Hydranode Developer's Diary - Developer's Daily Diary: Console UI cleanup

Alo Sarv
lead developer

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Developer's Diary

irc.hydranode.com/#hydranode

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Console UI cleanup

As you can see, the UI of the console got cleaned up; the search-bar is completely optional, and is disabled by default. The three buttons at the bottom-right should be intuitive (if not from screenshot, they should be once you'v clicked them once) - representing three most-used operations - Search, Download and Incoming. Since this is a Console, everything is ofcourse keyboard-controllable - some hotkeys are already in place, others are being added.

On other news, did some testing and improving on darwin port, it now compiles, but most likely won't run yet - need some more hacking around the build system.

Madcat, ZzZz

posted by Madcat # 1:30 PM

Comments:

Looks cool, but I would prefer it, if S, D and I would be replaced with icons.

# posted by Anonymous : 9:20 PM

I agree with anonymous, Icons would make your program much more intuitive especially to windows users as it reminds them of the toolbar control ( a very flexible and widely used control, infact both the tasklist on the taskbar and the notification tray with the little icons are toolbar controls.)

# posted by Anonymous : 6:43 AM

Keep in mind, this application you see there is NOT the standard GUI. It is a console application, meant to be as slim and small as possible. The real gui, with all the nice icons and colors is still being developed. This console is simply for testing the core/gui comm protocol and could technically be used to control the core in full. Its purpose is simply to have a way to control the core, without the use of a gui.

# posted by Anonymous : 1:52 PM

Icons - yes, sooner or later we'll add them.

It is true that the Console isn't a "standard GUI", but this shouldn't stop us from making it nice. Basically, I'm trying to evolve it into a light-weight flexible GUI, oriented at developers and power-users, to have a better development/testing platform for the former, and to give more control to the power-hungry power-users, which they would probably miss in the "standard GUI".

In any case, the Console isn't only a console - it's a GUI application, which means GUI design rules apply, and icons will need to be added; lists will be moved to proper ListControl widgets (displaying lists in shell is pointless).

All in all, with this amount of flexibility this thing is going to have, one must be very careful for not to clutter up the interface, and this is what these last two screenshots are directed at - minimum amount of controls enabled by default, the rest can be enabled via commands and/or keyboard shortcuts as needed.

Madcat.

# posted by Madcat : 2:45 PM

PS: The S, D and I buttons are QToolButton controls btw - so there's your toolbar stuff :P

# posted by Madcat : 2:49 PM

wow 35 year old software (Hn 0.11 built 1970...)

# posted by Anonymous : 10:52 AM

as long as a real telnet style interface is in the todo/ticket system i see no problem with it

# posted by Anonymous : 10:37 AM

What do you mean by "real telnet-style interface" ? It exists already - it's called Hydranode Shell (cmod_hnsh core module).

Madcat.

# posted by Madcat : 6:10 PM