I will be working on Pitivi as my Google Summer of Code 2018 project under GNOME. One of the major task in my project is to integrate the current Welcome dialog box of Pitivi into it’s main window and display projects in a more informative, discoverable, and user friendly layout.
Currently when Pitivi starts, a Welcome dialog appears that displays the recent projects and some buttons for creating a new project, browsing projects, etc. This dialog box needs to be integrated into the main window.
Pitivi’s current welcome dialogSome GNOME apps that already have their Welcome screen integrated into their main window are Builder, Boxes, Notes, ToDo, etc.
Integrated welcome window in GNOME Builder app
Integrated welcome window in GNOME ToDo appThe integration of Welcome dialog into Pitivi’s main window will provide us with more space that will be used for –
- displaying relevant meta information regarding a project like its directory, last access timestamp, thumbnail, etc. in a nice custom layout rather than just displaying the title of the project (which we currently do in Pitivi’s Welcome dialog)
- displaying projects categorically as “Starred” and “Recent”
- providing a search interface to allow for easy browsing of projects
- better positioning of the buttons based on their actions. Rather than stacking all
the buttons vertically (which we currently do in Pitivi’s Welcome dialog), we will
place Important buttons like “New Project”, “Open Project”, etc. in the Header Bar, and Other buttons like “Help”, “Keyboard Shortcuts”, etc. inside a menu in the Header Bar
As of now, I have integrated the welcome dialog into Pitivi’s main window. Now, we have two main screens in Pitivi – Greeter Perspective (the welcome window screen) and Editor Perspective (the video editing window screen). The main window manages the UI of Greeter window and Editor window and handles the switch between these two windows.
Integrated welcome/greeter window in Pitivi. Notice that the important action buttons like “New” and “Open” are shown prominently in the header bar.
Integrated welcome/greeter window in Pitivi. Notice that other (not so important) action buttons like “Keyboard Shortcuts”, “User Manual”, etc. are shown inside a menu in the header bar.Currently, I have a merge request pending for this change !33. I will keep posting my progress on this blog and on the issue 1302. Until next time.
Stay tuned 