[ InfoMatrix ] Elegantly Information Dense (iPod Nano, Video, Classic)

[yuuiko]

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Version 2 coming soon! Check out the latest comment for a preview.

My friend showed me the wonderful iPod, and got me into RockBox.
He lent me his iPod Nano 2 as he knows i'm a person who makes themes
for everything. When I used that iPod and Rockbox, I had to make a theme.
Presenting....

========== INFOMATRIX ==========

This theme is focused on presenting a lot of information in the most
elegant way possible, while also to make RockBox's screens and list items
more recognisable and unique, thus easier to use.

View in Theme Gallery:
V2 - iPod Classic / Video
V1 - iPod Nano
V1 - iPod Classic / Video




———————— SBS FEATURES ————————
•- Mid-Contrast Beige theme -•
Careful contrast control makes it easy to see in the sun while relatively
comfortable to use at night, reducing eyestrain from blue and bright colours

•- Unique Context and Quick Menus -•
You'll know exactly where and what these screens are

• Elegant, considered and clutter-free UI •
• Large, full-width list menus •
• Now Playing Ticker bar with Title, Artist and Playback icons •
• Titlebar Turns Dark while browsing menus of a running plugin •
• Current Folder displayed in the title of the File Browser •
• Time alternates with battery percentage •


———————— WPS FEATURES ————————
•- Information organised into three ‘rows’ -•
"Current Info", "File Info" and "Schedule" (includes playlist progress, clock, and next song)

• Compact and dense but neat design •
• Always visible volume bar with "0db" marker and amp clipping indicator •
• Bold, crisp, pixel-perfect player status icons with no antialiasing •

•- Lots of Info displayed in the WPS: -•
Title, Artist, Album, Year, File Codec, File Bitrate, Track Number, Playlist Progress,
Clock, Next Song Title, Next Song Artist, Volume DB, Current and Remaining Duration,
Battery, Shuffle, Repeat Mode, and Hold Status, all elegantly organised.



———————— NEW ICONSET INCLUDED: “Clear 12x12”————————
A new, pixel-perfect custom iconset "Clear 12x12".



Aimed to make RockBox list items and files more understandable, this iconset
greatly modifies and improves the "Tango SW" icons, adding support for
custom foreground colours and a much more understandable and clean look
with no blurry anti-aliasing and crisp pixel-perfection.

Additionally, I've redone file (viewers) icons from scratch, researching what
each file types are and created icons accordingly. You can now actually begin
to conceive what a .ch8 file could be. Also doesn't screw up the "Open With"
menu as lots of iconsets do.


———————— CUSTOMISATION ————————



•- Custom Colours: -•
This theme supports custom accent colours, simply adjust foreground colour in settings.

•- Asian Glyphs Support -•
If you need asian glyph support, select the "14-Rockbox-Mix" font in the Theme Settings.

———————— NOTES ————————
I recommend you set "show path in browser" to "current directory" in settings to see the current folder in the title bar for files menus.

Due to the way Rockbox renders viewports, you may see some visual artefacts
when first loading the theme or changing theme settings. To fix this switch to the
WPS and back out, that will fix it and it shouldn't come back until another theme change.

The beige colour depicted here was very sensitive to tonal changes due to display quality.
The raw images in InfoMatrix have been purposefully oversaturated to compensate the iPod's
"washed-out" display. The shade may vary on your iPod compared to the shade seen in screenshots. If the theme renders too yellow or too cool on your device, let me know and
send me a picture. (Also very hard to get the picture right). It should be a nice, warm, almost paper-like shade when in natural lighting.

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[cereal_killer]

Now that's a very nice theme. I'll be happy to try it on my iPod nano 2g, when it is released. Thank you for this, yuuiko.

[yuuiko]

Now that's a very nice theme. I'll be happy to try it on my iPod nano 2g, when it is released. Thank you for this, yuuiko.

Thanks cereal_killer!

Theme is now up!
I had to make some compromises due to rockbox's strict upload checking.

• You now need to manually set the font for the Asian Glyph Support. Rockbox didn't allow me to have multiple .cfg files.
• Icon pack is named "InfoMatrix" instead of its real name "Clear Icons 12x12" as it needed to match the theme name.
• In my copy, there was a theme file that allowed you to set "Clear Icons 12x12" as your iconpack without changing any other theme settings. This had to be removed as I couldn't add more than one .cfg file.

[cereal_killer]

Hello yuuiko, I installed your theme on my nano 2g along with the latest build using RockboxUtility, but there is only the fallback wps showing up. Version 3.14 also doesn't work.

[yuuiko]

Thats odd, seems to work fine for me and I did the same thing. Will investigate. Sorry for any inconveniences as this is my first time themeing rockbox!

Do the menus work well though? Including active plugin screens, quickscreen and context menu?

[Frankenpod]

Haven't tried the original but I've already done a 320x240 conversion, which works fine for my ipods (I feel no themes can go unassimilated by the ipod classic/video - no other player can have a theme that is denied to them!).

Don't suppose the problem for cereal killer's player could just be a required font not there for some reason?

(Could upload the 320x240 version sometime if original author (yuuiko) has no objection.  Probably still needs a few tweaks.*)

Really nice touch with the different type of screens for context menu etc.

*  I mean my conversion does - some icons haven't resized quite right.

[yuuiko]

@Frankenpod
wow quick! but oof the scaling is very off and it triggers me. I'd like the port to have the same sizing, instead of having everything scaled up bigger to fit the screen. Maybe its just your screenshots but they also look quite blurry...
Edit: oh I just needed to click them. Even so I see some aliasing fattening up some icons a bit there

Could you send me the files somehow (maybe cloud storage link or something) as it'll be a great start for me to tweak for the port!
(I'd need to do it in simulator though, I don't have an iPod Video/classic yet and I'm looking for one.)

Edit 2:
Tried to port using sim myself. Hmmm, thats a lot of space! and the font looks tiny now on the huge screen:

Maybe a small, regulated size increase would be alright. not 2x bigger though.

@Cereal_Killer
Just tried a re-install and had no problems. Try checking / installing the rockbox fonts?

[Frankenpod]

Will try to work out how to send it to you, if you want to tweak it to make it into a conversion yourself.  Perhaps I could attach it to a post here - pms don't seem to allow attachments.  I'm sure you could do a better job starting from your original concept, as opposed to me converting what you've already done.

Also, there was at least one part I didn't understand what the original code was doing.

  Not sure if I've missed something about how the theme engine works (I find that engine has a _lot_ of undocumented behaviour, where you can't tell what a bit of code will do till you try it on different targets, and where statements that are technically logically identical end up producing different results, so I never can tell if things in themes that don't make sense to me are just a slip, or are that way for a good reason).


Just for example - and this _isn't_ a criticism, just curious whether it means I've missed another quirk about how the theme engine behaves.


This line
%?if(%cs, =, 10)<%?if(%cs, !=, 15)<%?if(%cs, !=, 12)<%?mm<|%xd(Fa)|%xd(Fb)|%xd(Fc)|%xd(Fd)>>>>

seems to me the second and third nested conditionals aren't needed...if it's equal to 10, then it can't be equal to 15 or 12, no?  Or am I missing something?

Also I like how you shift the title to make room for the lock symbol - it's a nice touch.  Wondering if it would make sense to add that for the context menu screen as well?  Just for completeness.  Someone might put hold on while in the context menu!

Edit - yeah the icons are resized in a very simple way.  Was gonna improve them later.  A general problem is you can't do real anti-aliasing if also using user-settable colours or you get that purple/turquoise fringeing.

(One thing I'd like the theme engine to have is to be able to take the user-set foreground/background colours and manipulate them...so the user could say choose blue, and the theme would automatically use multiple different shades of blue for the different elements).

[Frankenpod]

hmmm, can't attach zip files here.  Could attach just the sbs and wps files, sans the bitmaps...but seems like you are on the way to converting it yourself anyway?

[Frankenpod]

I gave you a vote, but the theme voting system seems daft to me.  I see themes quickly acquire far more votes than downloads (hmmm...).  And its slightly irritating when someone gives a very low vote rather than posting to say what the problem is with a theme so it can be fixed.

[yuuiko]

Thanks for the vote and nice comments!

Not sure if removing those conditions will break anything. I kinda just did a no-assumption mindset when I made it. I guess we could try remove the extra stuff, it'll probably work as you noted since whatever 15 is cant be open at the same time as the others in the UI (first time making a theme here btw)

The hold symbol should appear where it usually does and not in the "popup window", but it seems to have disappeared alltogether when the context menu is open. Huh. I might make it so that it appears on the window title, would require two new viewports though

Icons in this theme shouldn't be aliasing or anti-aliased, they should be intently pixel-perfect! =)

WPS not done yet, and the MASSIVE screen compared to the nano is a big waste. Maybe I'll add an album art or the playlist or something. Just seems so empty at the moment.


Look at all that space:

[yuuiko]

on the note of hold design, I had a full-height album art thingy designed but not implemented because of technical issues.. Would you have any idea how to get it working?

Load holdview on main menu - seem to work ok


go to a view with a sliding text


Hold - the sliding text punches through


Unhold - VI disappears. Only comes back on scroll



Other issues:

• I can't seem to call a new VI on hold. I tried making a 1x1 VI on hold but it didn't want to switch to it
• I tried to do this in the WPS, but it seems like there cant be two album art container setups at once or I'm missing something

Note:
Haven't placed those four icons on the bottom right yet

oh one more thing if you’re here, does the beige show up on your players correctly? Having to oversaturate the bitmaps is feeling a bit risky

[cereal_killer]

Reinstalling the font pack helped. Working fine now. Thanks for the help. I am looking forward to the iPod Video/Classic port. If the hold problem is related to the nano, I experience a problem with the current build: After switching to unhold, no buttons except the select button work and after pressing select all buttons work again.

[Frankenpod]

Yes, you can't load two versions of art on the same screen and switch between them.  I've tried that and failed before (wanted to make artwork change size, for example).  You can have one art display on sbs and another on wps.

All sorts of things behave weirdly if you switch between different things on the screen.  I've just used trial-and-error to make things work, in particular redrawing things again after things that overwrite them have been removed.

  E.g. this one had lots of overwriting and switching between display elements, and I'm still not sure it works quite right with every possible sequence. 

Main thing is, it doesn't work as a logical programming language would, statements that ought to lead to the same result, by strict logic, don't.

http://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?themeid=2799&target=ipod6g

How are you doing the cover loading over the menu?  The scrolling text breaks through because scrolling requires updating, so it will update it after the cover art is drawn, and hence go on top of the cover art.  But I'm not sure how you are doing the swap.  It might not be possible to avoid the problem.

[yuuiko]

Not sure how I'm doing it, i just wrote something and it almost worked kinda thing.

Probably:
Setup the big albumart

setup a handler that returns Vd(w)
and everything that should appear on hold tagged w.

For the bkg i just added another rule and file to the backdrop switcher. seems to work fine.
I tried to disable the VI by adding ifs to not show any VI's when hold is on, but it doesn't seem to work. If i get this part to work then everything else should be a-ok

p.s. "oh one more thing if you’re here, does the beige show up on your players correctly? Having to oversaturate the bitmaps is feeling a bit risky"

part of the SBS thats hold related:

Code: [Select]

%xl(L,Hold - SBS.bmp,0,0)
#
#Conditional Backdrops
%VB(0,0,176,132,-)
%?if(%cs, !=, 10)<%xd(H)>
%?if(%cs, !=, 15)<%xd(H)>
%?if(%cs, !=, 14)<%xd(H)>
%?if(%cs, =, 10)<%xd(I)> #Quick
%?if(%cs, =, 15)<%xd(J)> #Context
%?if(%cs, =, 14)<%xd(K)> #Plugin
%?mh<%xd(L)|> #Hold
#
#-- UI Viewports
#Preload
%Vi(w,0,0,1,1,-)# hold
%Vi(x,0,17,175,98,-)# Main
%Vi(y,0,0,176,132,-)# Quick
%Vi(z,14,25,148,100,-)# Context
#
#Display
#%?mh<%VI(w)|> #hold
%?mh<|%?if(%cs, !=, 10)<%VI(x)>> #Not QuickMenu
%?mh<|%?if(%cs, !=, 15)<%VI(x)>> #Not ContextMenu
%?mh<|%?if(%cs, =, 10)<%VI(y)>> #QuickMenu
%?mh<|%?if(%cs, =, 15)<%VI(z)>> #ContextMenu
#
#-------------------------------------------------------------
#
# Handler - Switch to Cover View on Hold
%?mh<%Vd(w)|>
#
#---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#
#--HOLD VIEW
#
#
%Cl(0,0,132,132)
%Vl(w,0,0,176,132,-)
%?C<%Cd|>
#
#-- Progress Bar
%xl(M,Volume Slider.bmp,0,0)
%Vl(w,136,5,4,81,-)
%pb(0,0,4,81,Progress Bar HOLD.bmp,vertical,slider,M)
#
#-- Remaining Track Time
%Vl(w,141,47,35,14,-)
%ac%pc
#
#-- Current Track Time
%Vl(w,141,66,35,14,2)
%ac%pr
#
%Vl(w,151,12,12,12,-)
%?mp<%xd(Dc)|%xd(Da)|%xd(Db)|%xd(Dd)|%xd(De)>
#
#%Vl(w,0,0,176,132,-)
#%xd(L)
#