Hello,

We are running the latest Elan (3.8.1) on a Mac OS 10.6.2 and on Mac OS 10.5.8. On both machines Elan presents a problem with the space bar and with the "play/pause the media" command.

1. The space bar (w/o modifier) seems to repeat always the command that has just been clicked before. Is that intended? At least it is not editable in the Shortcut editor. I'd love to assign it to the "play/pause the media" command.

2. The ctrl+space shortcut for the "play/pause the media" command doesn't work. We are not able to assign it any other shortcut either. I tried every possible combination, but to no avail. All the other shortcuts work fine.

Has anybody else encountered that problem? Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Best,

Jan

I can't reproduce the problems on my 10.5.8 system.
Could it be that there is a conflict with a system setting in System Preferences->Keyboard and Mouse? Otherwise I wouldn't know.

-Han

Hello Han,

I've tried all kinds of things and came up with the following:

The problem of the non editable Play/Pause shortcut is due to the box "Use Mac look and feel." If it is checked the Play/Pause shortcut would not work no matter what combination it is set to.
First I thought it was the Media framework but it behaves all the same in Cocoa QT and Java QT. I don't know what the "Mac look and feel" actually does (I just had it checked because I'm on a mac and like how my mac looks and feels ... anyway), actually I couldn't tell a difference in the appearance of ELAN with the box unchecked (I have the "use screen menu bar" checked, so according to the manual this should also trigger the mac look and feel behavior. However the screen bar seems not to interfere with the play/pause button problem, so I can leave it on).
Alright, so that would be solved!

However, I could not solve the other problem, that of the spacebar repeating commands.
The thing is: I would love to set the spacebar to do my play/pause (without ctrl as ctrl space changes my input source globally). I can do it now (in the "nonmac look and feel") but it would work only as long as I don't click with the mouse. As soon as I click some button with the mouse then the spacebar stops working as my play/pause key and starts the old behavior of repeating my last mouse click.
I think this is due to the mac behavior of using the space bar to "click" buttons that are preselected for example in dialog windows –- like in a file saving dialog, normally OK is shaded all blue while Cancel is only circled blue. Pressing enter would hit ok, while pressing the spacebar would hit Cancel (I don't know the technical terms for that behavior).

In ELAN when you click a button of the media control it remains selected with the blue circle around. And even if you click somewhere else, e.g. on the waveform or on an annotation, the button remains selected. Do you think you can change that behavior so that the buttons would not remain selected?

Thanks for having a look at the issue (and thanks for all the work you put into ELAN anyway) ...

best,

Jan

Ok, I see, I can partially recreate the problem. On my system it does not depend on the Look and Feel setting. I can select the Space bar for Play/Pause and it works until one of the control buttons in the main window has been pressed. Clicking somewhere in the Timeline viewer deselects all buttons and the Space bar functions again for Play/Pause. It might be possible to always deselect all buttons after one has been clicked in order to circumvent the default spacebar behavior; I don't know if it is possible to disable it on the system level.
It is something very platform specific and even very "spacebar specific", which makes it kind of nasty to fix (unless it was a matter of a simple setting). For the time being a solution might be to ONLY use the keyboard shortcuts of the buttons and never click on them?

About the Look & Feel: if you deselect both the "MacOS Look And Feel" and the "Screen menu bar" option and relaunch ELAN (crucial) you'll see a quite different user interface design. It doesn't solve the spacebar problem though.

-Han

I've thought of only using keyboard shortcuts and not clicking at all. Probably the best solution for now.
But on my system I found one thing to be different from what you write: Clicking on the timeline does not unselect a previously pressed button. Only when I click on a tier, and then on the timeline it gets unselected.
However, it would be great if the buttons would not remain selected in future releases.

But you are right. Now I can't see a difference with the different looks. I've relaunched ELAN with both Mac Feel and Mac Screenbar turned off, and both on, and now it behaves all the same. Maybe I've confused something.

Actually on my system there is a different problem with the non mac look: The video preview floats over everything, i.e. the File, Edit and Annotation menus are hidden by the videoframe. That's probably not intended. (I run Mac OS 10.6.2)

Anyway, thanks for your help,

best,

Jan