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from the What-was-wrong-with-the-old-one? dept.
Open source video player VLC will get a new UI this year with 4.0 launch:
News website Protocol ran an extensive piece on the history and status of the popular open source video player VLC, and the story includes new details about the next major version of the software. Among other things, VLC 4.0 will bring a complete user interface overhaul.
"We modified the interface to be a bit more modern," VideoLAN foundation President Jean-Baptiste Kempf told the publication. Kempf had previously shown some version of a new interface about two years ago, but it's unclear at this point how much that one resembles the one the team plans to introduce with VLC 4.0.
While the article doesn't list every change coming, it does outline a couple other possible directions and priorities for VLC.
Read the article for more details.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by pTamok on Saturday February 13 2021, @09:58PM (6 children)
It strikes me that it would be useful if applications presented a standard UI functionality API that allowed users to apply their preferred UI style via a standardised description language. Some people like the Apple HIG style, others like Win95, and others more experimental approaches like pie-menus [wikipedia.org]. It seems that so far, no-one has been clever enough to apply an elegant and concise layer of abstraction that can separate the UI style from the functionality. This is a shame. It is what I hoped might happen 30 years ago, but applications seem to be stuck in the quagmire of tying the interface to the functionality. I'm not clever or experienced enough to attempt it, but I hope some gifted academics are working on it, somewhere.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 13 2021, @11:17PM
https://www.videolan.org/vlc/skineditor.html [videolan.org]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday February 14 2021, @12:21AM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 14 2021, @05:16AM (1 child)
just like alternative fonts when everyone else types like this and not like this.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Sunday February 14 2021, @11:49AM
If you're trying to make a point you're failing abjectly.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday February 15 2021, @03:18AM (1 child)
Skinning done at the level of the entire system needs the kind of standardization of interface API that led to freedesktop, ready to be overpowered by the systemd-ers.
(Score: 1) by Arik on Monday February 15 2021, @03:39AM
A UI should never be equivalent to 'the entire system.'
It's important to maintain a clear distinction between the different levels of abstraction.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?