[mythtv] New UI code. (was: blah blah up/down arrows blah blah)

[Steven Adeff]

On 4/7/06, Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu> wrote:
> On Friday 07 April 2006 13:20, Steven Adeff wrote:
> > On 4/7/06, Isaac Richards <ijr at case.edu> wrote:
> > > A widget's just a ui element - it's already using Qt widgets to draw the
> > > settings UI.  When I refer to the 'new ui', I mean the code in libmythui
> > > - the opengl stuff is a small part of that.  The new menu code is live
> > > proof of concept code for libmythui (though that's not completely done
> > > yet, either).
> > >
> > > The existing UI's underlying code is rather messy (libmyth/ui*, xmlparse,
> > > mythwidgets, mythdialogs) , having grown from a lot of different people.
> > > It's gotten pretty crufty at this point.  =)  It does Bad Things with
> > > Qt's event loop and is pretty complex + hard to follow in places.
> > >
> > > New stuff tries to fix all that.  Consistant design, simpler API.
> > >
> > > I actually got rather lucky when I figured out how to mix the old & new
> > > UI code. =)  I was anticipating a long painful drawn-out rewrite with all
> > > development in a branch since I thought I couldn't mix'n'match old and
> > > new, but that ended up pretty well.  I figure stuff will happen over the
> > > course of a few releases, now, since things can be reworked in smaller
> > > chunks.
> >
> > ok, I think I understand...
> > Will this new design allow for themes to have more control over
> > placement of UI elements (buttons, images, layer, etc)?
>
> Well, the existing theme stuff allows you to rearrange things fairly flexibly.
> Most of the themes end up just copying the default, though.  I'm still
> working out the new theme format, but I'm trying to make it much simpler to
> do theme modification (at least from the XML side of things, I still won't be
> able to do graphics).  More inheritance of previously defined elements, etc,
> so the UI's more consistant across plugins, too.

Sound good, have you looked at  XBMC's theme structure? It looks
fairly flexible and simple from my time with it.

I had an I idea while using XBMC the other day. It has an area of the
main menu that when playing music is a window to the visualization. I
thought it would be neat if Myth had the ability to enter the menu
structure while watching tv in a similar fashion, where the tv video
is placed in a window like with the EPG, but instead of the EPG have
the menu structure overlayed. This area could also be used in similar
fashion as to XBMC for the music visualization, etc.

> > Will we finally be able to play music and view a slide show at the same
> > time? =D
>
> That's completely separate. =)  I still maintain that it wouldn't be very hard
> to background the existing music player and return to it if someone wanted to
> do the work.  It's just not something I want to spend time on.

Hrm, from my understanding through what I've read, I thought the
plugins exited when you left them, wouldn't that make controlling the
music while its being played impossible if you exited MythMusic? While
I'm not so interested in playing music during a slide show, it would
be nice to be able to do other tasks such as schedule shows, see what
I've recorded, etc,  while MythMusic was playing in the background,
and still being able to select the next track, etc.. I just got the
impression that this was not possible due to the plugin structure?

--
Steve