UI improvement suggestions – Rid the Task Bar

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  • #9965
    Xulle
    Participant

    One of the most annoying perks of Magic Dosbox is that the taskbar is ugly distracting, and always gets in the way. This flaw is even more severe in android tablets (I have a Samsung) on landscape mode where not only it reduces precious vertical estate, since tablet taskbars also serves as app launchers after Android 13/One UI 5, it also makes you unintentionally switch apps.

    Currently the only option to hide the task bar is to flip-through the options manually on the in-game menu after every single game launch, which is more of a chore rather than a viable solution.

    I understand the taskbar brings up the menu, which has a launcher for the essential on-screen keyboard, therefore I have the following suggestion:

    1. Create a keyboard toogle
    In the current GUI the keyboard is layered inside the options menu that requires you to call up via the back-button, which is cumbersome given how frequent we need to switch keyboard on&off when using the app without a physical control device. A quick toogle(or better, a swipe) insitead of the “back-button to menu” would a quicker solution.

    2. Merge other options inside On-Screen Keyboard
    Since all other options on the menu has far less usage than the keyboard, an icon shortcut on top of the keyboard for other options will help us priortise usage without complicating the UI.

    And lastly, I would ask that if you can reconsider the “frameskip=2”, it might help out with performance on mid-end devices from 10 years ago, it’s really more or less of a degrade of user experience today.

    Thank you

    #9966
    admin
    Keymaster

    Hi,

    You can hide task bar from general settings/adjust screen menu.

    To make keyboard toggleable add special widget on the screen. Or deadly strike/combo widget and bind it to swipes.

    If you run win95 games then frameskip is important. Or there are still devices with cheap cpu. It is unbelievable, but it is truth. Late dos games may need it on these devices.

    #9977
    Miker
    Participant

    I agree, you do not have to hit the back button to get the keyboard. Use the built-in widget you can get the MDB keyboard and the in phone keyboard, on mine I either use MDB keyboard or hackers keyboard, which I also use with lbochs cpu emulate.

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