Thread: [Announce] Lanterne - an all-purpose flashlight app
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Copernicus is offline Copernicus
2013-06-12 , 12:10
Posts: 1,986 | Thanked: 7,698 times | Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio
#145
Originally Posted by Estel View Post
1. Sadly, "exit on camera cover close" options doesn't work. I've tried restarting Lanterne after enabling it, to no avail. It seems, that this option is just ignored.
Question: do you have the "Ignore camera cover status" option checked? If so, Lanterne will ignore the camera cover. This includes not closing the app when the camera cover is closed...

2. In morse code tab, text imput field is missbehaving, if one hits "return" after writing sentence to send (I did it intuitively, wanting to check if it will be same as hitting "Start transmitting" button).
Ah, this is a UI problem. In order to load large files, I switched from using a "line entry" widget to a "text entry" widget in the GUI. Unfortunately, when in landscape mode, you can only see one line of text at a time. If you switch to portrait orientation, you'll be able to see more lines of text.

I'll try to figure out a better way to manage the text screen...

3. In strobe flash experimented, input field for duty cycle time is strange, too. Using hardware keyboard, I can write max 999 ms there (three digits), but via software buttons, I can set as much as 5000 ms.
I set the maximum at 5000 ms without really thinking about it. You can, in fact, type in a number up to 5000 if you want; try typing in "4999" for example. Apparently, if you try typing "9999", it sees that the number is greater than 5000, and stops you.

But yeah, I really need to think a bit harder about the strobe UI...

Furthermore, there is something wrong with that duty settings. On 5000 ms and 25% duty cycle, leds remain ON for same ammount of time, as with 3000 ms. Increasing it above certain level seems to only affect pause time.
Yeah, another failure of mine here. The actual V4L2 max time allowed to keep the flash LEDs lit at high power is (if I recall correctly) 500 ms. Thus, once you set the period above 2000 ms, the duty cycle starts going below 25%.

I need to find a better way of showing this limitation in the UI...

UI design observation here. "new" settings, utilizing duty cycle time and duty cycle percentage are in line with wikipedia's definition, but, in real life usage, "old" way of setting ON time and pause time was *much* more convenient and intuitive.
Yes, and it was much more flexible as well. Dangerously flexible. The advantage of the "duty cycle" mechanism is that it shows you exactly where the danger is -- the higher the duty cycle, the greater the chance of damage to the LEDs. I'll look at providing other UI options, but I at least want to keep the duty cycle value somewhere, to let you know if you're in dangerous territory.

UI design suggestion - please, split "torch ON/OFF" button into two, wide in half.
Ah, yeah, I've been trying to work out how best to do something like that. The big issue here is how to make it work in both landscape and portrait mode. The way I've got it now, Qt automagically resizes all the buttons for me; but splitting the buttons horizontally works better in landscape, and splitting them vertically works better in portrait. I'm still trying to find a way to customize landscape and portrait modes without being too cumbersome.

Then, let first one remaine "torch ON/OFF", and make another "Indicator ON/OFF".
Actually, I'd prefer to have a generic White/Red switch somewhere, so that all the choices (Torch/Pulse/SOS/Morse) pick up the color switch once, rather than forcing each button to be split... But yeah, having to go to the preferences screen to switch is a pain. Let me work on it.

Speaking about details - I thinked about it carefully, including situation, when one of torch modes is already enabled, and user click "ON/OFF" button assigned to another torch mode. IMO, this should result in disabling previous torch instantly, and activating last one "clicked" (literally, toggling between normal and indicator torch).
Yeah, that does make sense; I really only implemented it the way I've got it now because it was easier to code quickly. I'll take a look...
 

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