Change how icons disappear when hovering over an icon in connect

[Mike]

Could you change it so the app icon doesn't disappear when hovering over an action?  It would be great if the icon would just highlight or glow with the play icon overlaying on top.  I can't tell you how many times I go to click on an icon and then move my mouse off of it just to make sure I'm clicking on the correct action.  There's just something jarring about it.  Thanks.

[Mattias Lagergren]

8 hours ago, Mike said:

Could you change it so the app icon doesn't disappear when hovering over an action?  It would be great if the icon would just highlight or glow with the play icon overlaying on top.  I can't tell you how many times I go to click on an icon and then move my mouse off of it just to make sure I'm clicking on the correct action.  There's just something jarring about it.  Thanks.

Thank you for this feedback! I just want to mention that ftrack Connect is actually an open repository and we welcome pull-requests for feature improvements like this: https://bitbucket.org/ftrack/ftrack-connect :-)

Here is the action item file that takes care of this logic: https://bitbucket.org/ftrack/ftrack-connect/src/a400e62776f24591c86ed131fd82993e3c14c25f/source/ftrack_connect/ui/widget/action_item.py?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default

[Mike]

Great, I'd love to try it out!  I've never contributed to a project like this before, so I'm unsure how to go about overcoming the errors I'm getting.  I gave it a shot by forking the repo then using Visual Studio to create a solution from the existing code.  That all seemed to work and when I pressed Start it ran setup.py.  The first time I ran the code, the console was filling up with info and things were being installed all over. After a while I got an error, something related to C not working, but the python installation part was successful.  Here is what comes up in Visual Studio when I try to run setup.py now:

usage: setup.py [global_opts] cmd1 [cmd1_opts] [cmd2 [cmd2_opts] ...]

   or: setup.py --help [cmd1 cmd2 ...]

   or: setup.py --help-commands

   or: setup.py cmd --help



error: no commands supplied

I'm not sure what this means, I haven't edited anything.  Any tips on how to get this working? Thanks!

[Mattias Lagergren]

Hey Mike,

I would recommend looking at this guide: http://ftrack-connect.rtd.ftrack.com/en/stable/installing.html#building-from-source and install it from a terminal.

And utilising a virtualenv (https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/stable/) to avoid polluting your system's python environment.

Since you want to develop you can also run "python setup.py develop", i.e. "develop" instead of "install".

[Mike]

I ran "python setup.py develop", so now I have ftrack-connect listed in my python environment like this:

ftrack-connect(0.1.25, d:\path\to\ftrack-connect\source)

I'm going to do more research today, but here are some questions that I have so far.  Sorry if they're basic python questions:

1. In order to edit the code in an IDE like Visual Studio and connect to source control, do I create the project at the root folder (ftrack-connect), or at the source folder?  
2. Is this new project considered a python project?
3. How do I run this new edited ftrack connect from a module? 
4. Should all development be launched from a terminal, or can I use things like virtualenv from inside a python module?  I'd just like to automate the process as much as possible (instead of manually typing commands every time I want to test something)

Thanks!

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Answers so far:

3. For some reason, ftrack connect wasn't picking up that I added the legacy API path to the PYTHONPATH. I found a solution here, http://eosrei.net/articles/2014/06/python-paths-subprocesspopen-apache-modwsgi-and-virtualenv, that solved the problem.

Here is a basic example of what I ended up doing:

env = os.environ.copy()

env['PYTHONPATH'] = ';'.join(sys.path) + ';path/to/ftrack_python_api'

subprocess.Popen(['python', '-m', 'ftrack_connect'], env=env)

4. Walkthrough on how to use virtualenv in Visual Studio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KY1GEOo3qy0&feature=youtu.be

 

[Mattias Lagergren]

I'm afraid that I'm not familiar enough with Visual studio to help you.

Running connect like "python -m ftrack_connect" is correct. As for the the legacy api you need to download and unzip the python-api.tar file. Then put the result on the PYTHONPATH.

In os x I do: "export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/unpackaged/folder"