are only my (Bombe’s)) ideas of how things could be done! For most of these dialogs some partially serious coding has to be done so it’s quite unlikely there will be simple patches for these dialogs (unless I start to like C++ which is doubtful :).

Create New Clip

This dialog should appear when the user selects the File->New command (or uses the corresponding toolbar button). Note that creation of a new document can be cancelled by clicking the “Cancel” button (who’d have guessed that).

I’m still not sure about how to handle image aspect ratios or pixel aspect ratios in this dialog. But I am quite sure that I want separated editor and output settings and that I want both to have different aspect ratios, if needed (e.g. work on a clip in 1024x768, PAR 1:1, and for rendering use 720x576, PAR 1.42:1 to create bitmaps that can be used in DVD production without any further rescaling). Though, asking for output settings in the “Create New Clip” dialog might be misplaced, I admit that. :)

The edit fields for the work area and focus point are completely gone — on purpose. The FPS field is also gone (the Synfig of the future uses a notion of FPS only for preview, output, and the snap-keyframe-to-time feature) but the start and end fields should probably be in this dialog as well.

Scale

This dialog lets you scale the work area in the editor.

Width and height values are adjusted automatically, according to the current aspect ratio. “Current aspect ratio” means the aspect ratio for the editor if “Keep aspect ratio” is unchecked, or the aspect ratio given in the dialog if it is chcked.

Resize

The resize dialog changes the size of the working area without changing the size of the objects. Cropping is also possible with this dialog.

The horizontal and vertical offsets work just like the corresponding files in The GIMP’s resize function.

Comments & Remarks

All this thinking about pixels and resizing and aspect ratios made me wonder whether that is all necessary. As Synfig is resolution-independent the only thing needed for the working area is the aspect ratio. The working area will always be scaled from (0.0, 0.0) to (1.0, 1.0). Scaling/Resizing would then only affect the pixel location values in all layers. (Would that actually work? I have to think about that some more.)