Custom actions/tags for touchscreen targets

[punkt]

Thanks for your feedback Biont, you're really coming back with crazy ideas!

Stuff like conditional viewports, setting variables, setting variables conditionally, and using multiple actions in one touch-region, is taking the WPS format in a new direction. It is evolving from a simple and declarative template language into a turing-complete imperative programming language. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'd like to take it slowly.

So I propose to collect a list of wanted features concerning theme variables, and use-cases for them.

So far we have this:

Setting theme variables
Set variables from touch-regions and use them as conditionals. A variable can be cycled (forward only) or set to a given value.
Proposed tags: %vl, %vd, touch-action vs
Use cases:

• Toggling between album art, playlist info and song info.
• Displaying popups.

Touch-action for cycling a var backwards
Proposed tags:
Use cases:

• ?

Saving/loading the state of a variable
Proposed tags:
Use cases:

• Using variables, several theme layouts can be configured by the user (e.g. display album art or playlist info). Saving the state allows recreating the theme state on power-up.

Multiple actions (especially "vs") for one touch-region
Proposed tags:
Use cases:

• ?

Hm, aren't multiple actions already supported by using multiple touch-regions with the same bounds in one viewport? Or is only one of them triggered?

[Biont]

It seems that none of them are triggered, if 2 touch actions are at the same place (and in the same viewport)
However, you can have one action for click and one for hold at the same place, but that is not what we want.

Cycling backwards in combination with normal cycling could be useful for arrow keys. Once there are more that 3 different viewports to display/cycle through, this might help navigating in the WPS.

AA, song info, playlist viewer are already 3 viewports. Let's add a separate file info, settings display (equalizer, crossfeed, etc.) and a WPS configuration menu (like for my customizable buttons in the test theme) and cycling through them in 1 direction quickly becomes painful if you just want to get back to the AA after viewing the song info.

1 click on the cycle backwards button and you're there.

I know it would possibly make more sense to have 6 different buttons that trigger their respective viewport directly, but 6 buttons also eat up lots of screen space.

[punkt]

How about this for cycling:

vs'identifier'<+|-|number>
vsa+ cycles forwards
vsa- cycles backwards
vsa1 sets a to 1

Btw, we just had a discussion on irc about the wps syntax and possible future directions. The devs don't like menus in the wps all that much, they prefer themeable menus. So don't hold your breath for e.g. saving state from the wps. Let's focus on getting the variables patch finalized and into the svn first!

[Biont]

Sounds good.

...and I totally agree with you about not going too far in the first step. I guess a smaller patch that only introduces a couple of tags that hurt noone is far more likely to be accepted than complete custom variable madness

And getting this into the main build sure is more important than 2-3 fancy extra features. This could be the most important touchscreen-related development since the introduction of absolute-point mode itself.

[JdGordon]

that looks really good, I'm interested to see where this patch ends up
saving the variables is almost certainly a NoDo though, even sharing them between skins (sbs and wps for example) is unlikly to be wanted.

[punkt]

JdGordon, thanks for your input 
I updated the patch to support cycling forwards and backwards and uploaded a new simulator build to my page.

[Biont]

This looks pretty much perfect now.

I hope it's accepted by the devs

[punkt]

I'll write a a few lines for the manual explaining the new tags tomorrow or so, and then the patch is done, I guess.

Edit:
Stuff for the manual is done, so I guess the patch is finished.
Hm, is there any way to make this useful for non-touch targets?

[Biont]

Any news on this? I guess the patch doesn't work anymore after the skin breaking change