Rockbox

  • Status Closed
  • Percent Complete
    100%
  • Task Type Patches
  • Category User Interface → Themes
  • Assigned To No-one
  • Operating System Generic RaaA
  • Severity Low
  • Priority Very Low
  • Reported Version Daily build (which?)
  • Due in Version Undecided
  • Due Date Undecided
  • Votes
  • Private
Attached to Project: Rockbox
Opened by St. - 2011-09-01
Last edited by funman - 2012-03-05

FS#12254 - RaaA cabbiev2 [Full Touch Application Port]

This serves as the new home for my theme project… This is carried over from my forum thread, now deprecated:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,28083.0.html

r00001:

- Remove “Touch Tabs” that mislead users into believing we supported touch gestures (namely screen swiping)
- Now using items already present on the WPS to launch contextual pop-ups.
- Touch the volume icon to launch the volume slider, or long press to mute/un-mute.
- Volume touch slider pop-up now respects when its in use, and won’t disappear on you when trying to adjust the volume.
- The HW volume rock will also launch the volume touch slider pop-up, but for a minimal timeout period. Volume changes initiated with the volume rocker will not time out whilst being manually adjusted with the touch slider now either.

Touch UI:
-Extended touch regions to be as large as possible, to accommodate both large fingers, and to tolerate some shifting off the touch element when changing values.
-Brand spanking new “touch screen soft-lock” initiated in the WPS by pressing and holding the “Now Playing” title bar. Press and hold again to release the soft-lock.
-Launch the “Files - Quickscreen - Context” pop-up by touching the album art if present, or the current track metadata if album art is not present.

Visual elements:
- Title-bar system completely reimplemented.
- Refined alignment in all areas.
- Shiny new anti-aliased fonts.
- New bitmaps in a lot of cases.
- Fix two graphical errors present in the 480×800 port.
- Allow for RTL langs and (presently limited) translation.
- Make textual viewports RTL aware.

Metadata display:
-Metadata display tweaks try to avoid blank lines in cases where metadata isn’t present, reshuffle with “sane” conditions based on the presence of the next field if something we expect to be present is missing and fall back to a known present default if all else fails.

General:
- Bring it up to current syntax and remove headers, footers, white space, and (now) needless comments used in theme files during testing/review.
- Massive code clean-up in a lot of places.

[Saint]

Closed by  funman
2012-03-05 07:24
Reason for closing:  Out of Date
Additional comments about closing:   Warning: Undefined array key "typography" in /home/rockbox/flyspray/plugins/dokuwiki/inc/parserutils.php on line 371 Warning: Undefined array key "camelcase" in /home/rockbox/flyspray/plugins/dokuwiki/inc/parserutils.php on line 407

moved to github

St. commented on 2011-09-01 08:37

r00002

Changelist:
- Remove fonts used only for testing during the theme’s creation.

[Saint]

Some quite niggardly issues that I noticed:

1) Why does the Next Track text change from bold to non-bold depending on whether AA is present?
2) The highlight on the Context menu icon looks different to that on the Quickscreen menu icon, so it looks perhaps out of place
3) Can the volume icon change to something different on mute? Right now, the state of being mute looks identical to being at -99dB so it’d be nice to have something to identify which state the player is actually in.
4) I really like the added text when the screen is locked
5) Probably not currently possible, but if the current song text is bolded and the Next Track not, then could this carry over to the playlist browser too as an extra visual indicator of which song is currently
playing.

You’re pretty much there, IMHO, just a few tweaks needed to make it perfect!

I like this simplified theme much better then the previous rev. with the two sidebar things. I’d probably prefer the ‘folder QS C’ popup to be triggered by the short press on next track info, to line it up with where it pops up and free up the short press AA/current track for something else. i like the AA/current track short press for playlist and long press for context, but, you’ll never please everyone, thats why its nice to be able to customize your own WPS(which i’m doing with this one).

Nick, you’re probably good at those ‘find whats different’ games, i would have never noticed the highlighting on those icons. The font thing is quite noticeable and probably should be consistent between AA and no AA views.

I’d like a resumeplayback button on the SBS in order to not have to navigate from the folder view to the main menu to get back to the wps. i have tested this successfully but you don’t really have any more room for such a thing on your sbs, i’ll just throw out one of the tools that i don’t use for mine(like repeat mode) and replace it with that. it’ll just save me one click but worth it to me. right now, to get back from folder browsing to wps, you have to tap the status bar and then now playing from the main menu. or maybe you could change the function of tapping the status bar to kick you to the wps vs main menu(unless you are in the wps already of coarse) most hardware targets simply press play to do this.

.my 2 cents.

St. commented on 2011-09-03 03:28

Small note about the AA’s touch screen function:

Short press is configurable, insofar as its function is “Hotkey”, “Playlist Viewer” just so happens to be the default WPS hotkey function.
Long press is hard-coded as a quick way to bring up the context menu.

Thanks for testing guys, and for the input. Its appreciated. I’ll look into the issues raised.

PS: Nick, a shiny new “mute” icon is in the works and will be in r00003 ;)

[Saint]

Some thoughs:

- The scrollbar on the left looks somewhat out of place because (at least on my device) Android puts the scrollbar to the right and is much smaller. I’ve tried configuring it to the right with 10px which looks ok (480×800 screen). This unfortunately causes the lists to not being indented compared to the title. Making the title entry stand out more (or moving the viewport for the list a bit to the right) might make that look nicer. Then we only need an option to show the scrollbar only on scrolling :)
- The popups for volume and browser buttons are nice. A possibility to pop them down manually instead of waiting for a timeout would be nice.
- The popups hide the current track information, but I’m usually more interested in that than the album art. How about moving them up so they overlap (partly) with the album art?
- I still think the button area is a bit too crowded – how about combining repeat and shuffle into a single icon and having a popup to toggle them?
- is it possible to go to the wps with a button? Would be nice given that the playback controls are shown outside the list.
- the border around the album art is nice but looks a bit strange if the album art image is not rectangular. Though I guess that issue can be ignored since album art not being rectangular is a really rare case.

St. commented on 2011-09-05 09:12

Dominik,

- Is the scrollbar, right justified or no, actually usable at 10px wide?
One of the reasons I made it match the icon width was because when (in one of its many past lives) this theme had the context pop-up tabs, people had incredible difficulty launching them on some devices and their width exceeded 24px be quite some amount.
I’m assuming you’re just using kinetic scrolling and using the scrollbar as a visual indicator for your position in the lists?

- Context popups are placed above the metadata for a reason….they aren’t drawn over top of the metadata, but rather temporarily replace them to prevent drawing issues.
I *could* draw the pop-ups over the AA, but the result would not be predictable at all. For instance if there was a fullscreen update, or the AA changed (if the current track changed) while the popup was up, there would be no way to guarantee that the pop-up was drawn over top of the AA. In all likelihood the AA would be drawn over the pop-up if the pop-up was up whilst the AA was redrawn.
I also did it this was as I feel the positioning of the pop-ups where they are now make it easy to reach with a small movement of the thumb.

- I am working on a way to minimize the pop-ups if you’re done using them and don’t want to wait for the timeout to expire…that being said, it is my feeling that the timeout is low enough for that to not be of much concern.
However, I would like for there to be a way to minimize them on demand, even if the timeout is negligible.

- It is possible to go to the .wps wth a button, however…I’m wondering what the “right” way to do this is.
(Suggestions welcome)

[Saint]

St. commented on 2011-09-05 16:06

r00003

Changelist:
- Fix some OOB touchscreen defines in 240×320 (not an issue, really, but needed fixing four housekeeping’s sake)
- Fix an error that slipped in where long press on the titlebar in the .sbs of 480×800 was mistakenly “contextmenu” as opposed to “quickscreen”.
- Small alignment fixes to both.

[Saint]

St. commented on 2011-09-05 16:07

s/four/for/

Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but I remember that when I selected ‘Default’ theme in the ‘browse themes’ option within rockbox for the older versions on the original thread, it added a ‘Shut Down’ option to the main menu.
Is the ‘shut down’ option no longer available with the updated theme? I uninstalled rockbox first, then installed the latest dailybuild and then copied the folders over as usual for the theme. Thanks

I realised it might be a problem with the theme not being compatible with the latest daily build r30551-110915. Would someone mind telling me which is the latest build I can use? It’s a shame the tracker doesn’t include some info on which rockbox build themes are compatible with…

Last comment. Uninstalled rockbox, deleted the rockbox folders on my device. Reinstalled latest daily build r30551-110915 and loaded it up once. Exited (force shut down via task manager), copied the folders for the theme (r00003) into the rockbox folder and selected cabbiev2 in the ‘Browse Theme Files” folder once I opened Rockbox. Is that everything I should be doing? Note, there were no other themes available (e.g. default, failsafe) which is different to before. Still missing the ‘shut down’ option in the main menu and I’d be interested to know if this was removed intentionally or if I’m not installing the theme properly. That aside, I’m now going to spend the next hour or so enjoying the new theme and seeing how it compares to the depracted ‘RaaA - Default Theme Candidate’ I’ve been enjoying for the last month. Thanks for your hard work and creativity :)

AFAIK, the Shut down option is based on the build that you are using (i.e. it’s added via a patch before compiling RB) so the theme wouldn’t add that option on its own.

The patch is in the builds I do, see the forum for the link

St. commented on 2011-09-21 05:20

The reason it may be messing up is the “resources on sdcard” patch if I remember correctly, and there are situations that can cause rockbox to write over the theme because it shares the naming sceme “cabbiev2” and the theme .cfg gets replaced. You can either not use resources on sdcard (an installation will now look for rockbox-info.txt in /sdcard/rockbox/ before deciding whether or not it will put its resources on the sdcard.), or rename the theme .cfg to something else so it doesn’t get replaced in these situations.

[Saint]

St. commented on 2011-09-21 05:40

r00004

Changelist:
-Add a 320×480 Port!
(I don’t expect it to be perfect (regarding alignment, please comment if anything is busted or looks weird)
-Minor graphical changes to all.
-Added the option to reset the repeat and shuffle* state to “off” with “long press”.
*(not /really/ needed here)

Still to come:
-A pop-up for the repeat state in a similar fashion to volume and filebrowser/context menu/quickscreen pop-up?
-New iconsets for all

Eventually:
-Derive all images from a high resolution SVG master.

[Saint]

St. commented on 2011-09-21 07:27

Silly naming issue in 320×480, “x24” got cut off the backdrop.

..whoops.

St. commented on 2011-09-21 15:14

r00005

Changelist:
-Some pretty major alignment updates for 240×320 and 480×800 -480×800 pop-ups enlarged slightly to better match the viewport(s) they replace

Still to come:
-Fix up the sizing of the 320×480 pop-ups (a little “squashed”)
-A pop-up for the repeat state in a similar fashion to volume and filebrowser/context menu/quickscreen pop-up?
-New iconsets for all

Eventually:
-Derive all images from a high resolution SVG master.

[Saint]

St. commented on 2011-09-21 16:43

*upload the correct 240×320 .zip

Changelist:
-None

Still to come:
-Fix issues with the backdrops of the state icons not quite matching up with the backdrop (by using transparency)
due to repositioning them (thanks to my non-colour blind GF, Karmin, for this)
-Fix up the sizing of the 320×480 pop-ups (a little “squashed”)
-A pop-up for the repeat state in a similar fashion to volume and filebrowser/context menu/quickscreen pop-up?
-New iconsets for all

Eventually:
-Derive all images from a high resolution SVG master.

I was going to look into fixing the the wpsbuild scripts so this can be commite,d but I just tried on my phone and because of the rather large bitmaps the audio buffer is down to ~4MB which isnt great. Though this wont stop this being commited, but it means i’ll more likely make raaa use malloc for the buflib backing instead of the current implementation which just uses the8mb buffer.

St. commented on 2011-09-22 13:00

r00006

Changelist:
-Resize pop-ups to better match the metadata viewport dimensions (all)
-Reposition file browser/quickscreen/context menu images in their pop-up and adjust touch areas accordingly (all)
-Fix 480×800‘s volume slider that I broke in r00005 (whoops)

Still to come:
-Spacing the “Next Track:” title away from the metadata slightly where possible an/or using a different font?
-Fix issues with the backdrops of the state icons not quite matching up with the backdrop (by using transparency)
due to repositioning them
-A pop-up for the repeat state in a similar fashion to volume and filebrowser/context menu/quickscreen pop-up?
-New iconsets for all
-Use translation in the title-bar to reduce total theme size and increase usability for non-English speaking users.
(at the cost of some “prettiness”)

Eventually:
-Derive all images from a high resolution SVG master.

[Saint]

I tried on 320×480. It loads, but there are some issues.

SBS:
-The REW button is in the middle of the screen, overlapping with the main text. The FFWD icon is also slightly moved up
-There’s a graphical glitch at the bottom. A small black image with one gray/gold (depending on the volume) corner. It looks like some left-over from the volume icon.
-No proper icons? I get the built-in ones
-The main menu font is too huge for my test, plus I don’t like this bold.
-I like the statusbar on the right more. perhaps include this?

WPS:
-The play/pause button is very hard to hit, I think the underlying touch region is shifted up or otherwise doesn’t match the icon.
-Not a fan of the 5 lines. It looks too dense (especially with the bold font).
-Also not a fan that I now need to long press the AA for the playlist viewer (note that the default music player on CM also brings up the current playlist on short press).
-The popup disappears very quickly when entering the WPS, but stays for too long (IMO, anyway) when opened up.
-The volume pop-up looks meh. It looks like the progressbar not the volume bar which was confusing. Also the graphic is glitchy at the edges.
-The “screen locked” bar is shifted a bit
-It looks like the top bar has small bad pixel at the edges

Otherwise, it has some nice improvements over SVN.

I’ll use it for a bit longer, but that’s it for now.

Some initial thoughts on using the480x800 v6 on a Galaxy S2. Disclaimers: I have not read much of the above - this is a brain/gut dump. I also know that some of the following are not theme related, but all part of the UI. But you were after feedback… ;)

1) I suspect something is wrong in the path access, I unzip to my \Phone\rockbox folder (which is where the apk installs stuff). Selecting the theme file gives me the default, tiny, status bar. I manually selected the wps/sbs/font/icons then proceeded, so maybe what follows refers tro something fundamentally broken on my installation.

2) I strongly dislike the popup for folder/context/quick screen. How about:
a) context menu = long press on WPS body
b) menu = short press on title bar (globally, if it isn’t already)
c) quickscreen = long press on title bar (globally)
d) replace the shuffle/repeat icons with browser and screenlock (don’t favour file browser over database!)

3) Don’t use the full screen - show the phone’s statusbar.

4) When paused, auto-resume on entry to the WPS.

5) A bigger font would be nice for wenus - or even better use Android native list widgets.

6) When skipping tracks, the brief redraw without album art is unpleasant; how about making the non-AA layout similar to the AA one (albeit with a dummy art box)?

I have tested the 240×320 r00006 version on the sdlapp and vx747 sim and have the following comments:

1. cabbiev2.sbs has an extra “)” on line 68
2. The preloaded images (ff, playmode, rep, rew, shuf) are not located at the same coordinates in the sbs and wps. This causes a visible shift of the images when switching between sbs and wps.
3. The playmode icon displays “pause” while playing and “play” while paused. This may be meant as “Press here to Pause” when playing, but seems backwards to me.
4. The next/prev icons in the SBS cause the selector bar to increment/decrement. Is this intended behavior? In a previous version, you used wps_next/wps_prev which did control playback, although a repeated press still scrolled the selector bar.

Thanks for the recent regular updates. Just picked up on them and updated from r3 to r6. All seems to working fine.

Not sure if this is related to me using the latest build from Paulhue’s build page which includes the shutdown patch or the theme, however I recall that when I installed the latest daily build (unpatched and with the stock theme) of rockbox earlier in September, clicking on ‘playlists’ showed an option for ‘playlist’ catalogue which enabled me to see all the playlists created by rockbox. However shortly after I installed the patched build and the theme afterwhich I can no longer see an option from the playlist sub menu to access the playlist catalogue and it only lists ‘‘create playlist”, ‘view/save current playlist’ and reset playlist catalogue. Any chance somone else running the latest theme with a regular/vanilla unpatched daily build can confirm if they can access it or not. At the moment I instead need to navigate to the playlist file using the browser which is less than ideal.

During my brief testing earlier today I’m glad to say that the context menu on the latest revision from the ‘now playing’ screen is MUCH improved (at least on my device) in how easily it is accessed compared to the previous theme revision I used, r3. Some good suggestions above, look forward to comparing them with my own experience tomorrow. I’m using the 480×800 version. Not sure if I’m misunderstanding, but in terms of Kugel’s issue with the font being too huge in the main menu, have you tried tweaking the font in the theme settings? My 480×800 version has 3 different font variants available although I preferred the largest anyway (was the default too).

Followed Saint’s advice from a thread on the forums and checked the missing playlist options using a supported untouched/patched build from Rasher’s site. Playlist catalogue is working now although bookmarking audiobooks isn’t as easy as it was with the ‘shut down’ option in the main menu. Thanks

Request: Is there any chance of making a Cabbiev2(study) variant of the theme which could include a bookmark button on the main screen? I really liked a custom UI for a PMP which someone made called ‘study’ which was optimized for people who used their PMP for study purposes (e.g. listening to lectures, non fiction audiobooks [language courses, sciences etc], text to speech files made of their university notes etc).
I understand that some of the features of that theme/custom UI like including buttons for forward/rewind in increments of 5secs, 15secs, 30secs and 1 min (or something along those lines) is probably overkill unless someone wants to make a brand new theme from scratch. However, maybe the small ‘create bookmark’ button which was on the button right hand corner of the ‘now playing’ screen could be implemented in an optional variant of theme? Thanks

St. commented on 2011-10-25 00:38

r00007

A quick update to get my current work out into the wild.

Changelist:
-Fixed various alignment issues (hopefully the last)
-Fixed 320×480 icons naming issue
-s/next prev/wps_next wps_prev/ in .sbs (all) restoring original functionality
-Various small fixes

Still to come:
-Spacing the “Next Track:” title away from the metadata slightly where possible an/or using a different font?
-Fix issues with the backdrops of the state icons not quite matching up with the backdrop (by using transparency)
due to repositioning them
-A pop-up for the repeat state in a similar fashion to volume and filebrowser/context menu/quickscreen pop-up?
-New iconsets for all ←-In progress
-Use translation in the title-bar to reduce total theme size and increase usability for non-English speaking users. ←- CantFixForNow (needs a new .lang string “Screen Locked”)
(at the cost of some “prettiness”)

Eventually:
-Derive all images from a high resolution SVG master.

[Saint]

Continue to ignore my previous request(s). Now that I’ve been using RaaA for 6+ weeks I’m finding it much easier to quickly bookmark (muscle memory I guess) on the go. Getting to grips with various other functions which I picked up by playing around with Rockbox has also made it apparent just how versatile Rockbox is (even better with this custom theme). Thanks for the addition of extra font options with the last release, found them useful.

I think the theme is pretty much flawless on 480×800 with the daily build from the same date as r0007’s release, however I’ll be interested to see what further innovations and/or improvements you come up with. Thanks for all your hard work (and the Rockbox/RaaA developers).

dip commented on 2011-11-01 23:27

Two questions to your great theme:

1. If you have a long list (e.g. all artists) the scroll bar cannot shifted completely down to the bottom, so you cannot scroll to the end of a long list. The problem is that the moving scroll “button” is always placed about 0.5 cm above your finger and if your finger reaches the botton of the touch area the list is not yet scrolled to the very bottom. Is that a theme problem or a genera rockbox problem?

2. Is it possible with a theme to have album covers displayed in a browse list, e.g. the album browse list left ot each album name, like most Android player do it?

Out of curiosity, is there any chance this theme could be committed in such a way that it ends up as the default theme in the Rasher builds (or some other similar)? It’s superior now that I’ve tried it, but it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to install on the device (for instance, the link to the zip file here is not openable via the device’s browser).

St.,

I wanted to make you aware of an interesting problem that has shown up concerning your fonts included with this theme. Starting with r30937 (Support for transparency in 32bit bitmaps on color targets) your fonts do not display the same in respect to highlighting. This does not seem to happen with other fonts, although I have not tested many.

This is noticeable in the lrcplayer plugin. I have attached screendumps showing the difference.

@Mike - That’s the idea. Once Hayden is happy he’s sorted out the kinks, and he gets approval, this WILL be commited to be the default theme for RaaA. Then rashers builds will include it automatically.

@Hayden - I could do with a 720×1184 port now please ;)

St. commented on 2012-01-25 04:27

r00008

Changelist:

-Use shiny new svn iconsets
-Tiny metadata display tweak
-Accommodate for the “Shortcuts” menu entry in the .sbs

[Saint]

First off, I wanna say thanks for the 320×480 skin. There aren’t any other skins for it right now… Anyway, I caught one little error: there are only 24 images in the title bar, but in the sbs and wps it’s listed as 25. As a result, the title bar often doesn’t render correctly. Other than that, I can find nothing wrong with this theme.

St. commented on 2012-03-05 07:11

RaaA cabbiev2 [Full Touch Application Port] has moved!

You can now find my work at:
https://github.com/saint-lascivious/RaaA-CabbieV2

And issues can be lodged at:
https://github.com/saint-lascivious/RaaA-CabbieV2/issues

Thank you to all those who have watched this task and provided feedback along the way.

You will now find that are are able to download my repository directly and track changes directly from github, however period releases will still be made available.
You can keep up to date on these releases by following me on:

Google+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/100067000465805237472

or

Twitter
http://twitter.com/Hayden_Pearce

Thank you all again for your support,

[Saint]

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