RD-Car - a car-friendly touch theme for Android (480x800)

[ThomasR]

Hey there, I'm new around here. :-)

My name's Thomas and I love graphics design, programming and listening to music while driving.

Since there is no Android section on the official themes site, I thought here would be a good place...

Unfortunately, due to the rise of buttonless smartphones, (good) standalone music players are becoming increasingly rare.

To make using a touch-only Android phone a little more useful while driving, I have created a WPS that is designed to be simple and easy to use, especially when you can't be bothered to hit tiny buttons or pay attention to a touch screen (e.g. while driving).

Skin name: RD-Car

Features:
- designed for Rockbox-Android (480x800), tested on Galaxy SII and Rockbox Simulator on Linux
- simple, clean and car-friendly all-touch WPS with large buttons
- top left button opens a popup menu that hides the lesser-used options: file browser, shuffle, repeat & volume
- pressing the album art opens the playlist
- long-pressing the album art opens the context menu
- long-pressing the play/pause button stops playback and returns to the file browser
- extra large progress bar for instant seeking!

Possible problems:
- scrolling text might flicker
- popup timeout might not be to your liking (currently 3 seconds before auto-hide)
- popup cannot be hidden instantly - you have to wait until it auto-hides

The third screenshot shows what the WPS looks like if there is no album art.

Download:
http://www.rahdick.at/sonstiges/rd-car_rockbox_android/rd-car.zip

Feedback is welcome!

[Julian67]

I've just installed RD-Car theme on my Archos A43IT running Rasher's daily build from September 4th  (A43IT has a less than ideal resistive 480x854 screen and works well with Rockbox for Android 480x800).

The RD-Car theme is great.  Having oversized progress/seek bar and back/forward buttons is a major improvement as I found accurate seeking almost impossible with cabbiev2, whether using bar or buttons.

I don't think the pop-up timeout period matters much but maybe it would be nice to have it also disappear in the same way as it appears, with a tap to the menu icon.

I have lots of classical/early music, much of which has very long metadata and filenames.  Scrolling is working nicely and I don't experience any flickering in the WPS, Show Track Info or file browser screens.

I love the clarity and legibility of the design.  I can see how useful this would be for a device mounted in a car.  I'd also suggest that the theme would be very attractive for normal, everyday use with just slightly smaller buttons which would allow one or two more lines of info on the WPS (I usually modify my themes to remove stuff I don't care about such as "next track info" and replace it or add stuff I do want such as the composer tag or a scrolling line for the comment tag).  I'll probably get busy with the Gimp and shrink your icons and see if I can adapt your theme to my wants, but I never object if it's easier to start with 

[ThomasR]

Thank you for trying it out - I'm glad you like it! :-)

In case you want the source graphics, I uploaded them here:
http://www.rahdick.at/sonstiges/rd-car_rockbox_android/rd-car.svg.zip

The SVG was created with Inkscape. I didn't clean it up or anything, but there are a couple of named layers and object IDs that should make working easier. There are also a couple of invisible rectangles (use ctrl+Num5 to switch to outline mode) that are used to export several areas of the image - just hide everything you don't want exported, select one of the hidden rects and hit export.

[[Saint]]

I'll admit I haven't looked at your code, but your meta-problem with timeouts and the popup sounds suspiciously similar to a problem I faced and conquered with the help of the ever attentive JdGordon and a small arsenal of brand new skin engine features (hint: pretty much all of the skin engine features of the past year or more were implemented at least in part to help get a full-touch theme functional).

You might want to head on over to my RaaA CabbieV2 GitHub repository and take a look how we eventually did it. Its a thing of beauty.


...and yes, I know, I need to get to work and finish this beast.



[Saint]