MegaDrum Manager GUI redesign. How do you like it?

[halifax30]

This post has been in my drafts folder for exactly 1 year, but in the past days I finally had the time to finalize and post it.
Back in December 2015 I was a new MegaDrum user and I was going through the initial frustration of setting it up. Part of the frustration was that I didn't fully understand how MegaDrum Manager worked and found some parts of it slightly confusing. Since I'm also a Java developer I decided to improve the layout of the buttons a little.
Attached you can see the screenshot of my reorganized MDM. It is not only a design I created in Photoshop. This actually works! I've been using it for the past 1 year without any major problems.
I'm interested in your suggestions. If you want to try it, let me know. I can send you the latest JAR file.

Some of the reasons why I moved certain buttons

• The new window is divided into two parts: left side contains everything related to the MegaDrum unit while the right side contains MDM-related buttons. This hopefully helps to clear the confusion that for example the MIDI Log does not show what happens inside MegaDrum. I used to believe that. It only shows the results coming out of MegaDrum after(!) it processed the input signals. It means that if input 1 is set to Note 47 and the 3rd zone of input 3 is also set to Note 47 then the MIDI Log might show a 3rd zone hit (orange bar) when you trigger input 1 because it doesn't know exactly which input was triggered in MD.
• The left side is further divided into two parts. The Global Settings part contains the settings which are global for your MD unit. The Configuration Slots contain everything which is stored in one slot. These two groups are not clearly separated in the current MDM version. I clarified which settings belong to which group with Dmitri in this forum post.
• Above these two groups are the action buttons which either Get/Send the settings in both(!) of these groups or Load/Save them to/from a file.
• The right side is pretty self-explanatory, no big news there.
• There is only high-level doc available for MD and no docs for MDM. Therefore it needs to be self-explanatory, like an Android/iPhone app.
• I changed some text to make them easier to understand. For example 'Total Slots', 'Last Used Slot', 'Send before Save'.
• While the button spacing has increased I tried to keep the window size to the minimum.
• In this version the detached windows do not work. Are they needed? Do you use them? I believe it is better to use tabs because you rarely have to see the settings on these different tabs at the same time.
• I made sure that the same font is used for all buttons. This made them easier to read.

Possible further improvements

• The 'AutoResize Window' option is not used often. So it can go into the 'View' menu.
• There is a big unused space on the right side of the 'Configuration Slots' group. Therefore the window size might be reduced further by placing the Global Settings group vertically on the right hand side of 'Configuration Slots'.
• The two tabs under PadsExtra can be moved a level higher and the PadsExtra tab can be deleted.

[halifax30]

Dmitri asked me to upload the JAR file. The forum had size limits, so I created a "Release" on GitHub which you can find here:
https://github.com/mocsa/MegaDrumManager/releases
Just download the JAR file.
You can also find the source code of my changes there.

[airflamesred]

Very nice Sir, and let me be the first congratulate you on your efforts.
Some thoughts, if I may.
You are right that many buttons can be hidden by either tab or dropdown.
Personally I'd have the log running the length along the bottom ( and hence longer).
There still seems to be an awful lot of wasted space though is this just the nature of java?

I'll give it a try tomorrow

thanks

[halifax30]

Thank you for the compliments.
So far, I've only changed things which made my life easier, but your or anyone's suggestions are more than welcome.
Wasted space is certainly not the nature of Java. You can put the buttons anywhere you like. One suggestion to reduce wasted space even more is what I have said in my initial post: take the "Global Settings" box and put it vertically between "Configuration Slots" and "MIDI Log". I might try to do that and see how it looks.

[airflamesred]

It means that if input 1 is set to Note 47 and the 3rd zone of input 3 is also set to Note 47 then the MIDI Log might show a 3rd zone hit (orange bar) when you trigger input 1 because it doesn't know exactly which input was triggered in MD.

Thanks for this, I just looked into it and it seems I had some 3rd zone dampened causing some orange bars.

[Rovalo]

Nice alternative, I like it. I must detach the midi log window because on the right side it is not visible enough. I downloaded your version and will test it, hopefully this GUI fits my screen width better than the original GUI.

airflamesred showed me this topic in relation to the midi log bar colours, thanks for posting that info.

[stefan1982]

I like the white-space as much as I hate it...
the white-space seems to calm down the interface, although a lot of things are still confusing and easy to misunderstand/misunderstood (not your fault).

What I think MDM needs is a complete GUI-redesign. I would love to work on it myself and come up with some mockups, but the problem is that I do not know any Java.

I think that it would be great if we could rewrite MDM in NodeJS with a Electron app, which could benefit from a GUI written in HTML/Javascript which is more widely known and easier to change.
As an example, it would be quite simple to get some wizards in to let you configure your pads and settings. Or automagically select the right notes for the VST you are using.

I would most certainly donate $100,- to get this going and would like to know if there are more people who would like to benefit from and easier to use MDM-application.

I hope more people could give some thoughts and perhaps Dmitri could share his thoughts on this. Maybe it could be done at all because of restrictions the MegaDrum TMI has.