Suggestions

After using TLB for some time now I have the following suggestions:

Menus:

M1. Captions on top of menu's rather than on the side with the ability to center the caption text.

M2. Ability to choose horizontal scrolling and to specify the number of rows.

M3. Scrollers not covering content. This will allow you do something like SC1.jpg (attached)

[attachment=1]

M4. Wrap icon text rather than cut it off.

M5. Ability to show other fields as the icon text - particularly extended fields like album, artist, etc.

M6. Abililty to specify up two three different lines as the icon text and choose the font and text color for each (see SC2.jpg). Particularly useful for music.

[attachment=0]

M6. Ability to open a menu automatically centered on the screen. An extension to this would be to allow offsets from the left, center, right / top, center, botton co-ordinates. (I know that a torn off menu can be positioned but it's not the same)

M7. Make a menu button click and the menu hotkey have the same behaviour, i.e. open the menu if it is closed, and close it if it is open.

M7. Ability to change caption icons.

M8. Ability to add custom caption commands.

Toolbars:

T1: Ability to have toolbar overlays that have a mix of transparent and opaque parts. At the moment the transparent parts get made opaque and you have to adjust the toolbar transparency which affects the whole image, including the opaque parts.

T2: There is a very minor "bug" when blend is used with autohidden toolbars: it blends from transparent to full opacity regardless of the translucency setting. i.e. the transulcency setting is not preserved. This doesn't happen for menus.

Skins/General:

G1: Enable mouse-over state for the menu background.

G2. Allow overlays on buttons. E.g. a play icon could overlay a video thumbnail like you see a lot on the web.

G3. Blend transition effects on buttons - especially for the media control buttons - like CD Art Display does.

G4. Show album art in the media control plugin.


The visual changes above will make it possible to create a variety of interesting interfaces. I'd be happy to buy a "Pro" version of TLB if it had these features.

Let me know what you think.

regards,
paul

Thank you very much for your suggestions. Some of them will be released already in the next version.

M7. Make a menu button click and the menu hotkey have the same behaviour, i.e. open the menu if it is closed, and close it if it is open.

This behaviour will be default for "always on top" menus in the next version.

M7. Ability to change caption icons.

Currently this is possible to change the caption icons via skin. Look the preinstalled "Torn Paper" skin the section [UI Buttons]

T1: Ability to have toolbar overlays that have a mix of transparent and opaque parts. At the moment the transparent parts get made opaque and you have to adjust the toolbar transparency which affects the whole image, including the opaque parts.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this clearly :oops: Please can you make some screenshots for this suggestion?

G4. Show album art in the media control plugin.

This is possible right now. As example you can look the preinstalled skin "Artwork". You need to add the something like:

Code:

[item2]
type=artwork
rect = 7 27 73 93

Yuri,

Sorry for the very late reply.

For T1 I want a toolbar that has some completely transparent parts. If I use an overlay, the toolbar background defined in the Visual Style is still visible beneath the overlay's transparent parts. I.e. TLB is behaving as I would expect. Even using a resource editor to edit the VS the best you can do is get a toolbar with the aero blur effect on the transparent parts.

In the screenshot below the left half of the overlay image is completely transparent, i.e. blank, and the right half is solid black. I applied the overlay image then set the toolbar translucency to about 70%.

[attachment=1]

There is a workaround for this but it's not very convenient: you can make a solid toolbar overlay with the current wallpaper as background to give the illusion of complete transparency. Of course if you change the wallpaper you need to change the overlay. In the screencap below I've done this and set the toolbar translucency to opaque (this was a mock-up so the effect isn't perfect - the overlay is not correctly aligned)

[attachment=0]

Thanks for the other enhancements!

Paul