Panels!

[Ommina]

Yeah I know, I'm posting a lot today. I'm trying to catch up in post count.

Anyway, the new main menu panels reintroduced in the newest version seems pretty straightforward; I got one going with a minimum of fuss.

I'd like to clarify a few points though, so ensure that I'm understanding them.

1. The Main Menu skin.xml file must be edited to include the <Panel> tag. That is, something lower in the plugin skin will not be sufficient.
   
2. There is now a Panels skin folder, but it doesn't seem to be a requirement - so far I've been using xml files from the main plugin skin folder and it's been happy.
   
3. A plugin CAN expose multiple panels.
   
4. Multiple panels are rendered at the same time. There is no automatic transition from panel A to B by the PVRX2 framework; plugins will have to share the main menu real estate. If two choose the same location, one will overwrite the other.
   

So an individual plugin will be able to change the content of its panel, but there is, as yet, no sharing of a panel like we had with the old interface, where, for example, the same panel would transition from "Now Recording", "Next Recording", "Now Transcoding", "Current Temperature".

(Or maybe I just didn't really understand what GBPVR -- in contrast to PVRX2 -- did.)

Do I seem to have a pretty good handle on it?

[sub]

1) correct
2) you can put the skin file wherever you like, as you long as you pass the correct name to your skinhelper constructor
3) yes
4) correct, they'd need to be layed out with knowledge of whether other plugins are.

It was pretty much exactly the same in GBPVR.exe.

[Ommina]

No kidding! I always thought that GBPVR.exe alternated the panel text on the plugin's behalf, letting different plugins share the same location. I guess that's a pretty good demonstration that I only started to pay attention to how things worked after the release of version 1.0.

Thank you for the clarifications -- now the question becomes one of deciding if there is anything my own small work does that is so amazingly interesting that it needs space on the main menu. Probably best to let the user decide.

Thanks again!

[sub]

No kidding! I always thought that GBPVR.exe alternated the panel text on the plugin's behalf

No it didnt, though a user created a plugin that did this. It wasnt part of the base install though. I did consider doing something like this for 1.2.x, but I couldnt be arsed

Thank you for the clarifications -- now the question becomes one of deciding if there is anything my own small work does that is so amazingly interesting that it needs space on the main menu

Thats pretty much wy I didnt do it. There is only so much info that needs to be shown.

[roy]

Are there any more panel items available now, other than @nowPlaying? Or will these come from plugin authors?

[sub]

I've only created the Now Playing panel at this stage, primarily to test the mechanism. Plugin developers can create others that show things like weather etc.