Upcoming Feature : New Dark Mode and UI improvements
Posted: Fri Dec 10, 2021 3:24 pm
This will be the third try at a proper dark mode for SharpCap, and hopefully the final one too 
The first dark mode in early versions of SharpCap was very basic - roughly speaking it was a digital equivalent of a red sheet of film over the display, muting the colours of everything except the camera image display.
The second dark mode is what you see now in SharpCap 3.2 and 4.0 - the familiar orange-on-black display that mostly works pretty well, but has a few glitches and niggles:
* Some things either cannot be turned to dark mode or are ridiculously hard to do - scrollbars, the window title bar, some bits of the dropdowns in the toolbar
* At times you see a flash of light mode before things turn to dark mode - particularly when opening a camera and the controls appear for the first time
* If you flip between dark and light mode then you get strange effects, like orange text staying on some things when you go back to light mode
* Some things are harder to see in dark mode - highlighting on pressed buttons, etc.
New dark mode (shown below) fixes pretty much all of these issues and brings some additional benefits - read on for more info...
You can see in this screenshot that things like the window title bar and scroll bars are now dark, although if you look closely you will spot some minor changes between how this screenshot looks and how the current SharpCap 4.0 looks beyond the colours. This is because the whole of the SharpCap main window, menus, toolbar, status bar, image display and more has been re-written in a different technology. While things are largely equivalent, there are some differences - such as the inactive buttons in the toolbar still showing some colour and the menus looking a bit different. I'm not intending to try to chase down every single different pixel, but I will address any differences that make it harder to see/use/interact with the application if such arise.
The change to a new technology for the main user interface of SharpCap brings a number of additional improvements (either now or in the future). These include
* More work on displaying the image is done by your computer graphics card (GPU). This reduces CPU usage when working with high frame rate cameras
* You can zoom the image further in when working with high resolution cameras - previously the zooming ability stopped when the size of the image multiplied by the zoom factor exceeded 65535 pixels in either direction (so for instance you would be limited to about 10x zoom on a 6000x4000 image in the old UI).
* Better support for high DPI monitors (and also for systems with a mixture of high DPI and normal DPI monitors). This may require more work to fully enable.
* Improved stability of overlays drawn on the image - for instance the pixel value readout overlay could flicker for high frame rate cameras when the image is zoomed in the old UI
From a technical point of view, moving to the new technology stack is a welcome step in the evolution of SharpCap - it's taken about 3 to 4 weeks to make the visible changes that you can see above happen, but that's only been possible because I have been planning and preparing for this change for about 2-3 years (on and off)!
From the user point of view, initially the new UI will be hidden unless activated by a command line switch. I'm hoping that some of the adventurous among you will try it out and report any gremlins or issues that you find (there are bound to be some in a change of this size, and new sets of eyes on it will be welcome as they will spot things that I am just not seeing). After a suitable period of refinement and testing, I will change the default over to the new user interface, and then eventually remove the old one.
cheers!,
Robin
The first dark mode in early versions of SharpCap was very basic - roughly speaking it was a digital equivalent of a red sheet of film over the display, muting the colours of everything except the camera image display.
The second dark mode is what you see now in SharpCap 3.2 and 4.0 - the familiar orange-on-black display that mostly works pretty well, but has a few glitches and niggles:
* Some things either cannot be turned to dark mode or are ridiculously hard to do - scrollbars, the window title bar, some bits of the dropdowns in the toolbar
* At times you see a flash of light mode before things turn to dark mode - particularly when opening a camera and the controls appear for the first time
* If you flip between dark and light mode then you get strange effects, like orange text staying on some things when you go back to light mode
* Some things are harder to see in dark mode - highlighting on pressed buttons, etc.
New dark mode (shown below) fixes pretty much all of these issues and brings some additional benefits - read on for more info...
- darkmode.jpg (476.8 KiB) Viewed 7180 times
The change to a new technology for the main user interface of SharpCap brings a number of additional improvements (either now or in the future). These include
* More work on displaying the image is done by your computer graphics card (GPU). This reduces CPU usage when working with high frame rate cameras
* You can zoom the image further in when working with high resolution cameras - previously the zooming ability stopped when the size of the image multiplied by the zoom factor exceeded 65535 pixels in either direction (so for instance you would be limited to about 10x zoom on a 6000x4000 image in the old UI).
* Better support for high DPI monitors (and also for systems with a mixture of high DPI and normal DPI monitors). This may require more work to fully enable.
* Improved stability of overlays drawn on the image - for instance the pixel value readout overlay could flicker for high frame rate cameras when the image is zoomed in the old UI
From a technical point of view, moving to the new technology stack is a welcome step in the evolution of SharpCap - it's taken about 3 to 4 weeks to make the visible changes that you can see above happen, but that's only been possible because I have been planning and preparing for this change for about 2-3 years (on and off)!
From the user point of view, initially the new UI will be hidden unless activated by a command line switch. I'm hoping that some of the adventurous among you will try it out and report any gremlins or issues that you find (there are bound to be some in a change of this size, and new sets of eyes on it will be welcome as they will spot things that I am just not seeing). After a suitable period of refinement and testing, I will change the default over to the new user interface, and then eventually remove the old one.
cheers!,
Robin
When released I'm looking forward to the command line switch.
