IE refreshed the page and lost my extensive reply, so pardon me if it sounds like I'm in a bad mood, here, because I am. ;-)
Xeron: How on earth can you call it protracker if it doesn't have a badly designed custom GUI?
Next you'll be expecting every option in the sample editor to work without crashing!
Haha! I still have to use Degrader to get it to work on my A1200, otherwise the screen modulo gets messed up. Will that feature be emulated in PT2?
Neko: Let it be known that Skins Suck (tm). They reduce the usability of applications by radically changing their interfaces, making them undocumentable and unintuitive for modest or novice use.
Indeed. Skins are used to make things look nice, not to improve functionality. Hence, the term "skin" -- a very thin, cosmetic top layer that offers little to no protection for what lies underneath.
Neko: OctaMED kicked ProTracker's ass for that when they moved to a GadTools GUI. Shame it was GadTools 
OctaMED 5 was only OK. Better organized than Protracker, but ugly as sin. I liked the original shareware OctaMED best, but it had its own problems.
I've always felt that what the world really needs is not a new OS, but a new GUI system, since that's the part of the computer that's the most inconsitent, badly designed, and most unportable. Java tries to offer a standardized GUI toolkit, but it sucks. It amazes me how few developers ignore the fact that an interface toolkit itself needs a good interface.
That's what I want to do when I better understand effective application architecture. Right now, aside from some C, Perl, and HTML, I only know how to use graphics tools. ;-)
Lempkee: MUI is slow and retarded...
I have little experience with MUI, but it seems to me that it was designed to take a PC interface and boil it down so it ran on Amiga hardware. Full featured, pretty, but not terribly practical. Then again, I don't recall ever seeing a GUI toolkit I actually liked.
Ruben: Skins are a matter of opinion. For instance, I find Octamed really awkward to use, whereas I feel at home with ProTracker.
If you grew up on ProTracker, of course you're comfortable with it. But keep in mind that this is the 21st century, and we have a hell of a lot more hardware and power than we did 10 years ago. The learning curve of ProTracker is very steep, and some careful re-designing could help immensely. Personally, I think trackers these days should use an interface resembling SawCutter 2.0, using horizontal graphical tracks, rather than vertical tracks filled with numbers, surrounded by integrated subpanels.
Ruben: Would Winamp and Windows MP go well without skin support? I don't think so.
WinAmp isn't so bad, though it is slow. MediaPlayer9 is awful. Unresponsive, and lacking in many standard GUI mnemonics that let you know the application knows what you are doing, like, darkening a movable slider when you click on it. It's very hard to make skins work properly unless you understand EVERYTHING that makes an effective GUI toolkit work properly. Very few people have that level of interface knowledge, and fewer people have the time to implement such systems properly when they actually have to write the application code, too!
Ruben: Also, it allows portability, which is important for this ProTracker. And sorry, I really don't think that abstracting MFC and MUI can be done 'easily', not to mention X if you want to support Linux (or you must be a REALLY good coder...)
Understood. I personally feel writing the GUI takes the longest time when making an app, so it's no wonder programmers hate doing it. Take a look at the GUI code for a simple text editor that DOESN'T use a GUI toolkit, but tries to look and function like an ordinary windowed application. What a horrible, bloated mess.
Neko: If I wanted to live in 1985 and reminisce and nostalgise about stuff like fixed-size user interfaces, skinning, "demo fonts" that look "cool", 4x4 pixel torus spinning around making me get a migraine, I would live in 1985 and do all those things.
This is an Amiga forum. You don't expect to find people living in the 21st century here, do you? :-)
Seriously, the reason I like getting nostalgic about the Amiga, is because rather than constantly looking towards the future, and getting into bigger and bigger messes, it helps to occasionally look to the past and realize what mistakes were made. If you try to write a critical 20-page essay about the differences between the ProTracker interface and a modern Windows app, you'll understand a lot more about interface design than just doodling haphazardly in Photoshop.
Then again, audio apps are infamous for horrible interfaces. Take a look at all the synthetic audio generators and post-recording filters used in the high-end PC audio industry. Oh, they look great because their icons, panels, and bevels have been carefully drawn and textured in Photoshop, but the functionality is crap. It really makes me wonder how companies can sell these tools at $200-500 a pop and stay in business.
And, as you have realised, it is very very VERY
important to keep the layout PT like, as all tracker musicians are very used to that old
interface. I know, as I am the organiser of an Amiga music crew (Up Rough).
All musicians in Up Rough dislikes, and refuse to work with octamed as they think it's GUI is weird
and uncomfortable.
Only usability testing will prove whether an interface is well designed or not. I also find OctaMED very awkward, but that's because the interfaces in both OctaMED and ProTracker suck. ;-)
The tracker interface, in general, needs a makeover. We no longer need to think about things like limited numbers of voices, sample cutoff, and stereo seperation. More sophisticated mixing techniques and support for stereo sounds and OGG-encoded samples could make using a tracker a heck of a lot easier and more effecint. Note, though, that OctaMED's attempt to make a tracker look more like standard musical notation was pretty pathetic. Admit it, many tracker users don't know beans about musical notation... myself included. ;-)
Technology evolves. Might as well try some new things to take advantage of it. Otherwise, all you're really doing is making a Windows/OS4 port of an ancient music tool very few people use anymore.
Propellerheads Reason springs to mind as one of the most intuitive interfaces i've ever used, and it's hardly a "standard UI".
I've been meaning to try that for a while. Although, I tried ReBirth a while ago and it really turned me off. I'm more of a sample recorder and composer than a DJ, these days. :-D
