112x64x1 (Archos) theme: ROCKboxed--please review and test

[JustJohnny]

I've created my first theme for ROCKbox. I have a 1st gen. Nano, so that is the original target device. I've started modifying it for use on other devices.

The theme is available on the Archos WPS gallery pages of the wiki.

Please try out the theme and let me know what you think.  I'm particularly interested in testing the progress bar and battery icons.

Does the progress bar fill the outline at the end of a song? I was having some difficulties while testing this with the uisimulator. Also, the battery icon disappears at certain levels. Does this happen on an actual device?

The inspiration for the theme is the Rockbox logo. Comments are appreciated.


ROCKboxed, version 1.0
Icons along bottom: volume, shuffle, repeat one, play, and battery level.

Other screenshots can be found on my personal website.

[Peter200lx]

wow, no longer have an Archos to test with, but I'm impressed that you were able to miniaturize it to that level. I know from experience that graphical WPS on that device are hard to pull off.

[JustJohnny]

... I know from experience that graphical WPS on that device are hard to pull off.

Thanks Peter200lx. It was basically a complete overhaul of the graphics and code. Instead of having a backdrop with icons on top of the status bar section at the bottom of the screen. It ended up being a row of icons lined up and sized to fill the width of the screen and the height of the status bar.

Plus I knew the most of the icons needed to be made a little smaller. I wasn't sure if I could keep them looking okay. Overall I'm happy with the way it's turned out.

[pixelma]

Nice that you also made this theme for my device!

One thing I noticed though while looking at the screenshots you posted in the wiki:
I do not like that the statusbar in the file browser/menus is switched off too and I don't understand why you chose to do it this way. The information given there is quite important and it's good to see this as long as music is not playing (even though it takes away a line on the small display).

[JustJohnny]

Nice that you also made this theme for my device!

One thing I noticed though while looking at the screenshots you posted in the wiki:
I do not like that the statusbar in the file browser/menus is switched off too and I don't understand why you chose to do it this way.

Thanks for your comments pixelma.

During my own personal use of rockbox, I find I spend most of my time looking at the WPS screen, so for me the statusbar isn't needed while making song selections, or changing settings. Plus, I just don't like how the statusbar looks in the file browser/menus.

Other people have mentioned that they like having the statusbar turned on, so maybe I should not set the statusbar to off in the config. file.

[bascule]

...so maybe I should not set the statusbar to off in the config. file.

Correct, you should never have non-WPS config items in a bundled config file unless it is required for the operation of the WPS and then it should be made explicitly clear in the Wiki entry so that people know what has happened.

It is sufficient to put %wd at the start of the .wps file, which disables the statusbar solely for the WPS and not globally.

[pixelma]

Hopefully you'll read this late reply but just now I really tested the SVN-version and I have some points I'd like to discuss with the creator...

1) While trying I found out that the battery icon for one level was broken (it showed nothing). This is an easy fix and it could be committed, but since I was forced to look at the code a bit I also compared with the code of the other targets. And here's the issue that I have: the long lines in which the battery level "bars" are defined are very hard to read. I don't know if it makes loading the WPS slower or not - but it's very hard to spot a mistake.

2) The additional spaces in front and at the end of the artist/album/title lines make the lines scroll earlier (I had a case where it wouldn't have scrolled at all without them). It also looks ugly when they reach the end of one side, they are just unnecessary because on the mono/greyscale displays you already have a spacing around the used part of the panel - that's different from the colour displays with the "black frame" around the used pixels. I'd like to remove them (maybe for the greyscale versions too) but won't do this without your permission.

3) The black status bar at the bottom gets very important and gives a heavy impression. One thing you most probably don't know is that the actual pixels of these monochrome displays are rectangular - width is 80% of height and so it looks even heavier - maybe you can make them smaller? (I'll attach a photo of it later if you wish but I don't have it here at the moment).

4) Personal preference: the genre tag is often empty in my self-tagged mp3s and so I have little use for it. On the other hand I miss the information of playlist position and total playlist...

Edit: typos/grammar and added attachment

[attachment deleted by admin, too old]

[JustJohnny]

Hopefully you'll read this late reply but i just really tested the SVN-version and I have some points I'd like to discuss with the creator...

Hi Pixelma,
Thanks for testing out the theme!! I'm always up for suggestions, particularly  when someone has an actual device with which they can use it.

1) While trying out I found out that the battery icon for one level was broken (it showed nothing). This is an easy fix and it could be committed but since I was forced at looking at the code a bit I also compared with the code of the other targets. And here's the issue that I have: the long lines in which the battery level "bars" are defined very hard to read. I don't know if it makes loading the WPS slower or not but it's very hard to spot a mistake.

Markun created and applied a fix for the battery not showing 100% charge for a number of devices a couple days ago.  I had noticed this, but hadn't had a chance to fix it. If you have downloaded a current build in the last couple days, and still have a problem--please let me know, or feel free to create a patch for it and have it commited to svn.

The battery code is a little hard to read. I was experimenting with what you can do with conditionals, and the trade off between wps size and graphic size. Of course I haven't done any real analysis of this yet

2) The additional spaces in front and at the end of the artist/album/title lines make the lines scroll earlier (I had a case wher it wouldn't have scrolled at all without them. It also looks ugly when they reached the end of one side and are unnecessary because on the mono/greyscale displays you already have a spacing around the used part of the panel - that's different from the colour displays with the "black frame" around the used pixels. I'd like to remove them (maybe for the greyscale versions too) but won't do this without your permission.

Good point. Please feel free to fix this for the monochrome versions.  I'll check on the greyscale ones. Thanks for pointing this out.

3) The black status bar at the bottom gets very important and gives a heavy impression. One thing you most probably don't know is that the actual pixels of these monochrome displays are rectangular - width is 80% of height and so it looks even heavier - maybe you can make them smaller? (I'll attach a photo of it later if you wish but I don't have it here at the moment).

Thanks for posting the picture. I see what you mean.  I think I may be able to cut a pixel or two from the height of the bar. I'll see what I can do.

4) Personal preference: the genre tag is often empty in my self-tagged mp3s and so I have little use for it. On the other hand I miss the information of playlist position and total playlist...

I lean towards the genre tag myself--I rarely use playlists. I have been thinking about adding some kind of alternative information if the genre info. is not available.  Playlist info. sounds good to me.

[pixelma]

Markun created and applied a fix for the battery not showing 100% charge for a number of devices a couple days ago.  I had noticed this, but hadn't had a chance to fix it. If you have downloaded a current build in the last couple days, and still have a problem--please let me know, or feel free to create a patch for it and have it commited to svn.

The problem Markun fixed was another one that didn't apply to the Archos version. I've already found the mistake and could even commit it myself but wanted to know what you think about the other things. I wouldn't want to commit every single small thing on its own.

The battery code is a little hard to read. I was experimenting with what you can do with conditionals, and the trade off between wps size and graphic size. Of course I haven't done any real analysis of this yet

I prefer one graphic for each level and for the graphics themselves you wouldn't need the whole battery symbol for it just the part that is "the inner" of the battery. Even though the monochrome displays don't support the "%X" for a backdrop of course, the "%x" tag for permanently loading an image works almost the same: just leave the place of the inner part empty and the other ones are displayed above it.

I lean towards the genre tag myself--I rarely use playlists. I have been thinking about adding some kind of alternative information if the genre info. is not available.  Playlist info. sounds good to me.

To be precise I meant the info of "track no. x of y" - and you are always using playlists... even if they are created dynamically . I seldom use saved playlists myself (.m3u/.m3u8) but I like this info because it gives me an impression of how long I can listen to the chosen music. That would be strange when only popping up occasionally while the genre tag isn't present.
My suggestion is (though haven't tried how it actually looks) to replace the codec info with it. Only codec info also doen't tell much on the Archos devices: due to the fact that they really use a hardware decoding chip, they are only able to play mp2/mp3 files at the moment (maybe wav and aiff can show up there one day but not yet). Then you could put the codec info together with the bitrate on the genre tag line in the suggested conditional? (But as I said this is personal preference and an idea I just had.)

Edit: On a second thought about my last idea though: maybe the line below the progressbar would become too long then... :/