|
Don't know anything about the technical stuff, but
the preview looks great !
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 2004 12:38
AM
Subject: [Freevo-devel] New skin 'Green
Lounge' and some issues/questions wrt skins
Hi all,
A bit later than originally planned, but I
managed to create a first draft of my skin
called 'Green Lounge'. Still
loads of things I want to add and change, but it's a start...
As Dirk
Meyer already pointed out in his latest e-mail 'Future ideas post 1.5.0',
it tends to be a bit difficult to get an overview of what is
defined where skin-wise across
the different files and I'm quite convinced
that the 'structure' of my skin .fxd file did not improve
matters. I am
not entirely sure whether the online skin documentation and the basic.fxd
skin
file covers all issues with regard to the skin-able part of the user
interface.
At work, I usually develop my User Interface prototypes and
demos in Macromedia Flash and
Director, so I had to get rid of my
WYSI-almost-WYG attitude and switch back to 'web' mode.
What I
have to work on still:
- Colour finetuning; the green tends to be bit
too vibrant on the tv screen and the
grey may need to be adjusted
slightly.
- Background images; it would be nice to have different
background images per section,
using the same image treatment and colour
tone (I'll even make that one for the Star Wars movie
folder if you like
;).
- The player section (Music that is): It's one large grey rectangle now
and I'm struggling a bit
with the appearance of the album covers. It would
be nice if I could define a fixed size for them
that would apply to all
covers (they would have to be scaled down). Is this possible?
- Left
and Right arrows on the highlight to support 4-directional navigation (as I
pointed out in
my previous mail
(http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=5014273&forum_id=9200)
Note
that each of the 2 arrows should only be visible when the user can navigate in
that direction.
Gustavo, would you still be prepared to look into this
one?
- I lost the plot a bit on how to get the truncation of long text
string in navigation mode working (hard or soft). It would be very nice if we
could use '...' here instead. Would this be 'easy' to integrate?
As
for the missing truncation in my current skin; my .fxd code appears to be
similar to the one in blurr.fxd
(where the truncation does work), but I'm
probably overlooking something.
- The appearance of the pop-up screens.
What I would also like is some control over the dialogue texts.
I replaced
the clock image that appears occasionally (when something is being loaded) by
a dialogue screen that says 'please wait...'. It would be nice if the other
dialogues could be adjusted
to match each other in terms of syntax. Is
it difficult to provide this on skin level (without creating a
huge
mess?)
- Animations; I mentioned it already in my previous
e-mail and I read the word 'animation' in Dirk Meyer's
e-mail above with
regard to the skins. Is this what I think it is? It would be great if the
transition between the different navigation levels could be animated... (among
all the other uses for animation I have in mind)
- Layout of the detached
audio player. Possible on skin level?
What I haven't
included (yet):
- TV section; for the simple reason that I do not have
tv card in my machine yet. I hope to include
it one of these days, but it
does not have my top priority yet (cable TV isn't all that exciting in the
Netherlands where I am).
- Icons; I'm still debating on the use of them
and in particular the positioning on-screen. It would
be nice to have
section-icons (music, movies, pictures) in the top-left corner of the idlebar,
but that's were the 'detached player' currently is (would be nice if the
position of this could be
defined in the skin file as well)..
- Some
other things that don't come to mind at this moment.
I've put some
screenshots here: http://www.stormbuster.demon.nl/
Finally I've really
been thinking about the current audio player and the way it's being
controlled. Hans Meine
already mentioned this issue in his last reply to my
previous e-mail. The issue is that playback cannot be
controlled when the
audio player is in 'detached mode'. Given the availability of the arrow-based
navigation
(using left and right to switch between the different levels in
navigation mode), it would be nice if the OK (select)
key could be used to
activate items while navigating. The play, stop and pause key would also be
available in
navigation mode to control music playback if the audio player
is in 'detached mode'. We would need the addition of
a previous and next
key however. It would make sense to use the REW and FFWD keys here, where a
single press
would move to the next or previous track and a long press
would do a rewind or fast forward. These 2 keys, along
with the Play, Stop
and Pause keys would then always have the same functionality anywhere in the
UI.
In player mode the left key would switch back to navigation mode.
This way, the 'exit' key could maybe be eliminated
(this would also apply
to mplayer and the picture viewer (consistent behavior of the left key).
I'll write it out for you in a flow diagram if you're
interested.
I hope you can appreciate my attempt and it would be great
if you could help me with my issues, so
I can try and finish what I've
started.
Cheers,
Robert
|
