ok here’s another idea on my quest to convince you guys that floating windows still are not cool … (i am talking about having a lot of tools gui’s open)
so instead of my previous idea to have tools docked into renoise’s own gui, i thought of this variant:
remember how the old winamp had those floating windows that would snap together like magnets when you ‘docked’ them together?
now i thought this was a cool idea to have for renoise’s tool gui’s… so you can sorta build your own layout with favourite tools and they will snap together when reaching a certain threshold radius and you would be able to move all docked tools at once, onto a second screen for example.
On a long term we definitely need a solution for this.
So far we avoided dialogs like the pest in the Renoise UI - for a good reason. With the “everything is open/possible”-script approach this of course is a hard thing to do, but still needed. So +1 for more brainstorming and for a better solution like the one we have now.
Melt multiple tools together, if one tool can’t fill up whole workspace, yes, but then you have to know which other scripts are available & running next to yours?
This could be made easier by defining something like a “rack unit”, define a constant width or height, so you can at least place as many tools as you want below or next to each others without cluttering everything. This used to work quite well in music studio “racks”, didn’t it?
Other related ideas: give scripts a dedicated, fixed place they can add themselves to (like for example the advanced edit in the pattern editor) in the Renoise UI. This again needs fixed GUI layouts, widths, heights. Also other parts of the Renoise UI will need such “advanced edit” alike places then.
I like the rack idea, but I don’t like “static racks” with fixed height/width (like e.g. in NI Kontakt) too much.
But I’d love a rack or combinator whose content can be modified by the user. For example I love the google persoanl startpage whith its costumizeable gadgets
What do you think about a dedicated further middle view for tools ? This view could contain an arranger for various tools. Once arranged the size remains fixed.
Couldn’t the tools (that you are using within a song, obviously not all of them you have installed) live in a tab at the bottom of renoise’s gui along side track dsps/automation/song settings, etc. and work in a similar way to the track dsps tab? Display some controls right there and pop up larger guis as needed by pressing a button (same as dsps…). Save with template. So on.
Although this solution might present some errors in presentation to human logic (the way this sentence does, uhm…) one can foresee a collection of tools eventually becoming large and unwieldy to find/organize.
… (i am talking about having a lot of tools gui’s open)