Skined buttons should give a better visual feedback

[Daniel Schürmann]

This is a snippet from Deere Skin:

<State>
 <Number>0</Number>
 <Pressed>btn_hotcue1_1_over.png</Pressed>
 <Unpressed>btn_hotcue1_1.png</Unpressed>
</State>
<State>
 <Number>1</Number>
 <Pressed>btn_hotcue1_1.png</Pressed>
 <Unpressed>btn_hotcue1_1_over.png</Unpressed>
</State>

State 0 is displayed when hotcue is not active (gray); State 1 in active State (red)
When mouse button is pressed the image is toggled. So while using the mouse, the user has no explicit feedback about the state of the hotcue itself.

Solution proposal:
We should provide two alternative images for active-pressed an inactive-pressed state.

I have played around with Gimp and have made some images slightly darker for the pressed state. This leads to a significant better user experience.

Questions:
It is worth to solve this issue for all skins?
It is a good Idea just making the buttons darker for the pressed state?
Should we provide a programmatic way to do this like reading a gamma value from Skin?

@jus: What do you think?

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

In lp:~daschuer/mixxx/daschuers_trunk I have a set-up for testing this issue with Deere1280x1024-SXGA.

You may test it on the first deck with beatloop 1 and 2, hotcue 1 and 2, Cue, play and reverse.

Compiled packages can be found here:
http://builds.mixxx.org/builds/experimental-daschuers_trunk/

Note: the push-button is patched with Bug #906310

[jus (jus)]

I agree we should change the appearance of the buttons in response to a mouse event in a consistant way.

So with a little planning which buttons to change ( we have some simple two-state buttons and some 4-state buttons) this should be fairly easy to do. I would go the route of updating the skins graphics, this would be the easiest way with the existing code. Automatically changing buttons gamma values sounds interesting too, but i cant say how that would interfere with Mixxx color scheme architecture that some skins make use of (Outline)

Targeted to 1.10.1 since it is basically a bug fix.

[jus (jus)]

lp:~jus/mixxx/skin-button-feedback has now an updated Deere1280x800-WXGA skin against current lp:mixxx/1.11 with added 3rd and 4th button state graphics. Buttons should now give a better visual feedback about the actual buton state. All buttons are covered except the mini toggle buttons in the grid next to the waveform overview.
Please test. Thanks.

[Daniel Schürmann (daschuer)]

Thank you Jus!
Looks and works really good.
Testet lp:~jus/mixxx/skin-button-feedback # 3431.

(While testing I am come over Bug Bug #1007950 "visual feedback for CUE Button like CDJ", but that's a different story. )

[Swiftb0y (swiftb0y)]

Mixxx now uses GitHub for bug tracking. This bug has been migrated to:
https://github.com/mixxxdj/mixxx/issues/6200