Enhancing QSynth/Rosegarden/SonicVisualizer knobs for CLAM
I am still expanding the widgets toolbox for CLAM.
PK Widgets, the ones in my previos blog entry, are really nice but they don’t integrate well with other widgets because the background and the fixed size. So you have to do a mostly PK interface or not. Most standard Qt widgets look nice with a nice theme such plastique, but for some reason QDial is the ugly duck of the collection… well, according Chris Cannam, also QLCD. I agree with him. QDial looks like old CDE style in every style you choose:
Besides the look, QDial behaviour is far from optimal. Clicking on any point jumps the pointer which is a bad thing if you want to progressively control a parameter. Also when you move the knob beyond one of the extremes you may switch sharply to the other extreme. Using such a mischievous control in a live performance could be a disaster. So let’s look for asthetic and behavioral alternatives.
Going back to the look, I just liked a lot the knobs in QSynth a program by Rui Nuno Capella.
The knobs indeed were taken from Rosegarden and Pedro Lopez Cabanillas enhanced the look by adding some nice but expensive gradients. The ones that attracted me.
I took those widgets with such a long trail and I extended them. I ported them to Qt4 using QGradients which are faster, and i did some visual improvements: shadows, bumped pointer, configurable colors, angular and linear modes of mouse handling… I added them to the CLAM Widgets plugin and added some configurability so you can change the colors from the designer. And that’s how they look now:
CLAM app's are go...
Very nice. I like them a lot!
CLAM app's are going to look much better now with all those new nice things. BTW, yesterday i read your work "Visual prototyping of audio applications" and i think it's a great idea. I played the demos too, very easy process.