[ptx] thoughts for hugin UI, post 0.5

[Rob Park]

Hi Tijmen ;)

On 5/26/05, Tijmen <mailinglists at mail.iivq.net> wrote:
> I think it's a great improvement to move the "stitch now" button to below.
> Form-like windows are allways filled in top to bottom, so it's weird to have
> the "finish" button on top again.

I completely agree, and so does the HIG. This when I finished the new6
design, it struck me that it looked almost exactly like a preferences
dialogue from Nautilus, similar to this:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/images/layout2.png

(kind of an ugly screenshot but it's the closest I could find without
putting a lot of effort into the search).

Here is the HIG if anybody is interested:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/

What I'm really, really starving for is some example code of a
HIG-compliant GUI... I read through the whole HIG and it talks about a
lot of stuff, but one thing I'm not clear on is how to accomplish a
few of the recommendations.

> I myself am a great fan of the more vertical layout of new6, but you have to
> see it in context. I think most people use hugin as fullscreen, and heving a
> vertical layout in mostly oblong pane, gives you either very much unused
> space, or a very noisy ui if the elements were to float free to the edges
> (think gridbag).

Yeah, the way I'll design it, none of the widgets will stretch to be
longer than they need to be. I tried that at first, they all stretched
out to the full width and it was very ugly. So instead we'll just have
to deal with some wasted space on the right side. It's not a bad
thing, certainly an improvement over the jumble of widgets that's
currently there.

> What my experience with hugin is that it has a lot of very advanced functions
> of which I don't have a clue what they do.

That's understandable, making panoramas is a fiddly thing and there's
lots of parameters that can be changed to produce different results.
You wouldn't complain that an airplane cockpit has too many knobs and
dials, because flying is complicated ;)

> So maybe the "stitch" screen could be split in two vertical panes, the left
> one with your new5 layout, the right one with an interactive help which would
> explain the differences between the different projections (withing 3 lines,
> that is), the size and stuff..

Well, I don't like that. What we really need is more and better
tutorials and documentation. No need to clutter the UI with it.

> Another thing what I would really like (but maybe this is because I don't
> understand hugin) is to have a "precrop" function as there's usually a huge
> black part in my images as I don't get the "cross" in the preview centered.
> You should be able to more easily
> -either manipulate the center of the cross (the one you see in the preview)

To do this you'll want to hit the "Center" and "Fit" buttons on the
preview pane, that should do exactly what you want, but there are a
few bugs with it that I'm aware of:

 - if the panorama is more than 180 degrees (i think), it stops working
 - the horizon of the panorama is *always* mapped to be exactly on
that center line in the preview pane, so even if you use the
center/fit buttons, if your panorama's horizon is near the bottom of
the pano, then you'll end up with a big empty space at the bottom of
the panorama (eg, the horizon will be the middle of the output always,
so if the horizon is near the bottom of the photos, then the top half
of the output will be your pano, and the bottom half will be a blank
space, because the horizon is in the center). I hope that makes sense.

> -set up a "crop" of the region that you want to have, so you can cut out the
> black parts, saving disk space and post-processing load times.

Not a bad idea, but I don't think it's too difficult to crop that
empty space out in photoshop or gimp afterwards (gimp even has
"autocrop" that will crop it exactly for you), but you have to be
using TIFF output, so that the "black" parts come out as transparency
instead of blackness.

> P.S. Sorry rob, this was meant to go to the list.

Good to see you've signed up for the list ;)

-- 
Urban Artography
http://artography.ath.cx