New BetterTouchTool UI Progress

Not on my side :-\

I just checked again...

Whatever I see has been fixed will be moved into the fixed dropdown and deleted from the main body. If you discuss against it this will happen also.

Edit: I see you needed an fn modifier icon!

44%20pm

fn-tiff.zip (7.3 KB)

Ah sorry, I only saw the collapsed one with the things you marked as fixed :slight_smile:

The other feedback is good but for now has relatively low priority. I'll keep it in the backlog though for future polishing. (In my experience releasing something is much more important than it being prefect in the first version :-D)

//edit added the FN icon! Now I'm working on the sidebar-undocking option, and if everything goes well tomorrow will be the first official preview release :slight_smile:

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@Andreas_Hegenberg

I think a 'popout editor' button for applescript editors is essential too before you do that!

I don't think that's necessary. The undockable side bar will be resizable so you can make it as big as you want :wink:

Hmm in my mind a well laid-out editor window would be better, but I guess we'll see how that goes.

Good work!

There most likely won't be any custom editor windows anymore even if they may be nicer in some cases :slight_smile: The main goal for me (besides having a more understandable UI) is to make it much lower maintenance. The side bar is great for that as it's all configured via some json like format and doesn't require any custom code. All these various custom windows the old UI had, caused me so much work and trouble (and prevented some new features).

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latest alpha adds undocking support to the sidebar :slight_smile:

Need to do some experiments on the layouting (currently I set a max width on elements that don't need bigger widths). It works pretty well but aligning this is hard :slight_smile:

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(psst... just having a popup editor would solve those issues in my mind, I wouldn’t be undocking that config panel anyway...)

Yes but no :smiley:
I think this already works pretty well and gives a lot of space for the apple script editor. A bit more aligning and reordering and I think this will be fine :slight_smile:

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Today the (developer side) flexibility of the new UI was battle tested :smiley:
In less than an hour I added basic (but almost complete) MIDI device support and it is working :open_mouth:

Starting tomorrow it will be possible to use midi devices to control your Mac (I only have this one for testing though: https://www.akaipro.com/lpd8-wireless )

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We're going to see people playing music to control their mac soon.

I'd greatly prefer a dedicated AppleScript editor window over the pop-out sidebar, since the only reason I'd pop it out is to have a larger text area. This pop-out sidebar method makes it impossible to resize the text area vertically and horizontally at the same time, which is a pain for usability and makes me not bother using it, especially since the sidebar can already be widened inside the window. Just my two cents.

Also, for what it's worth, BTT's built-in text editor is so bad that I often am forced to copy my larger scripts into something like Script Editor. The built-in editor doesn't support undo, which turns code writing into a special form of madness. However, given how absolutely essential script editing is/has become to BTT, I feels like it deserves a better text editor. The sidebar text field feels like a step backward. In fact, I'd be fine if AppleScripts had to be edited exclusively through a nicer pop-out editor, because then it would be something I could write code in and not just paste into.

tl;dr I agree with @yuuiko - ditch the pop-out sidebar, focus on a pop-out code editor instead and replace existing sidebar text fields with an "Edit Script" button or something similar.

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I know in the unity game engine they don't even edit scripts inside the engine editor. They have a completely seperate script editor app for it.

In the engine editor they display a summary of the code as grey, uneditable text for a preview, requiring you to open the external app to edit it. (you can also set that app to whatever editor you'd like too, which is cool)

As a little extra @Andreas_Hegenberg :

  • List view doesn't have the preset labels yet
  • Keyboard Shortcuts are missing the 'notes' feature
  • Black and white icons in the activation group column still blank out solid white
  • If you open more than one CAG editor, the first one freezes and becomes unclosable
  • for some reason, the device switcher got disabled. (I don't know how this happened)

    Edit: And so did everything else in the menu bar. I had to force quit BTT to get it back as ⌘Q didn't work...
  • You should rename the 'Move selected triggers to Preset' and instead use 'copy'

  • 'Docs', 'Usage', 'About' and 'News' are missing from the new UI.
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A truncated code preview in a box that can be clicked on anywhere to pop out the editor would be really cool and lend itself to nifty pop-out transition animations!

EDIT: I felt strongly enough about this to make a mockup of how it might appear on the sidebar.

the new ui should support undo in the editor :slight_smile: also with the undockable sidebar you absolutely can resize the editor in width and height! That's what the small circle below the editor is for. But I'll think about a super simple pop out version of the Apple Script editor, which would basically just be a big Apple Script window and not contain any of the other settings.

@yuuiko black and white icons must either be fully opaque, or at least contain one color pixel otherwise BTT can't infer whether it should be inverted or not (for dark mode)

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I think I have a good solution. I'll just make the current applescript side-bar item pop-out-able. This way I don't need to duplicate code and you still can have a apple script only editor:

In this screenshot it just shows the undocked & scrolled side-bar, but the apple script editor will basically look the same.

I love the ability to edit small scripts directly in the side-bar though - so I won't make it to always pop-out, only when clicking a popout button.

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Just to add, since I think you missed it:

The pop-out UI doesn’t allow you to resize the text field in both dimensions at the same time, like a TextEdit window would. You have to resize horizontally, then drag the vertical slider nub. That’s not how I (or most people) thinks about resizing text areas, so it’s an awkward UX. Resizing the window should change both dimensions of the text field, and the weird vertical slider nub should be eliminated - at least on the pop-out window since it could then be resized freely there.

Otherwise this is a better direction for sure :slight_smile:

Yup in a separate window it would definitely behave like that (in the side bar such resizing behavior doesn't make sense though).
However even in the side-bar it remembers the last used height.

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@Andreas_Hegenberg, @GoldenChaos

Corner grabber instead of a vertical nub.
If you extend the width of the field the width of the column expands accordingly.

I think that would be very confusing and I have never seen such an approach in a side-bar. Also it would probably be very ugly to implement as the sidebar width is managed by a macOS split view whereas the content is managed by the inner view controller :wink:

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