[mythtv] New UI code. (was: blah blah up/down arrows blah blah)

[Isaac Richards]

On Friday 07 April 2006 13:20, Steven Adeff wrote:
> On 4/7/06, Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu> wrote:
> > A widget's just a ui element - it's already using Qt widgets to draw the
> > settings UI.  When I refer to the 'new ui', I mean the code in libmythui
> > - the opengl stuff is a small part of that.  The new menu code is live
> > proof of concept code for libmythui (though that's not completely done
> > yet, either).
> >
> > The existing UI's underlying code is rather messy (libmyth/ui*, xmlparse,
> > mythwidgets, mythdialogs) , having grown from a lot of different people.
> > It's gotten pretty crufty at this point.  =)  It does Bad Things with
> > Qt's event loop and is pretty complex + hard to follow in places.
> >
> > New stuff tries to fix all that.  Consistant design, simpler API.
> >
> > I actually got rather lucky when I figured out how to mix the old & new
> > UI code. =)  I was anticipating a long painful drawn-out rewrite with all
> > development in a branch since I thought I couldn't mix'n'match old and
> > new, but that ended up pretty well.  I figure stuff will happen over the
> > course of a few releases, now, since things can be reworked in smaller
> > chunks.
>
> ok, I think I understand...
> Will this new design allow for themes to have more control over
> placement of UI elements (buttons, images, layer, etc)?

Well, the existing theme stuff allows you to rearrange things fairly flexibly.  
Most of the themes end up just copying the default, though.  I'm still 
working out the new theme format, but I'm trying to make it much simpler to 
do theme modification (at least from the XML side of things, I still won't be 
able to do graphics).  More inheritance of previously defined elements, etc, 
so the UI's more consistant across plugins, too.

> Will we finally be able to play music and view a slide show at the same
> time? =D

That's completely separate. =)  I still maintain that it wouldn't be very hard 
to background the existing music player and return to it if someone wanted to 
do the work.  It's just not something I want to spend time on.

Isaac