Skip to main content

Sometimes, older is better...

When I first started Quelea, I wanted to use it as a kind of testing ground for features and ideas that hadn't already been incorporated into church presentation software. Both in terms of the UI, features and functionality. A lot of these features have worked really well - the ability to import from survivor songbooks for instance, and the instant search that's further improved in the next release.

On the UI side of things I tried to have a go with the ribbon - it's still got a love/hate relationship with people, but I wondered if it could do any good in Quelea. So I had a go, implemented it and left it as such for a few releases.

Thing is, it just didn't work - and I think this was a 50:50 split between it not being suitable for Quelea and the flamingo implementation.

On the suitable for Quelea side:
  • For something that's often run on laptops with small screens, it took up a huge amount of space it didn't need to.
  • There weren't enough controls to make it viable. It works (ish) for office because it replaced a hugely complex menu system, but Quelea just doesn't have that complex menu system, and it won't for the foreseeable future. So it really just acted like a huge toolbar.
And on the flamingo side:
  • It was pretty unmaintained, which doesn't exactly add to my confidence.
  • It only integrated well with the substance look and feel, which users might not want to use.
  • It only integrated at all well with Windows, and Quelea is targetted at cross platform use.
  • It looked - well, odd. Most bits are there, but odd bits like the tight integration with the Window aren't, and that just makes it feel like something's not quite there with it. Combine this with the first point and it isn't going away any time soon either.
Perhaps there are some things I could've chosen to make it look better - like designing the UI in SWT rather than Swing (which has a much nicer looking ribbon.) But I've now replaced the ribbon with a standard set of toolbars and menus, and personally I think this looks much nicer. We'll see how it pans out in practice, but sometimes the older, traditional way is definitely the better one!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The comprehensive (and free) DVD / Blu-ray ripping Guide!

Note: If you've read this guide already (or when you've read it) then going through all of it each time you want to rip something can be a bit of a pain, especially when you just need your memory jogging on one particular section. Because of that, I've put together a quick "cheat sheet" here  which acts as a handy reference just to jog your memory on each key step. I've seen a few guides around on ripping DVDs, but fewer for Blu-rays, and many miss what I believe are important steps (such as ensuring the correct foreign language subtitles are preserved!) While ripping your entire DVD collection would have seemed insane due to storage requirements even a few years ago, these days it can make perfect sense. This guide doesn't show you a one click approach that does all the work for you, it's much more of a manual process. But the benefits of putting a bit more effort in really do pay off - you get to use entirely free tools with no demo versions, it...
36 comments
Read more

Draggable and detachable tabs in JavaFX 2

JavaFX currently doesn't have the built in ability to change the order of tabs by dragging them, neither does it have the ability to detach tabs into separate windows (like a lot of browsers do these days.) There is a general issue for improving TabPanes filed here , so if you'd like to see this sort of behaviour added in the main JavaFX libraries then go ahead and cast your vote, it would be a very welcome addition! However, as nice as this would be in the future, it's not here at the moment and it looks highly unlikely it'll be here for Java 8 either. I've seen a few brief attempts at reordering tabs in JavaFX, but very few examples on dragging them and nothing to do with detaching / reattaching them from the pane. Given this, I've decided to create a reusable class that should hopefully be as easy as possible to integrate into existing applciations - it extends from Tab, and for the most part you create it and use it like a normal tab (you can just add it...
7 comments
Read more

Building windows installers in a Linux CI environment using wine and innosetup

Quelea is by far the "side project" that takes up the majority of my time. To aid with testing, I built in CI relatively early with a Jenkins server running on a custom VM. This was great - I could just push a change to the repo from anywhere, and then point the user to the CI release. They'd download it and be able to confirm whether the fix had worked (or not!) I've since switched to Travis and retired said VM (it's one less thing to maintain, and now everything is on Github.) But both these setups had one main issue - the windows installer wouldn't get built as part of this process, since they were Linux boxes and innosetup doesn't have a linux distribution. Travis has added windows support, but it's in early release, and in any case I'd like the entire build process to be able to run on any Linux box - it makes it both quicker and more transferrable if we ever need to move elsewhere. I therefore looked into using wine in the CI release to ...
Post a Comment
Read more