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

[Isaac Richards]

On Friday 07 April 2006 12:38, Steven Adeff wrote:
> On 4/7/06, Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu> wrote:
> > On Friday 07 April 2006 11:06, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > > that gets me every time as well. Aren't those input box arrows from
> > > the QT theme? I always attributed that to their "improper" direction.
> >
> > Yup.  Can't really change em without doing a new Qt theme.
>
> I'd suggest development of a MythTV QT theme, but that really comes
> down to what Theme  your using... Will the new UI still be using this,
> or will it be possible to allow theme designers to include these in
> their overall theme design without having to create a QT theme?

Once complete, there won't be any of the normal Qt widgets in use.  So, 
shouldn't have to bother with a Qt theme.

> > > I'd love to know how the new mfe is coming along, mostly to see if we
> > > can solve these UI issues before it gets to it, and if its still a
> > > long ways away, maybe its worth taking the time to rework the current
> > > frontend UI?
> >
> > Settings will be using custom widgets (very likely similar to the
> > existing recording settings look) when I get to redoing the settings bits
> > for the new ui.  I need to get the new parser code and a bunch of other
> > things done first, though.
>
> pardon my ignorance, but what will move moving to widgets gain MythTV
> and by new UI I assume you mean the new mfe and not the opengl stuff
> you've been working on?

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.

Isaac