Cantabile Development Blog

A New User Interface for Cantabile

One of the things I'd like to address in the next version of Cantabile is its user interface. Although feedback suggests that most people like the simplicity of the current user interface, maintaining it is starting to prove difficult and Cantabile's feature set is starting to outgrow the current design.

To address this I've started on a new user interface library that will hopefully address the issues of maintainability, keep the existing simplicity and provide a fresh new look at the same time.

This library - unimaginatively called "SkinLib" - provides a set of user interface components and a loader module that can read heirarchial layouts from simple text files. It renders the entire user interface in a single Win32 window, performs all rendering in double buffered manner (to avoid screen flicker and improve performance) and will be "skinnable".

The following is a screen shot from the SkinLib test harness:

So far I've implemented a checkbox, toolbar button, label, expander panel, LED, level meter, generic panel, and slider control. I've also implemented a stacked and stretched layout manager to assist in the layout of controls on screen. To complete Cantabile's main screen I still need to implement the heading labels, scrollbars, menu bar, toolbar, onscreen keyboard, X-Y controller and a few other bits and pieces. The microscore will be left as I'll probably replace it with a more complete MIDI editor.

Another thing this new UI will address is the difficulty in controlling Cantabile by keyboard. At the moment the tab order doesn't work correctly and there are too many controls to assign a single character shortcut to each. To resolve this SkinLib will support a precisely definable tab order and a multi-character short-cut system, with optional popup screen tips to show available key combinations.

Posted on April 5, 2007

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