custom browse usage from handheld skin

[Philip Meyer]

Erland,

This morning I tried using my PDA to control slimserver and have some useability questions/ideas.

The mixer icons don't line up on the right-side (they wrap over to the next line). I tried pocket IE and Opera. Normal browse is okay.

The horizontal spacing between mixer icons could be removed (no vertical spacing already).

A more radical approach to save space would be to not put mixer icons next to each item - only on all albums item/all songs item/song info page.

So if I was looking at a list of albums and wanted a mixer for a particular album, i'd select the album then click the mixer on the all songs entry.

This would give more space for album/track names on small devices.

[erland]

Erland,

This morning I tried using my PDA to control slimserver and have some useability questions/ideas.

The mixer icons don't line up on the right-side (they wrap over to the next line). I tried pocket IE and Opera. Normal browse is okay.

The horizontal spacing between mixer icons could be removed (no vertical spacing already).

A more radical approach to save space would be to not put mixer icons next to each item - only on all albums item/all songs item/song info page.

So if I was looking at a list of albums and wanted a mixer for a particular album, i'd select the album then click the mixer on the all songs entry.

This would give more space for album/track names on small devices.

Some questions since I don't own a PDA:
- What resolution are we talking about ?
- Does it look the same if you resize the firefox/IE window to the same with/height in pixels as the PDA screen ?
- How does the album/artist header information work ? Does it take up to much screen space so it would be better to completely remove it ?

At the moment I don't want to make any big skin work in my plugins, I prefer to do that for SlimServer 7.0 instead since 7.0 anyway is going to result in a lot of changes in the plugins. I will add your ideas to the wish list for a future release, but I will probably not do anything regarding this until 7.0 is released. I will probably release some other stuff for 6.5, but not skin stuff unless I can benefit from it myself (which means default or fishbone).

Of course, patches will always be welcome, even for 6.5.

[Philip Meyer]

custom browse usage from handheld skin

>Some questions since I don't own a PDA:
>- What resolution are we talking about ?
240x320, but size irrelevant - it goes wrong in any browser at any window size. Looks the same in Firefox on Windows.

>- Does it look the same if you resize the firefox/IE window to the same
>with/height in pixels as the PDA screen ?
Yes.

>- How does the album/artist header information work ? Does it take up
>to much screen space so it would be better to completely remove it ?
>
Doesn't look too good. In Pocket IE, the cover art is sized to about 2/3 screen width, with text wrapping around the remaining available space ("Duration:" just about fits).
In Opera, there are various display modes. "Fit To Screen" causes the album information text to be put under the album artwork (single column display), so it doesn't look too bad, but have to scroll a long way down to see tracks, and the mixer buttons appear one-per line, so each track takes 4 lines. "Desktop" display mode allows horizontal scrollbar - artwork is not scaled the same (bigger than width of screen), and the info text is squashed unreadably.

Probably good idea to just not display album/artist header info in Handheld skin.

>At the moment I don't want to make any big skin work in my plugins, I
>prefer to do that for SlimServer 7.0 instead since 7.0 anyway is going
>to result in a lot of changes in the plugins.
Okay.

>Of course, patches will always be welcome, even for 6.5.
Okay, I may have a look. Any clues where to start? eg. if I wanted to look at spacing around mixer icons and align to right of screen for starters?

Phil

[erland]

Okay, I may have a look. Any clues where to start? eg. if I wanted to look at spacing around mixer icons and align to right of screen for starters?

Below is a sort description of the relevant files, it doesn't matter for me if you make changes directly in the files under "HTML/EN" or if you create a copy of them and place it in corresponding directory under "HTML/Handheld". However, if you want to be able to use both default and handheld skin from different clients, you need to do any non compatible changes in "HTML/Handheld", else the default skin will stop to work.

Unfortunately the code isn't commented at all, so it might be a bit hard to decipher. Also some parts isn't structured as goods as I would like, I just haven't got the time to do it yet. So if you have any questions, just ask.

I've earlier had some problem where I used tables and SlimServer used CSS to get the correct layout, but I think the Custom Browse plugin tries to use the standard SlimServer web components where it is possible. So tables might not be the cause of these problems.


HTML/EN/plugins/CustomBrowse/mixerlink.html
===========================================
- Contains the <a ...></a> tag for the mixer in standard SlimServer browse menus.
- I don't think you need to change this because I think the mixer icons on the standard SlimServer menus seems to work correctly.


HTML/EN/plugins/CustomBrowse/menuheader.html
============================================
- This is the main block for the header and footer
- I think an empty menuheader.html in the HTML/Handheld/plugins/CustomBrowse/menuheader.html directory might be enough to get rid of the header and footers



HTML/EN/plugins/CustomBrowse/custombrowse_list.html
================================================== =
- This is the main page, the mixers are inserted inside the FOR loop that starts with "[% FOREACH mix = item.mixes %]". There is another commented for loop that contains mixes, but that isn't used. Must be some code I've just forgotten to remove.
- You can try to look if you see and "class" or "style" attribute in the SlimServer browse pages. Should be somewhere under HTML/Handheld in the SlimServer installation directory.
- The "All Songs" entry is handled inside the IF statement that starts with "[% IF pluginCustomBrowseCurrentContext and pluginCustomBrowsePlayAddAll %]"
- I've earlier had some problem with TrackStat where the space reserved for the mixers was limited to a specific width. When you had more mixers they got wrapped in similar way as it looks in the Handheld skin. I'm not sure if this is the case, but it might be a good idea to try to disable some of the mixers and see if the wrapping stops.


HTML/EN/plugins/CustomBrowse/custombrowse_contextlist.html
================================================== ========
- This is pretty similar to custombrowse_list.html and is used for the page that is shown when you click on one of the header/footer links or when you use the "Browse by selected" mixer.
- Don't start with this, when you have custombrowse_list.html working, you can look at this and see if you need to do any changes.