Announce: Custom Clock applet for Touch/Radio/Controller

[jstraw]

A new version of Custom Clock/Custom Clock Helper is now available, the news are:
- Added support for visualizers (analogvumeter, digitalvumeter), there is a sample "Analog VU Meter" style for the Touch bundled which use the standard visualizer image but make it possible to configure exactly which text elements you like to display.
- Added support for time based icon images through the new "timeicon" item type (jstraw, this is what you want to use for your flip clock experiment)
- Added support for animated icons through new framerate/framewidth attributes on all icon item types (tcutting this is the solution to your charging icon)

NOTE!
Visualizers will probably not work on the Radio and Controller due to the slower CPU, I've only tried them on the Touch yet.

The spectrum visualizer was a bit more complex so that will be included in a future version.

New attributes on all icon item types
A little information of the new attributes on icon item types:
- framerate: Specifies the number of animation steps per second
- framewidth: Specifies the width of each frame in the image provided by the url attributes.

A sample icon which support animations are this one:
http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...y_charging.png
And it should be configured with "framerate=1" and "framewidth=24"


New timeicon item type
The new "timeicon" item type handles images in the same way as the above animation support, but it doesn't animate the image instead it selects which image to use based on the the number in the "text" attribute. Some information on the attributes:

"text": Should contain one of:
-- "%S": Seconds, require a image with 60 frames (00-59)
-- "%I": 12 hour clock, require a image with at least 13 frames (00-12), the first frame will never be used
-- "%H": 24 hour clock, require an image with at least 24 frames (00-23)
-- "%M": Minutes, require an image with 60 frames (00-59)
-- "%d": Day of month, require an image with 32 frames (00-31), the first frame will never be used
-- "%w": Weekday, require an image with 7 frames (Sun-Sat)
-- "%m": Month, require an image with 13 frames (00-12), the first frame will never be used
-- "%y": 2 digit year, require an image with 100 frames (00-99)
You can of course create a generic image with 00-99 frames and it will support all the above mentioned values in the "text" attribute. Possibly, you might want to have two images, one where 0-9 is shown as 00-09 and one where its shown as 0-9

"url": The actual digit image (may have transparent background)

"width": The width of the frames in the "url" image

"url.background" (optional): If specified, this image will be pasted behind the digits. This way you can have a generic digit image with transparent background and use the "url.background" to make several styles with different background behind the digits. The "url.background" image won't be "animated" the whole image will be pasted as normal images.


Visualizer item types
For the "analogvumeter" have a look at the bundled style for the touch, it basically just sets the "url" attribute to this image:
http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...og_25seq_b.png

Finally, the "digitalvumeter" item times takes a number of url attributes, if you like to try this out set them to the following:
- url:
- url.tickon: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...VU_tick_on.png
- url.tickoff: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...U_tick_off.png
- url.tickcap: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...ick_bounce.png

I think the digitalvumeter will need some more polishing before it's ready to use, I just included it since the code existed in the Logitech firmware. I don't think the digitalvumeter style is ever used in the firmware.

Wow. That's a lot to wrap my head around. Be patient with me.

[erland]

Wow. That's a lot to wrap my head around. Be patient with me.

If you want some help with the configuration, you can just post the image files and me or someone else can make a sample configuration which you can start adjusting. A image file containing 100 numbers (00-99) or 60 numbers (00-59) is probably a good start for creating a sample configuration.

[tcutting]

A sample icon which support animations are this one:
http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jiv...y_charging.png
And it should be configured with "framerate=1" and "framewidth=24"

erland-
Thanks again - my battery indicator now animates correctly!
One more suggestion - add ability to put in "Sleep" icon. I don't actually find myself using the sleep feature, but would like to add the ability to display the icon.

Thanks!

Tom

[usch]

Unfortunately it has stopped working in Desktop SqueezePlay (Win XP) with the last update. I can no longer go to Screensavers > Custom Clock Settings, and the screensaver itself says "Not configured".

1271460042.781 WARN   squeezeplay.ui.draw - jiveL_dispatch_event:774 error in event function:
	...zePlay\lua\applets/CustomClock/CustomClockApplet.lua:416: attempt to concatenate local 'luadir' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
	...zePlay\lua\applets/CustomClock/CustomClockApplet.lua:416: in function '?'
	...Play\lua\applets/ScreenSavers/ScreenSaversApplet.lua:800: in function 'callback'
	...io\Squeezebox\SqueezePlay\lua\jive\ui\SimpleMenu.lua:189: in function 'itemListener'

[erland]

Unfortunately it has stopped working in Desktop SqueezePlay (Win XP) with the last update. I can no longer go to Screensavers > Custom Clock Settings, and the screensaver itself says "Not configured".

Yes I know, sorry for that.

Desktop SqueezePlay on Windows uses a separate directory structure for some reason, so it's hard to support it at the moment. I might possibly try to fix it in the future but I don't want to promise anything. Patches are very welcome if you or someone else like to help.

I know it works in Desktop SqueezePlay on Linux since it use the same directory structure as the real devices. It will probably also work on Windows if you compile your own version from svn, but I'm not sure how complex that is.

[mr-b]

That's rather unfortunate. Is there any chance it could be bumped up the priority list? I'd have thought that a fair number of ppl use SP as a testing ground for applets, and so anything which doesn't work may tend to drop off the radar.
It's bad enough with applet installation hanging if SP isn't run with admin privs ...

[Triode]

I know it works in Desktop SqueezePlay on Linux since it use the same directory structure as the real devices. It will probably also work on Windows if you compile your own version from svn, but I'm not sure how complex that is.

I believe its because of where the installer puts squeezeplay which is in the location of a normal application (C:\Program Files or equivalent). This means we should not install additional files to this location when it is run as a user. It should definately be fixable, just got missed.

[erland]

I believe its because of where the installer puts squeezeplay which is in the location of a normal application (C:\Program Files or equivalent). This means we should not install additional files to this location when it is run as a user. It should definately be fixable, just got missed.

The main problem is that it has a different structure under the executable, the Linux version and the real device has a structure like:
share/jive/applets
share/jive/jive
share/jive/fonts

But the Windows installation looks different, it has a structure like:
lua/applets
lua/jive
fonts

Anyway, the structure isn't the main problem, the main problem is that I haven't found any way to check which platform I run on. I tried using the System.getArch() method but it just returns "unknown" on Windows so it doesn't feel reliable.

I need to have a way to detect the path to the following directories:
- fonts (To check if a font file exists and load it)
- The directory where my applets is installed (To read and store cached files)
- The parent directory to the one where my applet is installed (To store files that should survive a applet upgrade) (This is a bit less important since it's only used by Patch Installer which won't work on Windows anyway since it uses Linux patch command)

[usch]

I believe its because of where the installer puts squeezeplay which is in the location of a normal application (C:\Program Files or equivalent). This means we should not install additional files to this location when it is run as a user. It should definately be fixable, just got missed.

That's a different problem. I have worked around that by giving users "create directory" rights for the lua/applets directory. This way any user can install applets and automatically becomes the applet owner with full access, while access to the core applets is still restricted. That's still not perfect on multi-user systems, but if there is just a single restricted user besides the admin it is workable for the time being.

Anyway, the structure isn't the main problem, the main problem is that I haven't found any way to check which platform I run on. I tried using the System.getArch() method but it just returns "unknown" on Windows so it doesn't feel reliable.

If that method fails you could call os.getenv("OS"). That should return something like "Windows_NT".

[verypsb]

How can I remove styles?