New BetterTouchTool UI Progress

Magic Mouse looks too rectangular to me, just a heads up :slight_smile:

The magic mouse icon is still the old one :wink:

oh oops :smiley:

Question: will the HTML editor get the same nice pop-out treatment? :smiley:

Request: "Notes"

The "old" UI offers a column "Notes" for my triggers. I just saw that this column disappears in the new UI, and leaves us only with "Trigger Name", "Assigned Action(s)" and its configuration.

VS
This column "Notes" is highly useful to mark what main action is associated to that trigger/activates it. You see I have a lot of them, and you get lost easily, forget on which TouchBar Button you use it etc. It also allows me to "name" easier what a trigger does especially when it runs an apple script.

I would love it if this column could find it's way to the new UI!!

Going one step beyond it would be cool to extend that function to all actions (TouchBar, Magic Mouse,…). I often forget where I added triggers for a long press for TouchBar buttons. That drives me crazy, and I'd love to be able to display the long press triggers in a fourth column (or in a third line for the new standard UI, as an extra line below "Action:").


Puppy eyes
Pliiiiiiiz'
:slightly_smiling_face:

Icons: Here come the Mice


Before:

Ahaha I guess the normal mouse is a bit too beige but for now it'll do :stuck_out_tongue: . I've got some other things to do and they took ages to shape and shade right!

Edit: You can easily tune the beige-ness of the normal mouse through adjusting the saturation in preview. Turning it all the way down looked pretty good to me

New BTT Mice Icons.zip (7.1 KB)

Next I'll probably refine the drawings and TouchBar icons (and maybe some others).

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@GoldenChaos the webview (and all other actions) settings will soon be integrated into the side-bar and they'll also get a popout for the editor part. Will however not be available in the first public release.

@Caliguvara the notes column has already been added, it will be available with the next alpha later today

@yuuiko awesome! I'll add them today.

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Suggestion for Settings Window:

Auto-open the device settings when the gear icon is pressed
e.g. if TouchBar is active, the window will open with touchbar settings.

It has dark mode hot switching issues
Doesn't switch completly if dark mode is activated/deactivated if the settings window is open

Add a title/header to the right view
@GoldenChaos got it right :+1:

Or you could beef up the window top bezel like System Preferences too.

I see a few ancient images and icons in there, maybe sometime i'll revitalise them

Will the Notes column be optional? (Select via right click on column headers, like in Finder or iTunes.) If not, please consider making it so. :slight_smile:

I agree, this would be tremendously useful. I'd even go further and separate the named triggers from the "Others" tab (or dropdown in the new UI) into a separate category, and then wherever there is a selection box for an action, present all named triggers in the same list as the pre-defined ones, under a new heading "Named Triggers". Then named triggers would simply be handled like any other action. This would also solve the strange problem that in the Touch Bar section, you cannot assign a default action to a long press unless you first create a custom (named) trigger that does nothing else than trigger the default action.

(I also never understood why named triggers are called that and not "custom actions" – they don't define trigger conditions but actions, and what distinguishes them from pre-defined/shipped actions is not that they're named, but that they're custom... ;-))

In any case, this would probably be a significant piece of restructuring of BTT's UI logic, but I think the new UI would be the ideal opportunity to implement it. And to be honest, the current logic seems more like something tacked onto the existing BTT structure rather than a proper integration. :slight_smile:

I'd absolutely love it if that could be implemented, and I think it would also make this feature much more accessible to new or less technically inclined users.

What do you think of this guys @Caliguvara @Shnub ?

(been tryin to get this in since the beginning :P )

I'm not current on the various iterations of the new UI, but speaking just from that mockup: in principle, that seems good to me – simply two ways of pressing a Touch Bar button. In column view, it would be another column after the default actions.

Two things though:

  1. The named trigger selection should really be a list (at least as an option; @Andreas_Hegenberg already agreed on that much here :stuck_out_tongue:).
  2. As I said, I really don't see why the long press should be limited to custom/named triggers/actions (:upside_down_face:). That should be exactly the same UI as for the short press/tap, with all predefined actions available and named triggers as just one option among them (ideally all integrated into the same list so that you wouldn't have to open any submenus for the selection of named triggers). Chained actions should be available as well.

(By the way, making the UI identical for predefined and named triggers also would make it much easier to define complex chained actions in the named triggers section and then use them like any predefined action, at any place in the app, wherever an action can be selected. Tidier too.)

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There will definitely be a (optional) list selection for named triggers. Other functionality related to them might come in the future when breaking compatibility with the old UI is not a big issue anymore, but is very low priority right now.

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Sorry for not many updates the last few days. I'm currently fixing many little bugs & crashes and am adding German translation (and looking for a good company to translate to other languages, probably it'll be https://www.oneskyapp.com/ because that allows BTT users to improve translations if the paid translators didn't get something right). New alpha should be available sometime tomorrow.

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(late comment here)

@Shnub
Yes, that was what I did in the original mockup, but @Andreas_Hegenberg said that this would require a significant change to the data model and is hard to implement. (very understandable) This is why you can see a β€œ+ Soon” faded button below it as I adapted the design to accomodate the current limitations!

I see, I wasn't aware of that. Yes, completely understandable to not tackle that while getting a clean-slate UI rewrite done.

That said, I hope this will stay on the to-do list for later times! I too think there's a lot to be gained here.

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Uhhh finally finished the localizability "project" to make the new UI adapt correctly to different sized strings and translated more than 13000 strings to German. Already ordered translations for Japanese, Chinese, French and Spanish that should be delivered in a few days. If that works well I'll order more languages - feel free to post requests in this thread: Request other translations here

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@Andreas_Hegenberg

IINA has a pretty neat settings setup. Maybe take a few ideas from it?
(though this is all cosmetic and not high priority of course.)


jup for now it was just important to migrate the old settings to the new format. Making it look nice and adding features like search will come over time!

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I can't figure out how to upgrade to the new UI. My version of BTT is 2.756.

I'm sure I'm missing something simple.

Many thanks!

@yuuiko just added (kind of) your triangles and "speech bubble" actions :smiley:
The indicator triangle is really helpful (although it was hell to hack a table view to do this, your exact design would require even more hacks, so that's it for now).


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