Notice: upcoming theme/skin related changes

[JdGordon]

If you watch the dev mailing list you would have seen a rather long and confusing argument between kugel and myself.. this is to give a bit of warning of whats been decided:

* The statusbar as we know it is dead and in true "the king is dead, long live the king" mentality, we will be replacing it immediatly with a shipped .sbs called classic_statusbar which will very closely mimic the old bar!
* statusbar skins (.sbs files) should always have a %Vi viewport specified which hints to themers and the UI the largest single rectangle that it will guarantee to not draw in
* the "ui viewport" setting will be used as a hint from the user to tell the UI where s/he wants the UI to sit.

(now it gets tricky)

When you have a sbs and a ui viewport setting loaded, the part where they overlap will be where the lists and UI is drawn (This includes the WPS's "default viewport" (the one thats used untill the first %V line))
If only one of those are set then it is used, and if neither are set then the entire display is used.

WPS Tokens:
* %we will force on the sbs (only if one is loaded though) and will set the WPS default viewport to the same as above (so bassically the same as now)
* %wd will disable everything and give the WPS the entire display.
* having neither will do nothing, and the WPS's default viewport will be determined by the same logic as above (and also if the statusbar is actually enabled)

Also, more of a minor side note, some settings will be removed or changed:
* [remote ]statusbar will go back to a simple on/off (default to on probably)
* sbs file: will default to either none, or classic_statusbar.sbs (depending on the cabbivev2 theme for that target)
* "volume display" will be removed, no need for it any more
* "battery display" will be removed, no need for it any more

The last two are the only ones which may annoy people... so get the latest svn and modify wps/classic_statusbar.sbs to create versions for each of them! (actually.. it would be really nice to give sort of local variable type things for skins so people could modify one line to choose which they want... although this could be done with viewports also... hmm...


anywho... thats enough for now... this will all likely happen in the next days/weeks and happen pretty close together.. so be prepared

[Rizzly]

Funny thing, my first gripe after trying out rockbox yesterday (ui-wise) was actually how outdated the statusbar-handling is. Both in looks and in terms of functionality (although you can replace it already).

Just a question (if I understood this right), what is the reasoning behind getting rid of the battery and volume indicators by default?

Keep up the good work!

[JdGordon]

they will stay, the setting which lets you choose between a graphical or text display will be gone.

[epithetless]

Thanks for detailing all of this. I've been trying to keep myself abreast of recent (and ongoing) GUI changes, but I hadn't realized that the "ui viewport" settings in a theme's .cfg file impacted the WPS (and not just menu lists) if no %wd token was in place. The things you learn...

[JdGordon]

read the dev mailing list if you want to know how that change came into being (untill these changes happen that setting doesnt affect the wps)