The process of editing film leads to an usage pattern, where a lot of components or nodes are intervened, each exposing some parameters to control and to tweak. The allocation and management of these property editors within the UI space is tantamount for a productive and satisfying workflow.
Vision
As of 2022, not even detailed concepts have been created to address these needs. However, the outline of our vision can be explained…
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the necessity to access or expose an UI is expressed as presentation request
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there will be a routing of presentation requests to a suitable location in the UI
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each location has an allocation scheme:
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in the simplest case, an existing location is re-used
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another strategy might be to create a new view for each entity/request
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or a fixed number of “slots” may be allocated in a round-robin or LRU pattern
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views allocated this way are non-modal by default
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a view can thus be re-bound or it may reflect state changes of a selected object
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some gestures may cause a new presentation request and thus lead to revealing an existing view
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there can be several spots of work — the user may navigate to a different spot, causing some views to be hidden and others to be revealed
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the user can apply navigation gestures to return to a previous spot and view / zoom level.
Lumiera is built around the abstracted notion of an interface system and gestures within that system. The most relevant interfaces we want to support are
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Mouse
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Keyboard
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Pen / Tablet
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Hardware controllers
Consequences for Styling
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Styles must be anchored semantically rather than based on a concrete widget hierarchy
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Property Editors are built from some ubiquitous building blocks
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Styling for several dynamic, transitory handling patterns are required
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focusing
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number tweaking modes
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linked properties
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cues for navigation
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many UI elements can be collapsed and expanded and we need an abridged display of elements
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we need a concept of layering generic states on top of pretty much every element, without producing a combinatoric explosion of actual styles.