Archive for March, 2007
March 17th, 2007
Firsty, I apologise for the lack of posts this week, I’ve been intensively studying mandarin – it’s a hard language to learn, no doubt. Anyway, I’m back now and working as hard as ever on the new FofR configuration, lots of juicy new features coming soon. Back to the point, a lot of these features have been enabled by the new pUI release. The changelog states:
0.8.0
+ “windowsize” button will now work inside child track displays
+ new user globals / layout globals will be run before all title formatting in TrackDisplay / SCPL.
layout globals will change between layouts and are saved in the .pui, while user globals stay the same for all layouts.
+ various bug fixes / improvements
What this doesn’t say is that Persisting Variables (PVARS) now really do persist – they are saved between foobar sessions right to the .pui file. This means making a configuration panel in a track display works as expected, saving settings between sessions rather than having to change them on each load. This has enabled me to make customising my configuration a lot easier and hassle free.
The download link never changes, if you seem to download the wrong file then something is getting cached in the wrong place. Terrestrial prefers this approach as it prevents old versions of pUI from being distributed, so I am afraid I cannot give you a unique URL, merely point you here:
Preview of the new globals box after the break Read the rest of this entry »
March 7th, 2007
The changelist states:
0.7.5
-
Tooltips for buttons. (add TOOLTIP:mytooltip or TOOLTIP:”my tooltip” to override the default)
-
Free cached images in not used for a while
-
Options for WINDOWSIZE to set anchor points (eg: WINDOWSIZE:x:y:LEFT:TOP, WINDOWSIZE:x:y:RIGHT:BOTTOM, etc)
March 5th, 2007
The support requests for configurations have been pouring in over the last week or so, my inbox has been quite busy. As a result of this I have decided to implement a sexy new forums system into the site – this way we can discuss bugs, etc. out in the open without the closed doors of an email conversation.
Now, I imagine the first thing you will be thinking is – “but we already have Hydrogen Audio…”. This is true, and this forum does not seek to be either a replacement or a competitor. HA focuses predominantly on the development of foobar and its assorted components. The fooblog forums (how can we shorten that?) shall instead be aimed at helping users develop and distribute interesting configurations and design aesthetics. I also hope that it will encourage more users to post to this blog and the site in general.
The login and registration for this blog and the forums are tied, you need only sign up once and if you are logged in on the forums you will also be logged in here. All existing blog members already have an account over at the forums. As a logged in user you can obviously post topics and replies at the forums, you can also post comments to blog posts under your forum name (without having to type in your username and email each time, and, after a set number of posts, your comments will appear instantly). You can also write and store draft articles for this site under your username; on each topic page there is a direct link to the blog’s article submission page, with a little bit of javascript to facilitate getting forums content into a well formatted blog post.
With no further delays, the forums can be found here:
http://www.fooblog2000.com/forum/
or
http://forums.fooblog2000.com
March 5th, 2007
I am really enjoying the configuration possibilities of PanelsUI. You can, pretty much, design any interface you want now. I’m not much for complex interfaces that have 17 different views or tiny windows that can only display 5 tracks and a poststamp sized album cover. I like plenty of room for a nice sized cover and long titles (especially for classical music). With that in mind, I present my latest foobar interface for PanelsUI…
Winter
March 2nd, 2007
The feedback and bug reports keep coming in – helping me to continue developing and improving this configuration. I’m proud to announce version 0.5 of my design (maybe I should give them names). Once again, this version uses some new PanelsUI features so be sure to get the 0.7.0 beta so that everything works.
So, what’s new?
Version 0.5:
- Added last played and playcounts to Song Info panel
- Improved track codec text in Song Info Panel
- Album/artist group headers crop when there is not enough space
- Added installation notice
- Added Volume slider to bottom ‘cog’ menu
- Added second but primary source for album art in Now Playing: “$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,folder.*)” before resorting to the old method.
- Added support for %album artist%, if this meta tag exists then both artist and track are displayed in playlist
- Switched SCPL album art from %tracknumber% to %_itemindex% based drawing, so that tracknumber errors do not render image erroneously. Similarly multi-cd albums show artwork only once unless discs are in separate groups.
- Added “Sort By” panel on SCPL – clicking Sort by Artist changes how items are grouped then sorts the tracks by artist.
- Sort by Artist, Sort by Path, Sort by Title, Sort by Album, Reverse Sorting
- When Sorted by title – No tracknumber is displayed, Artist appears to right of song title
- When Sorted by artist – no album art is shown, instead an artist image is used
- Improved White Theme pause on Now Playing, fixed Spectrum overlay bug.
- Improved Theme and in particular Hotness colours for White Theme
- Border of selected tracks now colour of “hotness”
- Random other bug fixes
If you have any requests please make them known in the comments.
At the moment I don’t have much time to write a full html enriched tutorial describing how to install this configuration and then customise it. If anone could take the time to do this, explaining fonts, components, etc I would be most grateful as I am sure many others will be.
Animated screenshot after the break. Read the rest of this entry »