Pro Tools interface beautification

[leftalive]

Originally Posted by smurfyou

Do none of you use multiple displays? It's ridiculous compared to Mac. And almost every other professional Windows program.

Whinging over.

K Roche I agree. Whether or not one can "just get to work" isn't the point.

I get irrationally angry every time I accidentally bump the stupid master window that everything else has to live inside simply because I can't just maximize it and have it fill both monitors completely.

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by leftalive

I get irrationally angry every time I accidentally bump the stupid master window that everything else has to live inside simply because I can't just maximize it and have it fill both monitors completely.

Humm not really clear on what your are describing ? Cant you resize both to just shy of full screen ?

[Xin Zhang]

Originally Posted by K Roche

Humm not really clear on what your are describing ? Cant you resize both to just shy of full screen ?

It is indeed not unusable. This topic is about the poor user experience. I hope it can attract official attention. Thank you for heating up the topic and attracting more people's attention.

[Reki]

The title in this post describes an underlying element of the way Pro Tools windows are managed. Nowhere else in the OS is this Windows Vista element shown, which initially led me to believe that Pro Tools itself was specifically coded to have the vista style borders. So it stands to reason that, the way you get rid of the Vista borders is to just update the UI. However, every subsequent pro tools update then on that changed the UI, including the addition of a dark theme overhaul, it did not change the vista borders at all. Upon further reading, I believe this is actually the result of how windows are managed within Pro Tools. Unlike most modern creative apps, Pro Tools does not offer a meaningful degree of multi monitor support at all. Instead, it relies on a parent / child window style of management that forces this legacy element onto the Pro Tools experience. This is only restrictive and counterintuitive for production and efficiency, seeing as having multiple monitors is not something that pro tools has the ability to take advantage of. It seems that the way to solve this is to redesign the pro tools windows to have multi monitor support.

In addition to the "Vista style" window borders, file dialog boxes (open, save as, etc.) are also outdated in Pro Tools on Windows. If you have Windows set to dark mode for File Explorer, you'll notice that Pro Tools file dialogs ignore that setting. Actually, Pro Tools is using "Vista/XP" era file dialogs as well which pre-date the dark mode option (select File-Open in Pro Tools, and File-Open in Windows Notepad to see the difference). My assumption is that they're using older Windows libraries to instantiate things like file dialogs and window borders. While it still "works" for the time being, you'd imagine that at some point Microsoft might deprecate those libraries, so Avid should address it. In addition to being aesthetically unpleasing, it's just seems a bit lazy (Windows 8/10 have been out for several years) or potentially indicative of some other deeper issue with being able to update that code within the application.