Graphic effects

[nloewen]

It would be nice if you could enable some graphic effects on the menus. Just some simple things like making the highlight bar move smoothly or when you move in/out of sub-menus, having the screen scroll over.

[AlexP]

There are quite a lot of people against this as:

It would make navigation slower
It adds complexity for a function that many of the developers don't really like

Therefore you are unlikely to find many/any of the core devs writing such a feature.

[nloewen]

I thought I might get an answer like that.

[AlexP]

If you want it, you are always free to do it yourself.  Just don't expect many to want to do it for you.  I'm not saying this is a nodo - if a way could be found that overcame the objections then it would be considered I'm sure, I just don't know how possible that is.  It'd be quite a bit fo work for something that may well be rejected, so unless someone who can code really wants it too I don't see them doing it.

[nloewen]

I'm taking a grade 11 computer programing course but I don't know enough to do anything with a gui.

[kanebt]

Why would so many people be against this? 

I think it would be fantastic to have good graphic effects in rockbox!!! Just simple things like he mentioned, smooth scrollbar and such:D

[AlexP]

As I said, the danger is that it slows down navigation just for some fancy visual effect.  I personally don't want to wait for for the next menu after pressing a button whilst some pointless visual thing happens, I would find it annoying.  However, if you can find a way to make it look nicer, and yet retain fast navigation then I'm sure people would love to hear about it - I certainly would.

[bluebrother]

Why would so many people be against this? 

Because it is annoying. It slows down navigation (hey, I frequently scroll through a rather longish list on my Ipod and it works perfectly without any effects stuff) and doesn't add anything to the functionality -- I, for myself, do want a good, fast player, not fancy bling-bling that doesn't play music (does a smooth scroll bar play music?). Also, having the CPU doing calculation just for bling-bling eats battery, and one goal is to achive the highest possible battery runtime possible. Of course there is always a trade-off between fanciness and doing as less calculations as necessary, but this makes it at least very hard for really fancy stuff.
Also, you always need to take the older supported targets into consideration -- a smooth scroll bar would make e.g. the display completely unreadable on h100 due to their slow LCD. While it's possible to have "nice" features only on players that can actually have them in a useable state this adds even more complexity. Rockbox is already complex enough (>500LOC in C according to ohloh) ...

[cool_walking_]

>500LOC

Wow, that must be some very efficient code!!

I'm against any sort of useless eye candy also, and a smooth highlight bar is even worse than just being useless - it actually slows down navigation.

[GodEater]

Wow, that must be some very efficient code!!

They're either REALLY long lines, or bluebrother meant 500K LOC

[bluebrother]

They're either REALLY long lines, or bluebrother meant 500K LOC

woops ... but if you remove all line breaks in all files you might get them down to 500LOC

[jeffrey1790]

is it possible to add the effects into rockbox, and have it disabled by default?

[saratoga]

is it possible to add the effects into rockbox, and have it disabled by default?

Of course.  We have features that are off by default, features that are on for only certain targets, etc.  If people are interested in working on effects, they can certainly take advantage of this (and they would have to since graphical effects are unlikely to work on charcell targets anyway).

[psycho_maniac]

yeah i dont want this either. i had to use a different phone for a few days and that had a lot of animations in the menus took me a lot longer to change stuff in that then my old phone which has barley any animations.

[keepsake]

This is like using special effects in Ubuntu. Sure, it looks good, but everything is a bit slower, and it really gets in the way sometimes (Compiz?), not necessary. For a few days you might be interested in the looks, but once it becomes a common thing for you, you're going to revert one day or another.