Skinning XGuide

[Kevl]

Hi Fla

Some notes on the Xsearch screen.

The new @CurrentMode and @TimeElement strings seem not to be heeding the font attribute. I think I'm telling them to be Tahoma but they look to be in Courier??? font.


In the block of text which apears instead of the keyboard to display details about the selected program then I think there is a minor issue with the program description text.

I think there might be a wordwrap issue??? It looks like only one line of data is being displayed. The rest of the layout looks fine though.


If you look at how the popups now display I have moved the popup windows and resized them so that they replace and cleanly hide the 3 selection columns. They look better than having them randomly appear on the screen (I think) and the whole display then looks cleaner to my eyes.

There is one popup which still needs some adjusting. The popup which has quickrecord as its top button has misplaced text and buttons. Maybe I have just missed its controlling items in the Xsearch skin. That being fixed would make Xsearch a done job I would say. Of course I need to then spend a few hours with minor tweaks and font changes etc but once we have control over all the items I can get on with that a few hours per eve.

(though until I started playing with skins on Xsuite I was unaware of just how powerful and feature rich the apps are so maybe there are more screens I haven't noticed yet).


Xrecord is still in need of quite a lot of work. It has a lot of popup screens and most dont have nicely placed text yet.


Kev

[fla]

Hi Kev,

It's starting to look pretty nice! In the plugin code I don't have much control over composite images. I just replace the @ parameters with the actual string and ask the gbpvr utilities to draw the image. Not sure I can do much about fonts and line wrap. Did you try increasing the height of that particular DrawText for the wrap problem?

I'll take a look tomorrow and look through all the XSearch files to make sure we got everything.

[Kevl]

I'll look harder at the size of the text box used to draw the offending "no wordwrapped" text to see if that is to blame. Multiple lines of text work elsewhere so maybe that is the problem.


Kev

[Kevl]

Yes it was the size of the textbox the description field now works fine on Xsearch.

The only screen left to fix on Xsearch is the popup with quick record as the top button.


Kev

[fla]

Just put a new version on the wiki that makes that quick record popup skinnable. Look for special element RecordingPopupBoxButtons and composite images RecordingPopupBoxBackground, RecordingPopupForeground.

There are yet more popups to make skinnable like when you select "Schedule" or "Advanced" from that popup menu as well as a popup that appears when conflicts are detected.

Note that the RecordingPopupBox can appear from XSearch, XGuide (clicking on a show), and from XRecord (clicking on a pending show & selecting "Find More") so you should check that thinks look ok from wherever you called the popup.

We're not done yet! :eek:

[Kevl]

Hi Fla

I have been wondering how to handle popups that are called from multiple parts of XSuite. I think I may be able to handle it by carefully thinking about a compromise size and location for the popup. so that it looks ok from all parts.

Failing that then the only thing I can think of is to have the popup layout (button positions and text positions as well as the default size and location of the background) specified in 1 part of Xsuite, but have the ability to override just the location and size of the popup in the app skin that calls it. If the size and loc is not specified in the calling app's skin (as might be the case with old skins etc) then the defaults get used. This would mean that the buttons and text get specified in 1 place but the position of the whole popup and the size of its background could be tweaked as needed locally.

Not sure how hard this will be to implement. Often things that sound easy are actually hard etc.

Also bear in mind that even if I start changing the look of the XSuite apps then there is still the possibility of scalling them back to 720x480 using Javawiz's Skinresizer app. So we could easily convert my skins back to default blue (change the button colours back etc) and provide it as the default skin - if needed.

Will mod skins this evening to take advantage of your new parameters.

Kev

[Kevl]

Hi Fla

Have modded skin further to suit last update.

I think that the button size on the last modded popup is uncontrolled.

I cant see a way of changing the button size though the spacing parameters appear to work. The popup background does not appear exactly where I expected. Could it have a slight X offset built in still? I need to adjust the txt positions lighly on the last popup but I will do that later when the other popups have been updated. I can then get a similar look and feel for all the buttons to the left, text to the right type popups.

Have attached the latest updated skins.

Kev

[fla]

Hi Kev,

Your suggestion for overridable skinning of shared popups sounds good. For now to progress quicker I'll skin only in XSearch and XRecord & XGuide should get identical shared popups. Overriding can be added later.

Composite images SelectedButtonImage, NormalButtonImage are used to draw all the buttons. This is not new. You have some other things in between these two in your skin.xml btw (I did too but now reordered) and they should logically be together. Do you need varying button sizes in different popups?

I looked at the code and tried playing with the latest popup's background and I didn't see any offsets. I even tried 0,0 and it went to the corner. Can you make a screenshot and paint an arrow to the problem?

There's a new version on the wiki. The "Schedule" button's popup is now skinnable. It's the same popup but it just changes it's contents when in schedule mode so the same background image is used. Look for special element RecordingPopupBoxScheduleButtons and composite images RecordingPopupSchedule, RecordingTypeArrows, RecordingEditCursor. Note that the two arrows beside recording type are not drawn when editing a pending recording from XGuide so they need to be kept in their own separate RecordingTypeArrows image.

[Kevl]

Hi Fla

Sorry about the false alarm re aledged Xoffset for the above modded popup.

It was late and had lost the ability to count. Todays mental arithmetic was far more succesfull. Popup screen appeared exactly where it was expected.

Re the buttons on the popup screen. I do think that a separate popup button (selected and not) should be defined so that it can be smaller than the normal large left hand column of buttons. Looking at how the skin experts here do skins it seems to be the norm. If you look at the popup screens on sub's blue skin then these do indeed seem to be smaller.

There does seem to be an odd button rendering thing going on in the popup screen also. It looks like the bottom edge of the button is being clipped. If you look closely then the button has lost its radius on the corners of the bottom edge.

I have not had chance to fully optimise the text positions on the new popups yet but will do so when all of the popups are adjustable.

I'm planning to get paint shop pro out to make the scrolling arrows look more in keeping with the look of the skin so will probably change these when I get a spare hour.

Re the skin files, I wonder if there is merit in adopting the baseskin type arrangement which other skins use. In this (if I understand correctly) there are lots of default settings for buttons, text styles etc which get applied to lower level skin files unless these lower level skin files over-ride the defaults. Given the 3 XSuite apps are so interdependent then perhaps an XSuiteBase.Xml file could be produced which would allow lots of definitions to be moved from the 3 XSuite app's skin files to the XsuiteBase.xml file. This would remove many duplicate entries from all 3 files and possibly make them all easier to maintain etc. Just a thought. Not sure how hard it is to implement in the code.

Kev

[fla]

The odd rendering thing is because your vertical size is too small in the composite images NormalButtonImage, SelectedButtonImage so the bottom edge of the rounded rectangle gets clipped.

I put a new version on the wiki that makes the XSearch conflict popup skinnable. New elements are ConflictPopupForeground, ConflictPopupCursor, ConflictPopupProgram and ConflictPopupBoxButtons. This is the same screen that pops up in XGuide as well when you try to quick record one more show at a specific time than you have tuners available.

I agree the main screen buttons should be skinnable separately than the buttons in popups. So far XGuide and XSearch only have buttons in popups so we'll probably only define the other composite images when we do XRecord's main screen.