Here is a summary of the problems I was required to solve when adapting Custom Browse to iPeng. Most of the issues here looks pretty related to the browsedb.html page in the standard skin, the reason for this is of course that the purpose of the Custom Browse plugin is to create custom browse pages in addition to those available in SC as standard.
Joerg, just to make sure you don't interpret these issues as complaints. The iPeng skin is currently the best remote control interface I've ever seen for the SqueezeBox (including the Jive prototype), so I really don't mind if it requires me to adjust my plugins a bit. 1. There isn't enough space to show all the mixer icons on the iPeng skin, so I had to implement a single mixer icon that lists all available mixers when you select it. 2. There isn't enough space to show both add and play buttons on the iPeng skin, so instead it just shows an add button. I think the suggestion from Joerg is that hitting the title or cover art icon should result in a "play" action. 3. The iPeng skin has support for a vertical alpha letter page navigation bar (corresponds to alphamap in the standard skins). The reason is two as I see it: - It looks similar to the built-in music player of the iPhone/iPod Touch - By having a horizontal page navigation the letters can be displayed with more space in-between making it eaiser to access the right letter on the touch screen. This caused some problem in my plugins since the corresponding component doesn't exists in the standard skins. There is basically no components available yet neither in the iPeng skin for this vertical bar so I basically had to re-implement it in my plugin. The page navigation bar is displayed as: - Standard horizontal bar with page numbers if the items isn't alphabetic sorted - Vertical bar with letters if the items are alphabetic sorted 4. To make the plugin look good in the iPeng skin it is important that you put everything inside standard component, if you try to use a <p>, <div> or <span> it will often result in that it doesn't look to fit the style of the rest of the page. This might be a stylesheet issue, but I'm not completely sure. 5. The iPeng skin has a "move to top" button in the footer which makes sense in the iPeng skin but doesn't make a lot of sense in the new default skin where we like to avoid extra clutter. There is currently no component available for this button, so my plugin code currently contains a copy of the necessary code. 6. Custom Browse normaly displays a header on top each browse pages, for example when you have selected an artists and lists its albums it shows information about the artist in the header. Here is a sample: http://erland.homeip.net/arkiv/slimserver/custombrowse1.png Anyway, the problem with this header is that it takes up too much space on the iPeng skin. Currently I don't show the header at all but I'm thinking that it might be a good idea to be able to access it by clicking a button/link or something similar. 7. There is not enough space available to show complete titles when they are long, the current solution is that long titles are truncated with a "..." at the end. This is obviously something that you don't want to happen with the skins you use on a standard computer. There is a truncate javascript function available through the iPeng skin, but the plugin currently has to decide what to truncate and how many characters to truncate it to. 8. There is currently no standard way of handling the "Sort by" list box. This looks differently in all the skins and on top of that I like to replace the contents in it with my own and their corresponding links. The result is that I currently have to handle this differently in pretty much every skin available. I haven't done anything regarding this in the iPeng skin yet, but I know that it will be another variant in addition to the ones already available from the other skins. 9. Some of the stuff in the iPeng skin is currently based on tables, while most of the rest of the skins is based on divs and spans. The result is that it is harder to get a single implementation to work with all skins when you like to place divs/spans inside your plugin page. However, I've managed to get this to work pretty good in Custom Browse with the iPeng skin without having to revert to use table/td/tr elements. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.homeip.net) 'My download page' (http://erland.homeip.net/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.homeip.net/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=41697 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/plugins
