Intone (0.20 - alpha release) Elementary based mplayer frontend

[c_c]

Hi,
@Treviño - Thank you for the feedback and the patch. I'll try and incorporate as much as I can / understand (my e knowledge is pretty scratchy considering this is the first app I've ever written that uses any e). Right now also looking at:-

 a) Bug fixes - like the fact that if you first select a song and play it, the playing subroutine does not update the song_index. (That's done though.) So, if you press play next - the app plays the second song in the playlist - instead of the song next to the song you selected.

 b) GUI / Usability improvements - Like an album art view (minus the album art till I figure out a better way to get art from the net) and a lyrics view which seems easier right now. Also, icons on the buttons, button and list size improvements and so on.

 c) Any show stoppers as far as performance is considered.


I'd suggest you to use as many ecore_* function as you can to use the e loop without freezing your app. 

I think I'm using pretty much all e functions - except those that handle the database. The db functions might be slower - thats one area that could do with some help. Can you point out areas that could be improved using e functions instead? I don't even know that there are e functions for a lot of things :-) I'll read through a few header files to see what I can pick up. 


I'd add just a "tango note" and a "tango folder with note" for the songs and the albums without a specific cover. Use that instead. 

Nice Idea. Will try that as soon as I can.


>Can I reduce the height to say 1.5 text line - 2 text line?

This generally is done automatically based on the elementary finger size and on the scale factor. But I've seen that it can change also if the icon used is quite big. However I didn't see that running intone in my
PC (using illume BTW). 

I can't seem to change the height using scale factor on my PC. Maybe I ought to try it on the FR too.


(BTW it works only in Illume WM, not in my standard system due to the fact that the window collapse withoutconsidering the preset evas size at all!) 

Yup ! Thats exactly what happened to me. OK - so I should try it on the FR. I have the code for it commented out in gui.c. Will try it on the FR ASAP.


Dialog-like windows examples are in the Elementary wiki, maybe you could use them.

I actually wrote a sub-routine (popup_alert in gui.c) to handle a Yes/No kind of dialog. I think I got stuck at passing the value back - because the widow does not grab focus for the duration of the dialog. How do I do that? Must be pretty simple - just that my ecore knowledge is almost non-existent right now :-D


Ah, why don't you use the ecore_exe_pipe_run function for controlling mplayer? 

Ha ! Sorry for being repetitive - but I didn't know it existed! Thanks for pointing that out.


The attached patch (intone-seek-fix.patch) does the work. 

Thanks. Will check that out. Hopefully, thats one thing struck off my list!


By the way actually the slider shows the position in seconds; why not using the percentage value? 

Well, I can try that and see how it feels.


Ah, I forgot to put an  if (timer1) before ecore_timer_freeze and ecore_timer_thaw. Anyway I think that the slider should be hidden if nothing is playing...

OK. Can try that out too - hiding the slider. Will give me one more line too. 

I intend releasing a new version as soon as I can get these things done. There are a few ideas I have, though, that remain unimplemented:-

  1. How can I hide the playlist and instead replace it with an image and some labels (for the album art view)? Can't I avoid the need to use a pager? This way - I also get to write lesser code (and save memory). 
  I'm thinking that if I could control the visibility of a few Evas objects (based on the user clicking the view button) I could have all my views (playlist, albumart and lyrics) in one window itself. Can that be done?

  2. Can I have a slider kind of menu coming in from the sides/bottom? I know it can be done using evas - but I don't know how. That way I can shift out the top 3 buttons (and more that I will add later) from the view so increasing my view area - and yet have them available for use.

  3. I need to add some colours to the buttons (apart from the icons). How do I do that? Do you think that will help - or should it be done by making a new theme?

Thanks again - everybody - for the suggestions. I'm assuming from the lack of bug-reports that either there aren't many show stoppers - or that people haven't got the time to let me know about them yet. Hope it's the first reason though :-)

Any / more feedback is really welcome. So go ahead!
-- 
View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Intone-%280.20---alpha-release%29-Elementary-based-mplayer-frontend-tp2587826p2596701.html
Sent from the Openmoko Community mailing list archive at Nabble.com.