Touch screensaver options ?

[usch]

The Information Screen applet/plugin should work both on SqueezePlay and hardware players. However, it needs you to install both the Information Screen applet (in SqueezePlay through Applet Installer) and the Information Screen plugin (in Squeezebox Server through the Plugins tab).

Yes, I had them both installed. The applet showed up as a screen saver in SqueezePlay, and the server plugin appeared in the web interface with the advanced and per-player settings pages. Still the screen saver displayed just a blank screen. I did not delve further into it because SqueezePlay itself is so full of bugs that it cannot be used as a desktop player anyway.

As for the NP screens on Touch, I'm hesitant to say much as this is still in Beta. But suffice it to say they have many interesting NP screens in current testing, plus erlands customized NP layouts.

Good to hear. I just noticed that despite the higher pixel resolution, the physical width of the Touch display is much smaller than that of the old players. With a decent font size that can be read from across the room a lot of horizontal scrolling will be required to display the same amount of text. I wonder how that will turn out in practice.

[peterw]

I just noticed that despite the higher pixel resolution, the physical width of the Touch display is much smaller than that of the old players. With a decent font size that can be read from across the room a lot of horizontal scrolling will be required to display the same amount of text. I wonder how that will turn out in practice.

The display area of the Touch is much larger; all that should be needed is simple word wrapping.

[usch]

Hm. I was hoping that the additional space could be used to display more information simultaneously, instead of switching between different screens. For example:

Line 1: Title
Line 2: Artist
Line 3: Album
Line 4: Genre / Rating
Line 5: Bit Rate / Sample Rate
Line 6: RSS News Ticker

If you wrap one of the lines, that would push other information off the screen at the bottom, so scrolling might be the better alternative. I just hope there will be a "scroll once and stop" setting.

[erland]

The Information Screen applet/plugin should work both on SqueezePlay and hardware players. However, it needs you to install both the Information Screen applet (in SqueezePlay through Applet Installer) and the Information Screen plugin (in Squeezebox Server through the Plugins tab).

Yes, I had them both installed. The applet showed up as a screen saver in SqueezePlay, and the server plugin appeared in the web interface with the advanced and per-player settings pages. Still the screen saver displayed just a blank screen. I did not delve further into it because SqueezePlay itself is so full of bugs that it cannot be used as a desktop player anyway.

I'm using SqueezePlay during development so it should definitely work.
If you decide to give it another try and get the same problem, post the server.log file in the 3rd party plugins section of the forum and we can investigate it further from there.

[JohnSwenson]

Correct.

On what are you basing your statements, John? I know you've been doing some serious work on the new platform, hacking Linux/ALSA configs, etc., but what experience do you really have writing plugins, writing applets, converting plugins to applets, and making plugins and applets interoperate?

I do think you mean well and generally do respect you, but I haven't seen anything to suggest you're very qualified to comment on these development issues, and your post contains some misinformation and apparent speculation.

I've written several applets (for SBC and SBT) and converted one plugin to an applet. I was talking with a developer about one of these and was told that I could do it as a plugin instead of an applet. This included doing menus etc. Now I never actually got around to trying that so I really don't have experience with it. I was basing things on what I had been told.

I personally did not have too much trouble converting the plugin to an applet, but I'm already quite familiar with Lua having used it for other projects.

I apologize if I made things sound too easy, I was under the impression that a plugin could display on the touch.

I still don't think things are quite as bleak as having to completely start from scratch for everything. Having something working, even if it is on a different environment makes things much easier than starting from scratch.

I personally like Lua much better than perl, so I will most likely be spending my time (what little there is) writing applets. :-)

John S.