Small glitch: menu items 'greyed out' by default in 1.3

[Nocturnal]

Hi Juan,

maybe this is due to the new Mac X look you're going for but I notice that when I restore the 1.3 window my menu items are greyed out until I mouse over them, then they appear black again. It all works fine so this is no big deal but it looks weird as it appears that the window doesn't have the focus when indeed it does.

As a general comment I must admit I don't care for the window animations etc. in 1.3. Maybe I'm an old sod still using XP but I'd choose functionality over fancy GUI effects any day. If you get these effects for 'free' with your widget set, great. If it takes coding time, well, I'll leave that up to you I hope you keep the windows version as much like native windows as possible. Please don't migrate Mac-isms to Windows if it can be avoided. If I want to use a Mac I'd buy one

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Sander,

No, this problem has nothing to do with the Mac OS X port. I also have noticed it, and I regret to say that it also happens in 1.4. The problem seems to be in Qt 4.4.3. Sorry, I decided to release 1.4 without fixing this issue because as you say everything works, and working on these "little" things is time-consuming (version 1.4 urged due to a number of reasons...)

If you get these effects for 'free' with your widget set, great. If it takes coding time, well, I'll leave that up to you

No, PI's workspace animations are 100% genuine PTeam code 8)  It indeed takes some effort to write these things, and  probably you'd be surprised by the amount of advanced techniques required to make them work efficiently (although I still have to improve some animations). For example, fading animations are implemented by delicate multithreaded techniques. You can check it easily: open an auto-hide window, the Process Explorer for example, then click on an image's title bar and start dragging it. The auto-hide window will fade out by decreasing transparency, but the GUI will be 100% responsive to your dragging, since no mouse events will be lost (and on three platforms!)

Well, I have considered these fancy things a waste of time during years, too. But, when one starts working seriously (professionally) in GUI programming and reaches some level, one tends to change one's mind. The GUI is really *very* important, and improving things aesthetically is no waste of time at all. For example, I am sure you'll get accustomed to fading transitions between maximized/normalized window states, then you'll hate disabling workspace animations; let me know if this isn't true

Please don't migrate Mac-isms to Windows if it can be avoided. If I want to use a Mac I'd buy one

Now I have Mac users saying PixInsight's interface is too spartan, and Windows users saying it's too nice. Oh well ... at least I have Linux users ... :lol:

[Nocturnal]

Hi Juan,

I guess I'm showing my age (41). I really really don't care about these animations. Maybe if I used Vista which supposedly does more stuff like that I'd be used to them but XP is pretty dull when it comes to that kind of stuff and it's fine by me. They're your priorities and all I can do is be at least one voice that says "features over animations".

I've unchecked all GUI checkboxes in the preferences but things are still animated. Do I need to restart PI for this to take effect?

[David Serrano]

I guess I'm showing my age (41). I really really don't care about these animations.

Don't worry, some people in their early 30s think like that too :twisted:.

[Nocturnal]

:lol:

[Juan Conejero]

Well I win you both, since I'm 44 8)

Come on gentlemen, don't be so old-fashioned. Give the animations a chance and you'll see how you'll LOVE them. You know, resistence is futile :lol:

[David Serrano]

Unix as a whole has a philosophy ("Write programs that do one thing and do it well"), but some programs decided to follow another well known law: Zawinski's law. "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail". Following the visible trend, maybe PixInsight will read mail and automatically extract images and process icons found as attachments!

Now seriously, compiz fusion provides me with the eye-candy I ask it to. Note that compiz is able to animate the menus of all applications, since they (the menus) are like regular windows to the underlying mechanism (X11), but PixInsight's menus don't get these animations; I guess that's due to portability reasons. I don't care anyway, since I've disabled all fanciness for the menus.

Should I use an eyecandy-based OS :twisted:, I would probably leave that settings enabled.