jb, 24y

I know I haven't posted a lot of things lately on this very blog.

I know that the image will not fit correctly the screen, especially if you use an old browser (meaning IE6)

But still:

Ergonomics

Working on VLC media player interface, I found that clicking on menus and buttons was really un-natural. Lots of people have already said that, of course.

That is why I gave a look at VLC media player Mouse Gestures.

Mouse Gestures

Most of the important code was already written by Dnumgis, but not the functional part. There was four gestures and I re-mapped them to have new actions.

Number of actions:

To ease the use of those gestures, I had decided to use only one-movements and two-movements actions, since three-movements are difficult for some people. And I decided to remove all double-movement (left-left, right-right, etc..) for the same timing reason.

So I had space for 4 x 5 - 4 = 16 actions.

New mapping:

You will find the new bindings on our wiki.

Qt4 Interface

I am going to speak a bit of the new Qt-based interface and the FUD I have seen around this future interface.

A new UI should be shipped with VLC media player version 0.9.0.

• First, it will be shipped in parallel to the wxWidgets Interface
• Then, it will replace totally the wx Interface.

Why ?

This is the most asked question... There are a few answers:

• We had a lot of problems with right-to-left languages,
• We had a lot of problems with Unicode and Wide-Characters support,
• We lacked a few features,
• We needed to enhance this UI, and the main coder left,
• To test something new.

So, as we couldn't stay with wx, we had basically two choices Multi-OS:

• Qt
• GTK

The choice has been what the motivated coder had choose (zorglub), and also because Qt4 provides a shorter code and a bit easier to read. Zorglub wanted to test it, so let's go.

FUD

Qt is evil! Qt is not Open Source

Come on, this troll is not true anymore, and it has been said over and over, pfff. I know that good trolls are getting rarer (especially because of SUN... :D)

Why are you moving to KDE ? VLC is going to use all my RAM !

OMG! This is because a lot of people don't do the differences between KDE and KApplications and Qt and QApplications.

VLC will be using QT libraries not KDE libraries, so not to worry about it.

People using KDE4, will inherit the KDE presentation, and other people will have the cleanlook style, which is very gtk...

I am going to fork VLC

Pfff, I don't believe you. And you don't have to, because VLC is a very modular program, and you can use it without a GUI.

But, if you feel the time to improve the old wx interface or code a GTK-based interface, please do so, and submit the patches that we will integrate in the trunk, so you will have only to provide new compilations with the enable-gtk or enable-wx. VLC is open source and we welcome all the efforts toward us.

Just a thought about linux desktop and Wars.

I have been so bored about the FUD and the Wars between KDE and Gnome and the graphical libraries...

I have also been so bored of seeing two time the same development one based on KDE libs, the other one on Gnome libs, when it could juste be based on Qt libs and GTK libs. A lot of things should be standardized and should not rely on the desktop manager...

About look and feel integration, when you use GTK software under KDE, you use the 'gtk2qt' GTK+ engines that makes the default Qt draw your application.

But, under gnome, you don't have a 'qt2gtk' Qt engine that would let the defaut GTK+ engine draw the application ! Why ?

When Qt4 interface will be shipped ?

When it will be ready :D