----- "John Schneiderman" <joh...@meent.biz> wrote: > Actually that is certainly I would be interested in. I'm actually > looking at designing it so that it's a single unified interface. It's quite > cumbersome to have to switch between multiple windows when running shows. The > players will be separate, but the search stuff will be integrated into it's > own areain the player. > > What are you ideas for singer and rotation management? I have added a > basic prompt for adding the singer.
At last! A coder, who wants to hear my design ideas! (Those are hard to come by... :-) I don't have a mockup on anything but paper, but I'll try to describe what I had in mind, and maybe I can find a UI mockup builder somewhere. Sit down, get caffeine, and don't think I'm placing an order, here. :-) (and, on re-reading this, yes, I do actually eventually answer your question about rotation management, at least in part...) === Divide your screen into 3 vertical stripes. Karaoke goes on the left, music in the middle, 'sound buttons' on the right (look at Rivendell's Sound Panel for an idea of what I mean). Each panel has a "player window" at the bottom; sort of a stripped down XMMS window. Each player shows the track name, total time, time remaining, and a play/pause icon -- or the background color changes from pastel green to pastel red, or something to show what's running. Each player has a Play button, a Pause button, a Cue button (rewind to start) and an Eject button. Each button is separate so you don't have to worry about debouncing a touchscreen (though I personally would probably go buy one of these: http://www.piengineering.com/xkeys/xkstick.php and put real labels in the keys; I like hard buttons. For each player, you have the playlist (upcoming stuff) and some spill (ejected stuff, which you might need to "uneject" -- uneject can be a softkey; preferably a popup menu that says "add as next", "add at end". For the music player, that's pretty much it, except that you need a way to add things to the play list; just a popup search window with (preferably incremental) search -- and my favorite approach is "sort all the things that *start* with the string first, then all the other things which *contain* it, like my BlackBerry does with its phonebook. On the karaoke side, though, you need a bit more control. I'm a "strict rotation" guy: the order you first sing in is the order you sing in all night; new singers go at the end. Some people modify it slightly for new singers; a common one is "after the first rotation, alternate old and new singers 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1". But you need "new singer", and you need "add song for this singer"... and I'd really like to have it keep track of each singer's requested songs, and provide an easy popup way to let the KJ handle "Oh, could I sing that second song first?" requests, as well as snapshot add-ons. (I come from a service employee background, and have little tolerance for uncooperative KJs. :-) Generally, though, the Karaoke play list should look like Drew - Put Your Head on my... (SC8463) JR - Somewhere in the Night (KH27) Billy - We Just Disagree (AH2008) And provide a soft key to pop up the singer-list management stuff if necessary. (I'm a ringer; I really care what label the track came off of, so I preserve that all the way through the system.) (I'm also looking at smart song-request terminals, probably using Fujitsu Point 1600 touchscreen pads and wifi, so external access to the singer management stuff is important to me -- using a DBMS for that instead of flat files is a plus). === Still breathing? :-) As you may imagine, I'm seriously considering trying to take it out on the road and make some money with it, so stability and ease of use in that environment is important to me as well. Things like "use windows, not dialog boxes, for management functions, so you don't lock up the realtime interface *ever*", and that sort of stuff... Cheers, -- jra Cheers, - jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Josef Stalin) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), March 24-25, 2009, San Francisco, CA -OSBC tackles the biggest issue in open source: Open Sourcing the Enterprise -Strategies to boost innovation and cut costs with open source participation -Receive a $600 discount off the registration fee with the source code: SFAD http://p.sf.net/sfu/XcvMzF8H _______________________________________________ Pykaraoke-discuss mailing list Pykaraoke-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pykaraoke-discuss
