Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas

Custom actions/tags for touchscreen targets

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Biont:
After playing around with touch themes for some time, I find one thing really missing in the skin engine:

The ability to use(/define) custom tags/actions on the WPS. Having a bunch of those would allow for all kinds of cool things like popup menus, maybe different window sizes or even customization of the WPS (i.e. load a different set of images)

My main concern are the popup menus. So far, there are only 2 feasible ways of creating a popup menu and both come with big downsides:

 - Using the %Tl tag, which can only be controlled with a timeout. And please correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no way to assign a specific area in which this tag works. That means the menu would pop up everytime you touch the screen anywhere, which sucks :)
Also, you can't close it, but have to wait until the timer runs out instead.


 - Drawing the menu when playback is paused. I used this way on my first theme, because you have much more control over when the menu appears and disappears. You can add a close-button (which is nothing more than another play-button ;D) and then it goes away and playback starts again. The obvious downside is: You have to stop playback, which is very annoying if you're going to the file/playlist browser through that menu, because the selected song only starts playing after closing the menu >:(



If we had some custom actions/tags, this would be no problem at all. They could work like the repmode command and %mm tag.


%Cta|2-4|  defines cta (custom tag a) with 2-4 values to cycle through

%T|...|cta| cycles through the values

%?cta<...>  could then be used for almost anything


I think implementing this would open up lots of possibilities for touchscreen WPS.

As I said: Popup-menus, resizable windows/menus, switching from simple to advanced mode, different image sets (a theme could come in different looks and colors, how awesome is that?) and perhaps alot more I just can't think of right now.


The only problem is - you guessed it - I can't code. That's why I hope that you'll like this idea and that maybe someone feels like coding it.


(sorry for my bad english)

JdGordon:
wierd.. I thuoght I replied to this ages ago :p

This idea would be pretty simple to implement and most probably would be accepted, it just needs someone to do it.

In fact I did implement this a while ago, but it was rejected because I used the browse button to change the tag's value instead of the touchscreen (which I still think is the correct way to do it on button targets)...

hmm... maybe I'll do this after removing the statusbar...

Biont:
That would be soo very great :P.

I can't wait to play around with these tags. They sure would be an essential feature for future touch themes. And they are a perfect match for the idea you posted here (which I really really like):
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=23124.0

Biont:
Any news on this?

JdGordon:
nope

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