plugin idea: cycling panel

[dottore]

hi, gbpvrians (gee-bee-pee-vee-arians) ;-)

what about a cycling panel-plugin? a plugin, which displays several panels in one place... what i mean: a few seconds you can see weather information, after that the next recording, after that the actual playing track, then a rss-fead, diskspace......

this would save place on the main menu. sure, there is no weather panel and a diskspace panel is missing too, but it would be cool to have this view for no matter what panel.

what do you think?

p.s.: the weather panel could get the weather-information from the weather-plugin....

[saintalan]

Great idea, but in essence are you not just talking about a screensaver, albeit an informative one?

I'd be happy with an alternative to the MediaMVP screensaver just to display a 'moving' album cover etc.

Cheers

Alan

[dottore]

no, i'm talking of a simple panel. a screensaver would be a nice idea too...the idea grew up as i noticed, that the main menu screen cannot be filled with every existing panel.

i want the navigable main-menu and one or two panels, showing me whatever information i want...

[Jeff]

The video archiver plug-in already comes a cycling panel that currently will cycle between showing the next scheduled recording, the current audio track, and low disk space warnings. It also displays the date and time. I wrote it for the reason you pointed out; I wanted to see lots of information and one panel per item used up all the screen space. THe panle contains 5 message levels and will display the messages at the highest level posted in a round-robin fashion at a user-configurable rate.

I am in the prociess of rewriting it so that other plug-in writers can easily post messages to the panel. As an example I am updating the weather plug-in to display the current conditions. Right now I have it working on my machine ut I wanted to test it a bit more before posting.

By the way, you can use the video arvhive panel even if you don't use the video archive plug-in.

Jeff

[dottore]

that's cool, so i will just wait for the next video-archiver-panel-release :-)

[jorm]

One of the problems is the gbpvr installation does not have the plugins in the library path so for one plugin to call another it requires the plugins dll to be copied into the gbpvr root directory. I wonder if sub would be willing to change this.

[Jeff]

Jorm - What I have done is move all the "common" functionality into the CommonGBPVRUtilities.dll file. This is placed in the GBPVR root directory and that way plug-ins can find and use it.

Jeff

[daphatty]

I wonder if sub would be willing to change this.

I think we need to give sub a little incentive to revamp the way skins and plugins work in GBPVR. A bribe if you will. I've had success with this tactic in the past with other similarly developed programs. Only difference (and a major one at that) is that GBPVR is a spare time, donation project rather than full blown shareware.

Call me crazy but I don't think GBPVR has reached its full potential. It's excellent as is but could be tons better. I, for one, intend to help it grow in any way I can.

[Jeff]

I have posted the update to the weather plug-in that displays messages in the video archiver panel. I have also included the updated source at the wike site so that you can see how panel messages are added.

There is also another source example for posting currently playing audio tracks posted here.

Jeff