Rockster: New theme for Sansa fuze, iRiver H3xx, and iPod Color/Photo

[atsakir]

yep... when it rains it pours

Another one for 220x176 players. I was entertaining the idea of making a theme that follows the Rockbox logo color theme for some time now and I also wanted to make a theme that has as much space as possible available for album art and this is what came out of it at the end:





Again, Album art and extra info are toggled every few seconds and so are the current and next song at the bottom of the screen

Feel free to comment and report any issues you may come across (I think there may be a minor glitch when there is a scrolling line under the AA which doesn't get cleared when the AA becomes displayed again but it only happens every now and then)

Oh, if there are people who want this ported to iPod Video/Cowon D2 please let me know because I'm still up to my head with work and it would be nice to know that it will be used by someone before I actually spend the time it requires to port it

[Zanza]

Let me first say: Very Nice.

With the recent increasing stability of Rockbox for the Fuze V2, I am starting to look for a theme that fits my needs. That is the biggest album art possible.
And i believe i found it

BUT:
*and i am rather ashamed for nitpicking* sine i can`t customize themes...would it be possible for you to change two things?
-could you switch off the toggle-effect? I like to see the album art. Extra info and next song doesnt bother me much
-and could you change the colour scheme to a more fuze-ish blue? So that it matches the scrollweel-light?

Please don´t get it wrong: Very nice work, but this is 90% of what I´m looking for. Please,please,please make it 100%

[atsakir]

Although the original idea was to match the Rockbox colors of dark yellow, black and grey I see no reason why not making a variation like the one you want. Just give me a couple of days and I'll get it sorted

[Zanza]

Tank you very much

Whenever you have time, no stress on my account please.

[atsakir]

Here you go...



You can go grab it at the themes site here:

http://themes.rockbox.org/download.php?themeid=786

[Zanza]

Thank you very much 
It matches the scrollweel perfectly and yaaay: bigbigbig albumart

Thanks for the last 10%

[[Saint]]

Just a quick question...

Is the .sbs conditional to playmode?

It seems like such a waste to have all that on screen cluttering the main menu if there isn't actually a track playing at the time.

Information such a battery, time etc. should *always* be displayed in my opinion, but a theme that left values blank if nothing happened to be playing at the time seems a little wasteful, considering that info is displayed graphically and takes up a large percentage of the screen.


[St.]

[Doleo]

To answer your question [St.]; after trying it myself I see that its not conditional and it just displays "Unknown Artist -" if no track is playing.

[Silverwolf]

Would it be possible to get the menus to show a unicode font, or is there something that I can edit myself to change the font to something that has unicode.

[[Saint]]

Doleo,

To answer your question [St.]; after trying it myself I see that its not conditional and it just displays "Unknown Artist -" if no track is playing.

Aha..thanks for clearing that up for me. To me, that seems kinda silly...
I'm tempted to make this adaptation to the theme myself, but I'm a little busy with my own stuff at the moment so I may not get around to it for some time.

And, on top of that I don't have any of the targets that this theme is intended for so I have little motivation to do so at present.
Perhaps the author of the theme will see this and get around to doing it himself.

atsakir,

I'd be happy to discuss code with you if you'd like.
Track time elapsed/remaining, peak meter, album/artist/track info seem quite pointless if there is no track playing currently.
If the track is paused, then it's a different story.
However, if playback is stopped then this information is needless and takes up quite a lot of screen space.


[St.]

[atsakir]

Hi everyone and thank you for your comments. Now, let me answer some of the criticism about the sbs screen waste of space when there is no song being played.

First and foremost, Sansa Fuze which is my default platform (and I think iPod Color/Photo as well) doesn't have a physical 'stop' button so the chances of actually having nothing being played or paused is minimal.

Second, the layout of this theme was chosen for maximum album space, moving everything interface-wise to the right which makes it unintuitive to remove parts of the interface conditionally because this wouldn't increase the menu space. Also, for this theme I wanted to keep graphics buffer use to minimum so most of the interface is part of the background.

That being said, I gave it a go and came up with the following mockup of an alternative sbs screen shown below with a horizontal placement of elements which will however require a separate backdrop for the sbs screen, increasing the buffer use accordingly. The playmode indicator (play/pause/stopped) will move to the bottom strip next to track name where the current/next song icon is now) and the time indicators will be conditional. What I'm not sure about because I haven't tried it is whether  I can put %Vi in a conditional to increase the height of the menu if there is nothing played or paused. If you think that it is a big improvement I can go ahead and implement it in a couple of days



As for Unicode fonts, 13-Fixed seems to be a good alternative to 13-Fixed-Bold if only slightly less visible and I can adopt it in the next revision replacing the system font for the menu as well as is shown in the mockup

[Zanza]

That looks nice, and may improve the readability of the menue quite a bit.

On another note: When there is a track playing i have a blinking symbol right next to the time. rather looks like two vertical arrows pointing to opposite directions. intented? bug or feature?

[[Saint]]

atsakir,

Very nice..well done. I prefer the mock up version by far.

My main concern regarding the .sbs displaying playmode related elements unnecessarily was at boot time, until you actually start playing something I would almost call it a bug seeing those elements onscreen without a track playing.
A lot of targets don't have a physical "stop" though it is still possible to stop playback (long play on iPod for instance).


[St.]

[atsakir]

Zanza, this is the HDD indicator that the memory is being accessed ...so it's a feature

ok, so I'll post the changed sbs in a couple of days

EDIT: Theme revision 1.02 with the changes discussed is in the themes site.

Go grab it here: http://themes.rockbox.org/download.php?themeid=799

A modified revision of the original Rockster theme will follow shortly

[Zanza]

ah,thanks for explaining

as for the new modifications: im using the r26480 build and sadly in the sbs screen the text is over the upper infobar. and no info is displayed in the bar either. (batt,volume,time etc)  :'(

but does look fantastic.nice change