Rockbox Technical Forums

Support and General Use => Theming and Appearance Customization => Topic started by: afruff23 on March 02, 2008, 10:04:19 PM

Title: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 02, 2008, 10:04:19 PM
This is for the Gigabeat F. I am using Fireworks 8.

This thing is going to have a lot of conditionals (what is the maximum size limit for a wps file? I ehar there is none, but complexity can limit it. The Gigabeat F should have little problems here, right?).
I think it will go something like this(if you have a better suggestion, please tell me).

1.If album art for current song is present.
...1.then display 140x140 album art on bottom instead of "next song info".
......2. If next song info is present.
............2.then display it along the same area of "now" sing info with alternating sublines (7 seconds for now, 4 seconds for ...............next).
............2.Otherwise, just display the current song on the top without the "NOW" image and no left margin.
...1.Otherwise, check for next song info. If present
......3.Then display "next song info" on bottom.
......3.Otherwise, only display current song on the top without the "NOW" image and no left margin.

The top bar is going to be fit to width (and made twice as tall) to the Gigabeat F screen along with all the icons on the bar (battery status, hold icon, HDD activity, playback status icons, and playback status "words").

The word "score:0" at the top alternates between "score" and "plays" with their respective runtime database tags.

The font is unifont.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Job Van Dam on March 02, 2008, 11:31:30 PM
You asked for it so you getting it...

- The word "score:0" at the top what is that exactly? The number of times that song has played? You can do that?

- That conditionals sound great. My own themes do some nifty things by using those crazy conditionals so I can respect that part of it.

- I think there should be some tagnames besides the tags. Like it should say "Album: (albumname)", you know?

- The actual wording of the playback status is cool.

- Volume level and progressbar should so be different colors.

- The date in numbers I'm not a fan of.

- The biggest problem this theme has is it's just straight up ugly. The colors and icons are boring. Also this theme looks very similar to everything else out there.

Anyone can make a theme but the better ones look good but still provide the information in a clear, aesthetically pleasing manner. You got half of it down with the info and other options but now the hard part is making it look good without sacrificing the info.
That's why, I think, most people make there own themes for themselves exclusively. I do because I want certain info displayed and I know what I like. No one can make a better theme for me than I can.

Still though... I am extremely curious of the themes people have made for themselves that they can't post because of copyright rules. Most of mine fall under that catergory anyway...
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 12:15:24 AM
You asked for it so you getting it...

- The word "score:0" at the top what is that exactly? The number of times that song has played? You can do that?

- That conditionals sound great. My own themes do some nifty things by using those crazy conditionals so I can respect that part of it.

- I think there should be some tagnames besides the tags. Like it should say "Album: (albumname)", you know?

- The actual wording of the playback status is cool.

- Volume level and progressbar should so be different colors.

- The date in numbers I'm not a fan of.

- The biggest problem this theme has is it's just straight up ugly. The colors and icons are boring. Also this theme looks very similar to everything else out there.

Anyone can make a theme but the better ones look good but still provide the information in a clear, aesthetically pleasing manner. You got half of it down with the info and other options but now the hard part is making it look good without sacrificing the info.
That's why, I think, most people make there own themes for themselves exclusively. I do because I want certain info displayed and I know what I like. No one can make a better theme for me than I can.

Still though... I am extremely curious of the themes people have made for themselves that they can't post because of copyright rules. Most of mine fall under that catergory anyway...

-Score is the autoscore the runtimeDB assigns to a song. It's here under %ra. http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/CustomWPS#Runtime_Database_and_Replaygain
It subline alternates with number of plays.

-Yeah, optimizing it (e.g. least amount of code) can be annoying though; my last player was the iaudio X5 which was lacking the kind of horsepower the Gigabeat has so it couldn't handle very large WPS files. Not to mention debugging.

-I think those take up too much space and you should get the hang of it after using it a few times. I don't want the lines to be too narrow that they always have to scroll.

-Well, it's an adaptation from the HiPodNextV5 theme which I made for the iAudio X5 (which is a spinoff of a spinoff,etc.)

-I prefer dates in numbers. Fitting the three letter day of the week would make it look awkward since there would be no space between the time and date.

-Yeah, I haven't adapted anything to the Gigabeat (from the 160x128 theme for the iAudio X5 I made). For some reason, I forgot/Fireworks won't let me create the bar pattern for a progress bar (e.g. like the iPod) so I just scaled up the old progress bar and applied a rounded rectangle mask.

As for aesthetically pleasing, yes it is quite ugly, but I am an info-freak. I highly doubt you could fit that much information and make it look any prettier while still allowing numerous options (e.g. 140x140 album art). This WPS is more to my liking (despite the fact I never use albumart; I might use albumart later if the theme I am using has plenty of info while still showing album art).

I believe this WPS will fill a small niche: a WPS which shows plenty of info (for now and next song) while still having big album art.

Am I violating any copyrights? My HiPodNextV5 theme was never taken down.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Llorean on March 03, 2008, 12:29:00 AM
Just as a note, the Gigabeat doesn't have any additional WPS "horsepower" relative to the X5. Yes, it can fit a larger file, but it still has the same ratio of screen size to maximum WPS size, so the WPS still has effectively the same maximum. It's more to save RAM than CPU power.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 01:31:39 AM
Just as a note, the Gigabeat doesn't have any additional WPS "horsepower" relative to the X5. Yes, it can fit a larger file, but it still has the same ratio of screen size to maximum WPS size, so the WPS still has effectively the same maximum. It's more to save RAM than CPU power.

In the past (a long time ago), I remember there being a hard file limit while I used an iaudio X5. Since apparently that limit has been removed, does that mean the WPS can be more complex than since then?
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Llorean on March 03, 2008, 01:34:52 AM
The only hard limits should be
A) You only have so many letters you can use for images
and
B) There's a maximum total buffer size for bitmaps, based on the screen size.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 01:39:02 AM
The only hard limits should be
A) You only have so many letters you can use for images
and
B) There's a maximum total buffer size for bitmaps, based on the screen size.
But there's a "soft limit" for complex coding (e.g. lots of conditionals), right?
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Llorean on March 03, 2008, 01:42:13 AM
I don't even know what you're trying to mean by "soft limit." There should be no further constraints, as long as everything fits in the buffer, as far as I know.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 02:01:19 AM
I don't even know what you're trying to mean by "soft limit." There should be no further constraints, as long as everything fits in the buffer, as far as I know.

By "soft limit", I mean something like how there is a soft limit to how fast a car can go. It's not an exact number or known, but if you work it too hard it won't function.

So, I can create tons of nested conditionals while having a few images and not experience any problems?
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Llorean on March 03, 2008, 02:08:16 AM
Well yes, in theory, there's a practical limit to how much computation the CPU can do, but I don't think you can reasonably make a WPS that hits this limit.

Remember, these players can also play video, not a simple computational task at all.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 02:52:50 AM
Well yes, in theory, there's a practical limit to how much computation the CPU can do, but I don't think you can reasonably make a WPS that hits this limit.

Remember, these players can also play video, not a simple computational task at all.

While I notice any big difference in battery life between a simple WPS and a complex one? Or is it a nominal change?
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: Llorean on March 03, 2008, 02:57:49 AM
It's been shown that there's a measurable difference in battery life between the menu and a WPS, so it seems reasonable that added complexity will show an impact in battery life. On a gigabeat I couldn't even hazard a guess how much though, or if it will actually be a measurable amount.
Title: Re: Gigabeat F WPS mockup..needs criticism
Post by: afruff23 on March 03, 2008, 03:07:04 AM
It's been shown that there's a measurable difference in battery life between the menu and a WPS, so it seems reasonable that added complexity will show an impact in battery life. On a gigabeat I couldn't even hazard a guess how much though, or if it will actually be a measurable amount.
Back to optimization I go. At least I only have to deal with pseudo-code (is that the right word?), while you guys have to deal with the tougher stuff.

EDIT: Here it is again with some tentative updates. I am still trying to figure out where to stick the HDD activity icon and hold sign while not ruining whatever semblance of canon my WPS has left.

Here are the changes I am thinking of:
-Remove the "score:0" and replace it with the day of the week and just dedicate that whole line to time and date
-The score and total play tags will likely not be used. I never really looked at them in the past, so I won't incorporate them.
-Remove the wording of the playback status and replace it with status icons consistent with the theme (e.g. hold, repeat, shuffle).
-Since the repeat and shuffle icons will be moved to the top, the space taken up by their current position will be taken up by an extended volume meter.
-I'm not so sure about the battery icon (made from scratch BTW).
-The gradient of the top bar seems to change dramatically near the bottom.
-When there is no "next song info" available and no album art either, there will be a huge gap in between the song info and the progress bar. I will have to move the song info down some in this case and this will require each line's conditionals to be considered carefully (e.g. a line displays album info in one condition and title info in another condition).