Dynamic placement of keyboard hints

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monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

I think I may have requested this in another post already, but I couldn't find it - so here it is again:

I'd like to suggest placing the key hints on the keyboard dynamically so that when I move the keyboard down to gain some screen real estate I will not loose out on having the hints displayed.

In this example it should actually show the hint for C and not only Bb:
keyboard-hints.jpg
keyboard-hints.jpg (16.51 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
So the hints could stay where they are right now, but when I start moving the keyboard down they should move to stay visible. Here is how it could look:
kb01.jpg
kb01.jpg (20.69 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
kb02.jpg
kb02.jpg (16.29 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
kb03.jpg
kb03.jpg (13.42 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
kb04.jpg
kb04.jpg (10.17 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
kb05.jpg
kb05.jpg (7.9 KiB) Viewed 17425 times
I think even the last picture gives you enough information to make use of the hints while playing.
Last edited by monkel on 11-04-15 1:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

One thing I've just noticed - why are the circles on the black keys in the shade of the falling white notes and vice versa? Shouldn't they be identical for consistency?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I think kiwi has suggested a similar idea in the past. It's a good one. Let me see if I can't get this on the schedule for Synthesia 12.

(The colors are opposite for contrast. When they're the same, the prompt blends in with the note and is a lot harder to see. That discussion happened back here.)
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MadDuck
Posts: 2

Post by MadDuck »

Hi! First time posting here, so most importantly - Thank You Nicholas for making the second most awesome piece of software ever. *

-Related to the fingering hints "sliding up" the keys, if there were an option for the C markers (C3, C4, C5...) to be visible when the keyboard is minimized that would be awesome too.


* #1 has got to go to Rocksmith, but I'm primarily a guitarist, so I do admit I'm biased. :D
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

No worries about Synthesia being second place: The Rocksmith team has done an amazing job. (And with the difference in team size, there is no way we could compete with the quality or quantity of the features they push out.)

Otherwise, when we fix the dynamic placement problem, the octave labels will also be included with the solution. :)
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

And please take note, that I didn't just cut off the keys at the bottom in my examples, but shrunk them top and bottom until the last picture. Just as a design suggestion ... :)
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Ha! So you did. I didn't notice that the first time I looked at this. That's actually kind of a nice effect. It's certainly an improvement over simply cutting off the bottom of the key.

I wonder if that would be easy to imitate with the way we draw notes. Hmm.
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jimhenry
Posts: 1899

Post by jimhenry »

Monkel cropped the top and bottom of the keys rather than scaling to shrink the vertical height of the keyboard. That will probably be pretty easy to duplicate.

If you treat the portion of the keys below the red felt as a rectangular region, you can crop from the top and bottom as suggested by the green lines in the following image. The top is cropped 1.22 times the amount of the bottom crop to arrive at the minimum height shown by Monkel. It's a lot like doing a fluid layout for a web page.

You probably should handle the hint dot vertical positions by setting a minimum y position and maximum y positions for the dot centers and then setting the y positions for displaying the dots by scaling from the maximum y positions toward the minimum y position in a similar way as the cropping is done. (The dots gradually converge to all being at the same y position for a minimum height keyboard.

In terms of control, I would think that you gesture to reduce the keyboard to the minimum height, and then, if you go well beyond minimum, the keyboard is hidden. There needs to be some "stickiness" so that you can reduce the height to the minimum without hiding the keyboard unintentionally.
Keyboard shrink.png
Keyboard shrink.png (58.06 KiB) Viewed 17272 times
P.S. I probably should have used y instead of x in my image to stay with the xy conventions for direction. :?
Jim Henry
Author of the Miditzer, a free virtual theatre pipe organ
http://www.Miditzer.org/
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

Now that I'm also using a windows laptop with 1368x768 the size of the onscreen keyboard becomes really annoying (and loosing the hints by moving it much down is not really an option) and I hope to see a preview that incorporates this, especially since it's apparently been on the dev. list since 2014 ... ;)

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=6832
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It's still on the list!

Checking just now, it's tentatively scheduled for Synthesia 12.
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

Just came across this again and with 2019 nearly here the tentative placement on the v12 feature list with 10.5 currently in beta makes this feel very far away... :(
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

Me again - whenever I pick up Synthesia these days I get back to this issue, especially when running on Windows or my Android phone. Would be great to have more control over the screen real estate ...

*sigh*
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I am very sorry for the wait.

I've got "Partially hiding the keyboard hides next note markers and labels! It shouldn't." on line 89 of The List. So it's coming next. It took a (very) long time to bubble up to the top of the list, but it's there now.
monkel
Posts: 199

Post by monkel »

Thanks for the reassuring update.
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