[Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Release Music Keyboard-6

[Simon Schampijer]

On 03/27/2013 12:27 PM, Gonzalo Odiard wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 7:38 AM, Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de>wrote:
>
>> On 03/21/2013 08:06 PM, Sugar Labs Activities wrote:
>>
>>> Activity Homepage:
>>> http://activities.sugarlabs.**org/addon/4654<http://activities.sugarlabs.org/addon/4654>
>>>
>>> Sugar Platform:
>>> 0.98 - 0.98
>>>
>>> Download Now:
>>> http://activities.sugarlabs.**org/downloads/file/28522/**
>>> music_keyboard-6.xo<http://activities.sugarlabs.org/downloads/file/28522/music_keyboard-6.xo>
>>>
>>> Release notes:
>>> This activity show a piano keyboard, and in devices with touch screen,
>>> can be used to play music. Can be used with a xo keyboard too, showing the
>>> played note in the screen.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sugar Labs Activities
>>> http://activities.sugarlabs.**org <http://activities.sugarlabs.org>
>>>
>>
>> Thanks Gonzalo for working on this awesome addition to the activity suite.
>> I played a bit with it today and here a few feedback items:
>>
>>
> Thanks!. Can we add it to the favorite activities in the new images to
> expose it to more testers?

Yes, is a good idea! Daniel can you add the musical keyboard to the 
favorites in 13.2.0?

>> - the initially selected instrument is not selected, when I change the
>> instrument, it is selected fine. As the widget to select an instrument is a
>> list depending on the selection you can not always see the selected
>> instrument, maybe you want to show the currently selected instrument as
>> well in the toolbar or make that clear by other means
>>
>
> Agree. We need think how is the best way to show the selected instrument. I
> don't like put labels in the toolbar, but in this case, may be is not a
> problem.

Yes, the toolbar is the place for actions, not the best place to show 
status only items. Reordering the list to always have the selected item 
on top is not really good neither as it might be confusing to the user. 
Or how about, you scroll to the row with the currently selected item? 
That should work UI and technical wise.

>> - it is great that you can show different labels on the keyboard, the icon
>> for the hardware keyboard mode is not really clear maybe you can reuse the
>> icon from the Sugar control panel, I would add tooltips to the icons (they
>> should hide automatically when you click the icon, recent fixes have anded
>> for this in the sugar-toolkit-gtk3), finding good text for the tooltip
>> involves a bit of research I guess [1], it would be great to have no-labels
>> at all mode as well
>>
>>
> Good. About the tooltips, I was not sure about the scales denomination. In
> some places, the scales with letters is named "German" and in other is
> "American" ! The scale starting in "DO" can be named Latin, but is not
> really clear for me and there are a lot of changes by countries and in the
> history. See:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note

Yes, I looked about a good way as well but could not find a global 
labeling myself. As you say, some say latin, others say german... We 
need a musicologist here...

>> - when I hold down 'w' and 'r' pressing 't' will not give any visual or
>> musical feedback - 'y' or 'u' does work, same that 'z' and 'c' work but 'x'
>> does not when holding down 'w' and 'r' at the same time
>>
>>
> Good catch. Requires research.

Yes, might be an issue with the underlying musical engine.

>> - sound: this is a question for the OLPC audio developers, there is a lot
>> of noise and clipping while playing - would be fantastic to fix this as well
>>
>>
> Yes.
>
>
>> -------------
>>
>> Future-future: it would be great to show the corresponding note in the
>> musical representation [2], [...] recording would be nice, play-along [...]
>> but that probably let the scope of the activity explode :)
>>
>>
> +1 and +1
> May be we can propose these as tasks to GSoC.

Yes, sounds good to me.

Simon