%px

[hakimio]

Here Llorean says %px could be used to create slider progressbar. Can anyone explain how this could be done?

[karashata]

The %px tag displays the percentage of a song played.  You could use it as a conditional (%?px) to display a sequence of images as a sort of custom progress bar.  If you wanted a slider bar, you could just make a sequence of images with the slider moved across the bar.  However, depending how many images you choose to use, your slider may or may not look very smoothly animated.

[hakimio]

Could you post an example?

[MarcGuay]

I believe that something like this:

Code: [Select]

%?px<1|2|3|4>
Would display a "1" for the first quater of the track, a "2" for the second quarter, and so on... If you replaced the numbers with image-display tags (%xd), then those images would be displayed in the same fashion.  I presume you've perused the CustomWPS wiki page already?

[hakimio]

I believe that something like this:

Code: [Select]

%?px<1|2|3|4>
Would display a "1" for the first quater of the track, a "2" for the second quarter, and so on... If you replaced the numbers with image-display tags (%xd), then those images would be displayed in the same fashion.

So if I need smooth progressbar, I need 100x%xd? 
Edit: and I need to specify 100 different coordinates?

I presume you've perused the CustomWPS wiki page already?

Yup, I have.

[Llorean]

I believe it should also work as a combined single strip image as well. If you need 100 steps, then yes, you need 100 subimages. But not every progress bar will be 100 pixels wide. For example, you can now also do a filling hourglass, or a circle that fills like a pie chart, or really anything you can come up with.

[hakimio]

I believe it should also work as a combined single strip image as well. If you need 100 steps, then yes, you need 100 subimages. But not every progress bar will be 100 pixels wide.

And what if I have 154 px progressbar? What if I have ipod video with huge screen?

For example, you can now also do a filling hourglass, or a circle that fills like a pie chart, or really anything you can come up with.

Yes, I can, but if I need SLIDER progressbar, I don't need pie chart, hourglass or anything else.

[Llorean]

You can still do it with strips and subimages, just fine. What's the problem? A solution was chosen that is VASTLY more flexible since it allows both what you want to display and several other things as well. I was merely illustrating the things that this method can do that a slider can't. This method can still also do a slider.

[hakimio]

Progressbar won't be smooth and move pretty ugly (max percentage value, I guess, is 100, so you can't specify more than 100 arguments for %?px).

[Llorean]

Have you actually tried it? A two pixel step will actually look fairly smooth. Pixels are quite small on the larger screens. It seems to me you're jumping to conclusions without doing any experimentation first. As it stands, this solution offers a lot more flexibility. Meanwhile the slider was previously in Rockbox some time ago, and removed.

Can you offer a justification good enough that it covers redundant code and binary waste, something much better than "it will look very slightly smoother" to convince whichever developers decided it should be removed to put it back?

[Job Van Dam]

Another good but small reason the original slider progress bar was good was the fact it was alot easier to implement and the code was more manageable too

For the current one you have to do the math to make the steps look smooth between the start and end point.
The code is also kinda ugly because not only will you have a gigantic conditional but you may also (in my case anyway) have the same image repeated many times over expect with different coordinates. I thought it would be better than using sub images with alot of transperency.

With the old one you just specify the image, the start and stop points and you're done and it's smoother than a baby's bottom.

[hakimio]

And one more: you might just run out of letters (we have only 24, right?).

[wintermute23]

26, each of which can be used in upper or lower case, for a total of 52 sub-images per strip.

And if you need more than that, there's no reason why you can't spread it across two or more image strips. If you really wanted to, you could use 2,704 images, if you could get them all to fit in the buffer...