PictureFlow Improvement

[csavery]

saratoga: I did post a note about the patch on IRC but didn't know about kugel. No one replied about the patch so I don't know that there's any interest. That's kind of odd because I find the feature quite nice.

I have updated my patch again to support both modes. "Direct" will go to WPS on first click, "Via Track list" will go to the track list first and a second click takes you to WPS.

I changed the setting menu item to "WPS Integration".

The patch is in the patch tracker.

[Vague Rant]

While I did make this by hacking around in pictureflow.c, it should be considered as nothing more than a mockup as my changes unilaterally disabled the reflection and resulted in a divide by zero in the code; but here's how PictureFlow would look with reflections turned off, allowing for much larger (by a factor of 1/3) album art.



As I say, my changes were horrible and ugly, but I would immensely appreciate if anyone was interested in applying a similar functionality as a setting in PictureFlow.

Also it's worth noting that the inability of PF to acknowledge album title display location appears to be a bug and has been filed as FS#11292.

[csavery]

What changes did you make do disable reflection?

It looks like the bitmaps are being scaled up in your picture as they are jaggy. That seems to imply you are using the bitmaps stored for the smaller size from the cache. The code probably should change the bitmap height when the albums are cached as well so that they are the right size. They will look much better using all pixels available.

I could do this change for you as a setting option but I'm interested in what changes you tried already.

[Vague Rant]

Actually that jagginess is just a result of me scaling up the screenshot from 128*66 to 256*132 (2:1); it would be almost unbearably small otherwise. I've been using my slightly modded version on my Clip+ and it looks fine, just no reflection.

Unfortunately I'm not on the machine I did the edits on, but give me a minute to check the source and I'll see if I can recreate it ...

In pictureflow.c, I believe I changed this:

Code: [Select]

#define REFLECT_TOP (LCD_HEIGHT * 2 / 3)
#define REFLECT_HEIGHT (LCD_HEIGHT - REFLECT_TOP)
To this (cringe):

Code: [Select]

#define REFLECT_TOP (LCD_HEIGHT)
#define REFLECT_HEIGHT (LCD_HEIGHT - LCD_HEIGHT)
REFLECT_TOP would appear to be the actual area where the cover is displayed, while REFLECT_HEIGHT is the reflection, rendered over 1/3 of the LCD_HEIGHT (basically, LCD HEIGHT - LCD HEIGHT * 2 / 3).

Honestly all the programming I've done was some TI-83 BASIC in high school math when I should have been working, so that may go some way to explain why I used such an ugly hack to do this. It's probably of minimal usefulness to anyone trying to implement this in a way that could ever be committed, hence why I didn't bother posting my changes earlier. Maybe this will point you in the right general direction, though.

[csavery]

Ok. Thanks. I just wanted to see how extensive you had made changes. You're probably getting a divide by zero error because the reflection height is reduced to 0.

Anyway, I'll have a look at the code again and test out some changes that skip over the reflection code and adjust the heights at runtime instead using the defines. This way it can be changed via the settings. Also will have to alter the build cache code since it currently uses the defines.

I'll post back here when I get somewhere - though I won't be able to test it on a Clip with reduced screen I should be able to try on the UISim. And then you can try it out.

UPDATED - I have this working for Clip+ in Sim now. I'm just cleaning up some side effects found on my Fuze when reflection is turned off. I'll post it as a seperate patch in Flyspray soon.

Also see I posted a fix for your "album title" bug, FS#11292.

[Vague Rant]

Thanks for the PM, csavery, a hectic week has left me unable to follow development as closely as I would have liked.

Sorry I haven't been by sooner to test your changes, it looks like you've done some stellar work here. Just about to compile right now and will let you know how it goes on hardware as soon as it's done (compiling from scratch on a slow netbook).

EDIT: Or not, looks like Flyspray is still nonworking.

EDIT2: Well as long as we're waiting, I'm messing with that ugly PF hack I did, and while I really don't want to be the guy going "Hey csavery, add this, now add this" (you're just so good at it) one minor niggle with the Clip+ is the tracklist, which uses gradients of brightness on titles further from the selected one; it ends up looking just kind of weird on the Clip+, though you can't tell in the simulator because it actually simulates a greyscale rather than monochrome screen. To approximate multiple colours, Rockbox flickers pixels at different rates in order to foster the illusion, but this looks awkward when applied to text; if you or anyone else had any interest it'd be nice to see a check for mono screens here and switching out of the multicolour tracklist for a monochrome one closer to the style of Rockbox's own menus (plain, as it were). Obviously, as always, this is just a none so subtle "This would be nice"; it's kind of a limited interest feature, especially considering I'm not aware of anyone who's interested in working on PictureFlow and uses a monochrome device, so this making it into anybody's workload is not a major concern.

[csavery]

I've made a patch changing the track list to non-gradient.
Just waiting for FlySpray to be up and I can post it for testing.
It works ok for me in Sim.

[Vague Rant]

That's fantastic, you've really improved the PictureFlow experience for us small-screen mono weirdos; so much appreciated. Looking forward to the return of Flyspray.

EDIT: Huzzah, site's back; finally got a chance to apply your two patches for the title display bug and the reflection setting (couldn't apply both but did the title bug patch "manually" as it was only one line); tested them on hardware and in sim and they behave perfectly and identically in each. PictureFlow is really looking professional now even on extremely limited screens like the Clip's; just great.

[csavery]

Just posted this mono track list as FS#11310.

[yelped]

Awesome! You're really doing great work!