Rockbox Development > Feature Ideas
I branched my own version of PictureFlow, and I fixed a few bugs!
EricLecarde:
I'm new in this forum so... first things first: hello Rockbox community! :D
I've been using Rockbox for quite a while and I think it is really cool.
One thing I never liked though, was the lack of "Cover Flow" integration, as I think its an important part of the user experience. I love to scroll across my album collection while listening to the music, I find it very suggesting. I think for some users this could be a deal-breaker.
I know PictureFlow is included as a demo plugin, but for me it is contradictory to have PictureFlow integration through the WPS menu, but to have PictureFlow placed in an obscure deep corner of the OS menus. So... I started by modifying RockBox to include this feature as a Main Menu item.
Then, after using PictureFlow I realized some stuff could be improved or fixed, so I decided to take a look into the source code and I changed some stuff. I made my own version of PictureFlow with the following changes:
- Albums are now grouped by Artist
- Text shows Album and Artist. There is an option to configure whether you want to show one, both or none of them, and also the position of the text.
- Album collisions are fixed. Albums with the same title merged. This is annoying since for example, many artist have a "MTV Unplugged". In my iPod, Mike Oldfield's "Discovery" merged with Daft Punk's one. Artwork was messed up too.
- Album updating can be forced through a menu option. See "technical details" below.
- I changed the empty slide bitmap.
- I added some extra fields to the language file: I need them for the new configuration options. English and Spanish (I changed some stuff in there too as the translation was not 100% my style).
- Going from WPS to PictureFlow dint work properly when more than one album with the same title. Fixed too.
- Blank messages when re-scanning were fixed (minor fix, but a fix).
I recorded this demonstration to show the changes (sorry for the menus in spanish):
https://youtu.be/tgSRhnXLJa8
Technical details:
To achieve the mentioned functionality, I changed the query that builds up the album list to perform first an artist search. Buffer now keeps information of the artists. This works nice, however there is a downturn: the new query tends to perform very slow when the hard drive is spinning. Since I don't want to wait 50secs every time I open PictureFlow when the HD is spinning, I decided to implement a solution: After the scan, PictureFlow creates a binary file to keep the buffer information, and since then, every time PictureFlow is launched, this file is read. This solved the problem but now PictureFlow is unable to detect changes in the Database by itself. Every time we launch Pictureflow, the album list will be the same, and that is undesired.
My fix is silly: I simply added a menu option to perform a new re-scan and update of the album covers. It works and its convenient: In the past, I found myself fixing some artwork file in order to make it readable for PictureFlow, only to realize that I had to re-build all the cover information from the beginning in order to get my new non-progressive jpg files scanned. Now this wont happen, as the re-scan option will build the album index and will search only for the missing artwork cover files.
Well I think that's all, sorry for the long post.
I would be happy to share my changes with the Rockbox community if anyone is interested. Let me know what you think!
Regards and keep rockin!
__builtin:
We'd certainly be interested in your changes. If you're comfortable with Git (and using your real name so we can assign credit properly), see https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/UsingGit.
Otherwise you can upload your code somewhere accessible, and we can take care of it.
darkcity:
Great work. Does album collision affect the text menu selection using search on 'Album'?
EricLecarde:
--- Quote from: darkcity on June 08, 2020, 12:23:10 AM ---Great work. Does album collision affect the text menu selection using search on 'Album'?
--- End quote ---
No, it is only a PictureFlow thing, due to the lack of Artist filter in the search algorithm.
EricLecarde:
--- Quote from: __builtin on June 07, 2020, 10:18:11 PM ---We'd certainly be interested in your changes. If you're comfortable with Git (and using your real name so we can assign credit properly), see https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/UsingGit.
Otherwise you can upload your code somewhere accessible, and we can take care of it.
--- End quote ---
Sure! I'll take a look and if I find some problem, I will let you know and just share the code directly. Thanks
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