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Tuesday, 06 September 2011 16:38 |
Been a while since my last posting. Much has happened - losing of a job, moving twice, contract work, and from time to time some personal project stuff.
I got to looking at EmuLauncher again: One thing I really wanted in it, but never worked in, was being able to view groups of ROMs by classification, i.e. genre. Sometimes you just want a fighting game regardless of whether it's on the Sega Genesis, or on the 32x - and face it, sometimes you don't feel like paging through 10's of ROMs just to get to one particular title you want to play.
That got me thinking on how to organize it in the UI considering the limited user input options the theather PC presents - in short - how the hell do I make it work with nothing more than a remote? Well - after thinking a bit, I realized that things like smartphones (particularly in this case iPhone's elegantly laid out UI) already do similar things: they organize a lot of data, with various ways to sort it, and present it in a user interface that has restricted input.
So why not make it look something akin to a iPhone app? *shrugs* Why not indeed:
Realizing that yes, it's almost a direct rip of a iPhone app interface, but this is nothing more than a mock up at this point. In fact the drop down for sorting will likely be another set of paneling on the left but you get the idea: swiping through information, and drilling down to what you want, each subset replacing the last subset in the left pane. The tough part will be getting it to behave how I want, visually, with .NET controls. In short - it'll mean a lot of custom control writing - but hey, that's how one gets practice and the point of this was to learn things and get an app that performed a function for a personal reason right?
Who knows how long it will take between home life and new contract work rolling in to take care of but at least there's a new entry here now at long last :) |
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 06 September 2011 16:51 |
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Sunday, 21 November 2010 18:53 |
I've been working on a friend's website and looking at needing to put a good amount of organized content on one page, but make it fairly organized and readable. In the past I've made use of an accordion style setup to open up div panels, et al, so that you're only reading what information you want to be reading at the time. Keeps things neat and clean.
I know jQuery UI has an accordion widget, and since this page also makes use of some error messaging through normal JS alert()'s I figured "hey why not kill two birds with one stone - jQuery UI has both of these components and can be styled to taste".
I was bit taken back by it after building my jQuery UI package however. jQuery requires core components and suggests you include a number of somewhat optional behavior classes for many of the widgets. After building with the core, behaviours and the two mentioned widgets, my jQuery UI build without any CSS classes / themes weighed in at about 102k. Sorry, but that's just far too heavyweight for my needs here.
I will admit that I use jQuery UI on this site for really only one thing: autocomplete. It's a useful widget and for pages that have a lot of searching going on you can more readily justify the file size. But it still seems to me that jQuery UI for all its usefulness (the draggable behaviour is also very convenient) still seems much more suited to large scale sites that employ a robust or complicated UI scheme...
I can write my own accordion style plugin for this, and the site is already using Colorbox for image zoom ins which I can tailor into custom error popups. All of this will come in weighing a great deal less than jQuery UI's 102k build from above.
I hate to say it as I love jQuery UI for what it offers, but I'd have to suggest that if you're looking for one or two off widget use on a smaller scale site, you're likely better off looking for a lighter solution elsewhere (there are plenty of jQuery plugins readily available on the 'net) or writing your own to suit.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 21 November 2010 19:07 |
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Friday, 24 September 2010 22:19 |
I last posted about a couple of custom apps I wrote for my HTPC. One of those was EmuLauncher. Well, after getting the apps onto the pc and playing it for a while it was obvious EmuLauncher needed to be tweaked.
First off it was FAR too small for the resolution on the TV. Text was readable, but barely so. And the sheer number of ROMs in a given setup was a pain to get through using only an up or down arrow on the remote. Besides, the overall look was too squashed, compacted, and I knew I could do better than that.
Thus the update:
First off the app now runs at a size of 800x600 by default. The buttons are obviously larger, bolded text, and the icons have been bumped up and enhanced a bit.
The largest change came in the left pane for the preview image. The larger window size gave a lot of real estate to do something with so I decided to use a panel to get a graphic context from and programmatically draw the image onto it. This let me do some things with the image before painting it onto the canvas. Thanks to a class I found on the net that saved me from the crazy Cross Product calcs required for perspective transforming an image (don't even ask - last time I did something like that I was writing Java libs...) I added a bit of flare to the preview section and reworked the graphics for the meta data.
Lastly, I added a key listener for the page up and page down keys to scroll through the ROM list with.
Drastically better than the old version.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 10 November 2010 19:23 |
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Sunday, 19 September 2010 18:02 |
As promised - pictures of the HTPC now that I've gotten it configured and hooked up. The shots below are of XBMC in action on organizing and playing music and movies off the hard drive. I included some pictures of the custom apps I wrote (tho they're not a lot to look at, they perform their duties admirably).
The first application pic is of AppLauncher which gets started at boot up - this allows me to choose what application I want to run from the remote. This app also registers a global hotkey in Windows (via user32 through the InterOp classes in .NET) so you can always bring this application back to the foreground with a press of a button on the remote control.
The second app is EmuLauncher - used to launch individual video game roms in their appropriate emulator. The pic is of the SEGA emulation setup I have.
Both apps are fully configurable through XML files allowing you to change the size of the windows on startup, configure what buttons you want, what roms get loaded and launched, what emulator is used for playing, etc.
Until next time kids...
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Last Updated on Sunday, 19 September 2010 18:18 |
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Wednesday, 15 September 2010 16:10 |
I just ordered parts for a new PC that I plan to use as a psuedo HTPC. I should likely explain... It's more intended to run emulators for playing old skool console games on my TV. I just intend to rip my current (not extremely large) DVD collection onto it as well and throw my music collection (fairly large) on there too.
In any event, I didn't go high powered on this thing. In fact, I wanted a lower powered machine, with middle of the road performance (and middle of the road price). So I went with the following package deal for case and mobo:
Foxconn R40-G4
I loved the small foot print this thing has physically - the thing is tiny - perfect for set top box usage.
I'm putting Windows 7 on it along with SNES9x, Kega: Fusion, and NEStopia for emulation purposes. Media content will be driven with XBMC. I picked up a small cheap ass Windows compatible USB remote (that is basically a keyboard / mouse signal sender built into a remote control housing) and have a few custom applications that I coded in C# / .NET for menuing the whole thing out and launching games off it with the remote control. Should be a fun little project to put together.
I'll put up pictures of things as I get it all put together along with screenshots of the custom apps.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 15 September 2010 16:26 |
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