so maybe off topic, but would anyone be willing to...

# tornadofx

[Spike Baylor]

so maybe off topic, but would anyone be willing to take a look at one of my screens and give some general UI advice?

[Spike Baylor]

@amanda.hinchman-dominguez So mainly looking at the main area where the recording stuff is. The obvious things will be to stretch out the textfield that shows the filename, and center the summary. But is there anything else that could make this work better. Its one of those strangely simple things that also has a lot of space so probably overthinking.

[Spike Baylor]

the file summary stuff all updates correctly and all that.. probably not the best screenshot to show that, but that is less of my concern here.

[Spike Baylor]

@amanda.hinchman-dominguez pinging you again here.. edited you in the first time and not sure of slack handles that or not, sorry if you get it twice

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

I would indent the non-bolded text

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

looks good otherwise. My general idea of UI is if I feel like I'm taking longer than a second to process information, there's either too much info or it needs to be formatted different. In this case, you don't need to do too much here, it looks p good for the most part

[Spike Baylor]

ok thanks. yeah as i said its one of those screens that is fairly straight forward, which always leads me to overthinking

[carlw]

Definitely make the filename grow. You have a lot of horizontal space and you shouldn't have to poke around with the cursor in a textfield to view the name.

[Spike Baylor]

Yeah whats here so far was just stick it up there and get the data flowing. The filename was the most obvious thing to fix after that, and centering the summary stuff. Its in a 100% working point now.

[Spike Baylor]

Just thinking of ways to "spice up" a simple set of components without needlessly complicating it. But really i think its probably fine with thosw adjustments

[Spike Baylor]

Also its just a toy lol. I doubt this will ever be used by anyone but me. All of this is just an exercise in kotlin, tornadofx, and design which is why im curious.

[Spike Baylor]

went with this, just to update 🙂 Now to work on the playback screen!

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

Looks better! I would also indent the text that is not bold. It also seems like there's a lot of unnecessary space around. Are you in need of the large screen size for the search results

[Spike Baylor]

I can look into indenting the text. This is how the form > fieldset > field looks by default.

I dont need all this space i just have this app working like a single view app. So you'll see the hamburger on the top left. That pops out a sidebar menu. Selecting a menuitem swaps out the main view

This one just happens to need the least amount of screen real estate

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

oh it's editable?

[Spike Baylor]

So this view. The top blue part is always there. It sets up multicast group and port to listen to. the main view allows the use to choose a file to record that data to. thats really all this view is for. There are other views that would see more time from the user.

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

It might make more sense to have that sort of thing as a modal

[amanda.hinchman-dominguez]

especially if you're able to multitask. I don't like to use whole pages that only has 2 buttons if that makes sense

[Spike Baylor]

Yeah normally i definitely would. The other views will fill more space and i wanted to play around with that sort of single view app, kinda like a mobile app.

I mentioned before this is mostly a toy to learn some kotlin/tornadofx and also get some ideas, domain models and services that i could reuse in something more useful.