The observable-hooks package provides hooks that do exactly the same thing as these custom React hooks I had written a while back. (even the names are the same, wow)
Co-authored-by: Hugh Nimmo-Smith <hughns@element.io>
* Keep tiles in a stable order
This introduces a new layer of abstraction on top of MediaViewModel: TileViewModel, which gives us a place to store data relating to tiles rather than their media, and also generally makes it easier to reason about tiles as they move about the call layout. I have created a class called TileStore to keep track of these tiles.
This allows us to swap out the media shown on a tile as the spotlight speaker changes, and avoid moving tiles around unless they really need to jump between the visible/invisible regions of the layout.
* Don't throttle spotlight updates
Since we now assume that the spotlight and grid will be in sync (i.e. an active speaker in one will behave as an active speaker in the other), we don't want the spotlight to ever lag behind due to throttling. If this causes usability issues we should maybe look into making LiveKit's 'speaking' indicators less erratic first.
* Make layout shifts due to a change in speaker less surprising
Although we try now to avoid layout shifts due to the spotlight speaker changing wherever possible, a spotlight speaker coming from off screen can still trigger one. Let's shift the layout a bit more gracefully in this case.
* Improve the tile ordering tests
* Maximize the spotlight tile in portrait layout
* Tell tiles whether they're actually visible in a more timely manner
* Fix test
* Fix speaking indicators logic
* Improve readability of marbles
* Fix test case
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Co-authored-by: Hugh Nimmo-Smith <hughns@element.io>
Catching two accessibility issues along the way: we were putting the wrong accessible labels on the 'expand' button, and even the off-screen pages of the spotlight tile were being exposed to accessibility technologies rather than hidden.
We need to be consistent about whether we import matrix-js-sdk from `src` or
`lib`, otherwise we get two copies of matrix-js-sdk, and everything explodes.
The buttons were scrolling with the view instead of always being visible in a fixed location on the tile, and the indicators were not adopting the correct width.
The Compound design tokens package is now set up to generate React components for every icon, so we no longer need to use our more error-prone method of importing the SVGs.
Includes the mobile UX optimizations and the tweaks we've made to cut down on wasted space, but does not yet include the change to embed the spotlight tile within the grid.
react-rxjs is the library we've been using to connect our React components to view models and consume observables. However, after spending some time with react-rxjs, I feel that it's a very heavy-handed solution. It requires us to sprinkle <Subscribe /> and <RemoveSubscribe /> components all throughout the code, and makes React go through an extra render cycle whenever we mount a component that binds to a view model. What I really want is a lightweight React hook that just gets the current value out of a plain observable, without any extra setup. Luckily the observable-hooks library with its useObservableEagerState hook seems to do just that—and it's more actively maintained, too!
Here I've implemented an MVP for the new unified grid layout, which scales smoothly up to arbitrarily many participants. It doesn't yet have a special 1:1 layout, so in spotlight mode and 1:1s, we will still fall back to the legacy grid systems.
Things that happened along the way:
- The part of VideoTile that is common to both spotlight and grid tiles, I refactored into MediaView
- VideoTile renamed to GridTile
- Added SpotlightTile for the new, glassy spotlight designs
- NewVideoGrid renamed to Grid, and refactored to be even more generic
- I extracted the media name logic into a custom React hook
- Deleted the BigGrid experiment
