Hotkeys

[Rich Walsh]

Doing a bit of fiddling in 4.1.2 and noticed:

1. “M” is not precluded by the “Warning: Hotkey used by workspace.” (or in the Key Map preferences)
2. “O” is not listed on http://figure53.com/docs/qlab/v4/general/keyboard-shortcuts/

Rich

[Rich Walsh]

Found a few more niggles now (some trivial):

1. It may have been a one-off, but clicking “Done” in the Audio Patch editor reset my preferences window to the General pane, instead of returning me to where I was. I had two workspaces open at the same time (it affected both) and had entered the editor via “Edit…” on the Audio Levels tab of the Audio Cue Templates…
2. When editing Audio Patch > Device Routing, if you merrily type away expecting the window to scroll as you arrow down, it doesn’t. What’s more, anything you entered while the cursor was offscreen isn’t, erm, entered.
3. New cuelists don’t respect the "Enable auto-load for new cues” preference. I’m not sure if it matters, but it might if you ever convert a cuelist back to a group.
4. Although you can now enter notes for cuelists they don’t appear in the HUD (?), which makes them almost useless? Should they appear there when you have a cuelist selected but no cue loaded maybe? Perhaps they’re an edit mode / Inspector only note to the programmer not the operator?
5. I created an exciting display glitch when dragging multiple cues from one workspace to another – see attached. It wouldn’t go away until I reopened the workspace.
6. It doesn’t feel quite right to me that the carts don’t scale to fill the available width, particularly when you open and close the Toolbox and right-hand panelly thing. I’d be comfortable with the text and buttons shrinking when I resized a window – more so than having to scroll to find a button. Have I missed something?
7. Similarly, the right-hand panelly thing has a natural width that it detentes to but it doesn’t maintain that when you zoom a window out, which is mildly irksome.
8. Carts are a bit weird with arrow selecting: you can move to the next button with an arrow (eg: right) once, but not again.
9. Undo in the notes field doesn’t undo what you just typed, but the last change you made before entering the notes field…
10. When dropping a bunch of audio into the workspace the Progress bar doesn’t progress at all for a few seconds and then whizzes across at the end. Could you tweak the logic so you know it is making progress? I didn’t even see it – black on black – the first few times.
11. (I confused myself a great deal with OSC durations by having a cue to increase duration by 1s act on itself once and then appear to increase duration by a random amount, ie: by how many times the command could be processed in 1s!)
12. OSC macros for bumping level are more sluggish than in v3 – and more importantly, if you fire the macro again while it is running in the background – for which there is no UI update – it is ignored, not buffered. So if you fire it 5 times in quick succession it may only act 3 times, which is particularly irritating given that you can’t see the levels when you have multiple cues selected. I miss the old version where you could see the levels of the last selected cue, but I guess the UI’s tricky here with partial batch-editing available.
13. I personally hate it when a key command of say shift-1 is shown as ! – which the carts do – as when I’m looking at a keyboard shortcut I just want to know quickly what keys to press. alt-5 is shown as ⌥5, but consistently it should be ∞, shouldn’t it (and who knows that keyboard combination?).
14. Shouldn't it be impossible to set a negative post wait that is longer than the action of a cue?
15. ⌘, opens Workspace Settings but doesn’t close it – it just toggles away and leaves it open in the background. That feels weird to me.

Thanks.

Rich

[Rich Walsh]

And a few more:

1. Cue Carts throw an AppleScript error if you attempt to get their mode
2. If you unfold a Cue Cart in the right-hand panelly thing the cues appear to be listed in the order they were created in, not the order they appear in the cart (nice for historians maybe)
3. Using SHIFT as part of the Hotkey for a script that makes cues has the obvious inconvenience of making them _above_ the selected cue; it’d be nice if “make” in AS wasn’t affected by modifier keys!
4. When you change cue list you can’t click into the empty part of the list to have no cue selected until you have clicked on a cue, if there is one “loaded”

Rich

<Screen Shot 2017-08-18 at 10.48.37.pdf>

[Christopher Cahoon]

Hi Rich! Chris Cahoon here, the other Chris at Figure 53.

First of all, HUGE thanks for these observations. There are some gems in here. I thought I'd respond briefly to explain some things and acknowledge some bugs. Generally where I say "Noted", I mean "Thank you kindly, we will add this to our issue list." 

From your first email: 

1. Good catch. That's also true of the backspace/delete key. I've made a note of this and we'll ponder on it.

2. Noted. We'll look into that sometime after our esteemed documentation author returns from vacation.

From your second email:

1. I've tried a few times and haven't been able to make this happen. Any more clues? 

2. For a couple of my co-workers and I (on OSX 10.12 and 10.11), the window scrolls for us when we arrow into a new text field. Would you mind going into more detail? Are you using the arrow keys below your right shift button?

3. I've made an internal note of this for us to make sure it's doing what we think makes sense.

4. Noted.

5. That IS exciting! I am sure there is some information about the specific operation that I can glean from the screenshot, but if you have any more detail on how I might make this happen (if it happens reliably). I've added your report and screenshot to our issue tracker.

6. Noted. The size of it is based on our current attempt to make it as small as it could be while fitting the stuff inside it that we want in there. It's likely there's some tweaking we could do with text sizes. 

7. Ahh— I've noticed this and it slipped my mind. Noted. 

8. Oof. Noted.

9. We agree that it would be better to let the undo for that text field to work well on its own, but it's surprisingly tricky (ugh, Computers, right?) to get it to play nicely with the rest of QLab's undo system. Thanks for the reminder that it's probably worth pursuing even though it's tricky.

10. Noted.

11. Noted.

12. Ahh, yes. Noted. Sorry for the performance degradation. No promises, but it pains me that I've made it _harder_ to work on batches of levels in the process of working towards improving it, and it's high on my personal priority list to improve this experience.

13. Noted.

14. Noted.

15. I hear you, it is not standard practice. There are a few places (the Light Dashboard as another example) where we have begun using this same "open window first, then toggle between windows" approach with hotkeys and menu items that open windows, and I'm finding it nice to be able to choose between hopping between the specific windows directly with the window-specific hotkey, or closing the window using ⌘W.

From Email 3 (sent while I was replying!):

1. Noted.

2. Noted. 

3. I will say that the "shift-insert" behavior has caused potentially more trouble than it's worth, and we're looking into reducing some of that trouble. I've added your observation to our list of issues around that behavior.

4. I am not sure I know what you mean— I've played around a bit trying to follow those instructions to see the behavior but wasn't able to. Would you mind giving me more clues?

Thanks again for this great report. 

Christopher Cahoon

Another Chris at Figure 53

[Rich Walsh]

Second:

1. Probably a one-off; if I see it again I’ll try to record the steps better.

2. It’s working now, but it definitely wasn’t earlier. I’ve relaunched the app a couple of times since… Again, I’ll note if it happens again. (I’ve also had a couple of corrupt cues – colour won’t reset, name won’t update, etc – that I’ve had to remake from scratch, but working too fast to know what happened when!)

5. Another one that can’t be recreated.

Third:

4. Make a new workspace. Make a cue. Make a new cue list. Click back on “Main Cue List”. Click on the cue. Click on “Cue List”. Click back on “Main Cue List”. Try to get [no cue on standby] in the "Standby Indicator" by clicking in the empty space – you can’t until you click on the cue again and then click in the empty space.

Thanks.

Rich

[Rich Walsh]

I've run into some new oddities (in 4.1.3):

1. I'm having a miserable time with text fields forgetting what I've just typed when I switch to another app before committing the text; I thought this had been fixed?
2. If you turn on "highlight for related cues" in a cart the related cues go yellow – not the one you're on – and stay yellow even if you click elsewhere
3. The text for "/cue/{cue_number}/colorName {string}" on the OSC API webpage should list orange not yellow as a valid colour

Thanks.

Rich

[Sam Kusnetz]

Hi Rich

I'm having a miserable time with text fields forgetting what I've just typed when I switch to another app before committing the text; I thought this had been fixed?

We thought so too! We’ll look into it...

If you turn on "highlight for related cues" in a cart the related cues go yellow – not the one you're on – and stay yellow even if you click elsewhere

Right you are, it seems. Very odd.

The text for "/cue/{cue_number}/colorName {string}" on the OSC API webpage should list orange not yellow as a valid colour

Right again!

Thanks for all this.

Best

Sam

—

Sam Kusnetz | Figure 53

s...@figure53.com

[Sam Kusnetz]

Rich

Are there specific text fields you’re having trouble with, or is this a general note?

Sam

—

Sam Kusnetz | Figure 53

s...@figure53.com

[Rich Walsh]

Notes & scripts definitely; not sure if there were any others.

Rich

[Rich Walsh]

I’m seeing it in the notes, script & OSC fields (all of them) in the Inspector – but not the notes field at the top.

I ran into another bug earlier, which I now can’t recreate – but it happened a couple of times: copying and pasting a selection of cues from a cart to a cue list caused the originals to lose their q list names…

Rich