Can we improve the layering in Quelea and pannel control, and why they are related.

[JessyJP]

What I mean is, in software like pro-presenter they have about 6 layers which act independently and simultaneously.
We can kind of do it in quelea too but it's kind of cumbersome.
Obviously, the most basic ones are background and text. Then there are the alerts too. But it's not easy to dynamically switch between background presets on the fly.
Also, real estate can be kind of expensive sometimes, dockable and show/hide view panels can help with that.

Say, I just want to keep a thin strip with the current live song sections and maybe the background preset sections, on the right of the screen while having, OBS, Reaper, and X-Air-Edit ( for example) on the other parts of the screen in a live event while I am travelling with my laptop.

Point is, hide/show/dock (maybe resize) could help introduce new panels which in turn let us focus on the layers we want to control exclusively. ... also decouple the text formatting layer from the actual background video layer.
I.e. change the video but not the formatting on the fly.

[HeyITGuyFixIt]

I had brought this up to some degree in #343

[JessyJP]

I think there is a middle ground somewhere here. We don't really need as many layers as with pro-presenter.
Other software can help us layer more things but we should discuss what the most basic and essential layer system we can implement is.
I think: main layer theme(text format) comprised of { (L1) background + (L2) text } with (L3) overlay (image or video) + (L4) alerts. Even without (L3) it's already plenty. We just need some layer independence in the theme layer.

[berry120]

I'm all for this sort of thing in theory, but similar to the point I brought up in #343 it adds a lot of complexity and would need to be thought through quite carefully, with mockups etc. and tested thoroughly before we could roll something like that out. Technically this could also be quite a challenge to implement reliably cross-platform in JavaFX.

It may be something we're able to improve on in the future, but realistically it's not likely to be something we're able to dedicate a serious amount of time & resource to any time soon.

[JessyJP]

Speaking of which what the current priorities are?
I mean the top 2 or 3 features we can expect next year.
Obviously, the software is quite complete at this point, is there any annoying-screeching bug that needs to be addressed at the moment?

[HeyITGuyFixIt]

@JessyJP I think #547 is pretty big right now. Videos can't play.

[berry120]

Speaking of which what the current priorities are? I mean the top 2 or 3 features we can expect next year. Obviously, the software is quite complete at this point, is there any annoying-screeching bug that needs to be addressed at the moment?

Biggest priority by far is the issue that's causing no video to be available on Ubuntu with 2022, that needs addressing ASAP and is proving a very annoying one to fix.

Beyond that you're correct - the software is reasonably complete and while there's bits and pieces that we'll look to add as they make sense, there's no other critical showstoppers that I'm aware of that we need to be looking at. There are definitely some big pieces on the "wishlist" I'd like to look at if I get time, but time is proving a rare commodity at the moment!

[JessyJP]

Could you (or anyone) do a little test checkup to see if they are getting the song transpose bugs reported here:
https://quelea.discourse.group/t/just-couple-of-small-things-bugs/895