Luca Danieli. SuperCollider s improvement of the Document Management system and development of the IDE to support multiple windows.

Transcription

1 Luca Danieli SuperCollider s improvement of the Document Management system and development of the IDE to support multiple windows.

2 Languages involved SuperCollider; C++; Qt.

3 Project initial observations 3 problems: 1) it is major rework; 2) the new code must undergo an open-review by volunteering co-developers on GitHub; 3) the submission of major reworks always involve a long review process, and this becomes sometimes a deterrent.

4 Strategy two separate but correlated phases, submitting two independent (smaller) pull requests for approval. Phase 1: improvement of the Document Management system; Phase 2: development of the IDE in order to support multiple windows and improve the user experience.

5 Phase 1: The Document Management 2 sub-projects: a) creation of an additional drop-down menu to improve the identification of documents opened in a large number of editors; b) syncronization of the Documents Docklet with the tab system already implemented.

6 Phase 1: the original document system

7 Phase 1 (a): the drop-down menu In the original IDE, the tabbar in the top was shared by all the open editors splitting the main window. At any moment, only the tab associated with the document opened in the editor currently focused would be highlighted. The result prevented users from having a clear knowledge about the documents currently opened in multiple editors.

8 Phase 1 (a): solution Add new options to allow the user to arbitrarily replace the tab-view with a drop-down view.

9 Phase 1 (a): implementation. The QTabBar is a Window s Widget. The QComboBox (drop-down menu) is an Editor s widget. Both are active. Only one widget is visible at time, the other hidden.

10 Phase 1 (a): implementation

11 Phase 1 (a): result

12 Phase 1 (b): the Documents Docklet The new drop-down menu sorts documents in a fixed lexical order; Users might be willing to re-order the Documents Docklet. Sorting the documents within the Documents Docklet by last-opened wasn t useful. There is not real reason to have tabs and docklets to sort documents differently.

13 Phase 1 (b): solution It was chosen to synchronise the tabs and the docklet, in order to make the document management system clear to the user.

14 Phase 1 (b): solution

15 Phase 1 (b): tricky implementation Qt does not furnish the user with a QTabBar/QListWidget ad-hoc connection. The QlistWidget s and QTabBar s methods reorder items in different ways and provide different outputs. The implementation resolved into a complete re-listing of the items within the Documents Docklet, by use of QtSignals.

16 Phase 1 (b): tricky implementation

17 Phase 1: put the basis for Phase 2 The implementation of the new Documents Management system has introduced a ParentChild structure.

18 Phase 2: multiple Windows 4 stages: a) create a new class SubWindow and relative shortcuts; b) create a new QListWidget for each SubWindow; c) add a popup-menu to switch among windows; d) rework the Session manager to save and reopen the windows at later moments.

19 Phase 2 (a): a new SubWindow The creation of a new QWidget SubWindow involved the re-modelling of internal widgets: the ownership of the toolbox has moved from the MainWindow to the MultiEditor class, so to be automatically built in every window.

20 Phase 2 (a): a new SubWindow

21 Phase 2 (b): a QListWidget for each window The MainWindow s Documents Docklet already implemented has 3 modes: attached, detached and undocked. Duscussing the design with Dr Scott Wilson, we observed that is a Docklet was attached and visible, it would make sense to duplicate the layout on new windows. When undocked, the Documents Docklet should be shared by all windows, showing the status of the current editor in use.

22 Phase 2 (b): a QlistWidget for each window

23 Phase 2 (b): a QListWidget for each window

24 Phase 2 (b): implementation

25 Phase 2 (b): implementation Dynamic re-connection:

26 Phase 2 (c): the popup-menu To switch among windows, there was need of creating a new shortcut to open a menu listing all the windows currently opened.

27 Phase 2 (c): the popup-menu This was obtained by creating History of used windows...

28 Phase 2 (c): the popup-menu and a new class that could retrieve a window from the History.

29 Phase 2 (c): the popup-menu

30 Phase 2 (d): saving the configuration Users could previously open multiple editors within the MainWindow and save their environment to be reopened at later times. Now, every window can host several editors. There is need to save the state of each window, as users could be interested to create different ways to visualize diverse projects.

31 Phase 2 (d): saving windows As the system was providing a method to easily save all editors within a window, the method has only been used on a wider context, saving the state of each window through a foreach function. As this is a new feature and sessions might be opened on different versions of SuperCollider, there was need to ensure compatibility with previous releases through an if statement.

32 Phase 2 (d): saving window states

33 Phase 2 (d): opening windows and reopen the windows accordingly to the version used.