From: Jonathan Gordon <jdgordy_at_gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 18:18:18 -0700

Getting this written down so I dont forget and figure I may as well
try and get some comments at the same time.

I just came to the amazing conclusion that the set time and date
screen is utterly unusable without the remote on a touchscreen, and
80% of the screen is wasted. So I remembered about the idea of putting
"buttons" on the screen, kind of like how the WPS can do it now, so I
wanted to know how far we should go with this...

My first idea was to pretty much copy the current buttonbar stuff and
only use text for the buttons, but that kind of sucks so I'm pretty
sure it will end up using the icon system (with an updated version of
FS#8133 to handle it).

MY question is how customizable do we want to make this? The choices
are pretty much:
1) have the caller specify the viewport to draw into and the buttons
to display, they will then get drawn to automatically fit, so it could
be a single row or column, or a grid
2) have the caller specify the viewport and the pixel positions to put
each button...

I think the first option is actually going to be better because it
mean less work to add this to a screen, and I think the only time when
real placement would be needed is when we want to have 4 directions
(like the time/date screen), but then that can be made to work in a
single row anyway....

Does anyone think any of this would be useful/usable on
non-touchscreen targets? (I'm thinking *maybe* in some plugins, but
probably not.)

(afterthought)

There is one more option for customization... I think that themers
will have much more "fun" with touchscreen targets when they are
supported, I wonder if we should right now just make this entirely
themeable from a text file or something. Each screen would have its
own section and each would only allow a subset of buttons, but the
user could choose exactly where to display which button? (this would
probably be seperate from the WPS layout options)
something like:

[generic list]
list: x,y,w,h

[filebrowser]
list: x,y,w,h
context button: x,y,w,h,icon
other button: ...

etc...
Then it would be dead simple to integrate into existing screens.

Thoughts? Comments?

Jonathan
Received on 2009-05-23