Thread: My Use&Development log

1 minute use comments:

1- I have a Weather and Contact button although if I assigned them to not set (because I haven't installed the plugins), If I try to reassign the buttons, there is no more choice for weather.

Either there should not be weather or contacts option because I don't even have these plugins, or both should be there.

I think they should just not show up at all, if someday there are 50 plugins, I don'T see how all of them would be showing as buttons if you don'T have them installed.

2- When I go to media, first "tab" is all artists, but the two other tabs are not labeled (skin issue?). Anyway, when you are under all artist, you can press the 3rd tab and it goes directly there, however, you cannot go back to all artists (1st tab) without first going to the center tab.

You should be able to jump back to all artists when you are currently seeing the actual files.

Also, is there a way to jump between OM and other windows apps? I can'T use alt-tab or even choose another program in the taskbar, I need to close OM before being able to get somewhere else...

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

1 minute use comments:

1- I have a Weather and Contact button although if I assigned them to not set (because I haven't installed the plugins), If I try to reassign the buttons, there is no more choice for weather.

Either there should not be weather or contacts option because I don't even have these plugins, or both should be there.

I think they should just not show up at all, if someday there are 50 plugins, I don'T see how all of them would be showing as buttons if you don'T have them installed.

The button assignment screen only shows available plugins (aka installed). Its only the default assignments that may not match what you have.
This is just a temporary implementation for the beta versions. Users couldn't figure out how to set buttons, so until we improve the skins a little bit (a post-installation welcome page) we are keeping this in as a temporary measure. If the plugin isn't available the button just does nothing and can be easily removed as you saw.

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

2- When I go to media, first "tab" is all artists, but the two other tabs are not labeled (skin issue?). Anyway, when you are under all artist, you can press the 3rd tab and it goes directly there, however, you cannot go back to all artists (1st tab) without first going to the center tab.

You should be able to jump back to all artists when you are currently seeing the actual files.

This may have been a skin bug in 0.6 although I thought it was fixed prior to release (its definitely fixed now). You will find pressing the second tab has the same effect of jumping from the song list to the artist list.

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

Also, is there a way to jump between OM and other windows apps? I can'T use alt-tab or even choose another program in the taskbar, I need to close OM before being able to get somewhere else...

Works fine for me...what os are you using? Do you mean in full screen, windowed mode or both?

I just double click on the desktop icon, it goes full screen but I have no title bar to resize it... I have windows 7 ultimate x86

and I have installed MS Visual C# 2008 Express, is that enough to be able to see source code and start playing? free download from MS. I really want to start helping out, I once again started looking at RR but I guess unless you've been following RR since day 1, you're in for months of fooling around before getting it right! Just the thought of installing winamp and seeing their config utility makes me want to look elsewhere.

and now, without doing nothing more than I did when writing the other posts, my OM crashes. It seems to crash after the speech recognition loads (or related to the auto indexing). It crashes 100% of the times so I'll uninstall and reinstall to see.

uninstalled OM using the uninstaller, then rebooted and reinstalled.
did not select Speech to see if it was the problem.

two things I have noticed:
1- it still crashes
2- it seems the uninstall did not do its job. When I launched OM, my two removed buttons from the previous install were removed, and the music indexed. This means that somewhere, a settings file stayed on my computer after the install, and the "fresh" instance reused that last config.

edit:
I found out I could still use OM even though I had the crash window "OpenMobile has stopped working". SO I went in and removed indexing. And now no more crashes...

As soon as I put indexing back on, it gives me the "stopped working" window

one last thing for tonight, I was reading the FrameWork.xml and saw all the contact, gps and other stuff in there.

Does that mean that every plugin will have their attributes in the main framework xml? I am thinking far ahead, but with dozens of plugins, it will become huge even if someone doesn't use any plugin?

I would tempted to say that it might be better with a core that has nothing except probably the media player and then everything else as a plugin (radio, videos, GPS, bluetooth, contacts, weather, name it or see road runner list of plugins)

that's all for tonight, I'll continue playing with it tomorrow.

p.s. is the volume button supposed to work? I know a gesture up or down pauses the music, but for volume?

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

uninstalled OM using the uninstaller, then rebooted and reinstalled.
did not select Speech to see if it was the problem.

two things I have noticed:
1- it still crashes
2- it seems the uninstall did not do its job. When I launched OM, my two removed buttons from the previous install were removed, and the music indexed. This means that somewhere, a settings file stayed on my computer after the install, and the "fresh" instance reused that last config.

edit:
I found out I could still use OM even though I had the crash window "OpenMobile has stopped working". SO I went in and removed indexing. And now no more crashes...

As soon as I put indexing back on, it gives me the "stopped working" window

The crash you are experiencing is interesting, as I cannot duplicate. How many songs do you have that it's indexed? Also, there is an !OMDebug.dll in the Tools folder, move that to the plugins folder to generate a debug log of the crash. That could give a better indication of what is happening and how it can be fixed.

Also, the uninstall did do its job. Version 0.6 uses the commonappdata directory (and the local app directory in the next version), because the settings format is finalized. This is done so that future updates do not require users to reconfigure all of their settings and visual preferences between each version. I guess an option could be added to the uninstaller to remove the settings, if it is really necessary...

I'll try to answer your question regarding the framework, but JC may have to fill in some of the blanks. Adding plugins does not add to the framework. The Framework contains standardized interfaces (GPS, contacts, weather, etc.) for which plugins can be written to communicate through. This is done for instance: I have Navigation plugin A, and some other plugin B that will have communication with the Navigation plugin. Plugin B is written to interface with the standardized GPS portion of the framework, allowing me the option to change to some Navigation plugin C which is also properly interfaced with the GPS portion of the framework without breaking or requiring a change to plugin B to maintane its functionality. Also, each plugin is loaded on a separate thread, and sandboxed from the framework to ensure the integrity of the core program is maintaned in the case of a plugin crash.

I hope that helps shed some light, and if I failed to explain anything correctly or in less detail, JC will have to expand on it.

Edit: I missed your volume question in the response. Volume control is implemented, it's just waiting on the graphics for it to be finalized.

I just typed a very long message, but the forum tells me my token is expired, what the heck!!!!

ok I have only these music files on my computer that I downloaded to test OM, it's a Jack Johnson show.
http://www.archive.org/download/JJ20...3_64kb_mp3.zip
The filenames are normal but tehre are wierd characters in the tags, like \, >, @, *, etc. They are indexed though and I can see these file sin OM. It just likes to crash.

I have OMDebug already in the plugins folder, I opened it with VS but not sure what I am looking for in there.

=====

For the framework, I think I understand, calendar, media, gps, raw and weather are like type sof info that can be communicated inside the framework. I'm not sure why weather is a special type, what kind of integration or talk a plugin could have about weather??

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

one last thing for tonight, I was reading the FrameWork.xml and saw all the contact, gps and other stuff in there.

Does that mean that every plugin will have their attributes in the main framework xml? I am thinking far ahead, but with dozens of plugins, it will become huge even if someone doesn't use any plugin?

I would tempted to say that it might be better with a core that has nothing except probably the media player and then everything else as a plugin (radio, videos, GPS, bluetooth, contacts, weather, name it or see road runner list of plugins)

that's all for tonight, I'll continue playing with it tomorrow.

p.s. is the volume button supposed to work? I know a gesture up or down pauses the music, but for volume?

I guess your a little new to c#......the framework.xml file is function definitions (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...f7(VS.71).aspx). Its used by visual studio to give descriptions of every function when you are programming so theres no need to use any type of api reference. It is never used when running, all settings and data are stored in a high speed internal database.

Follow ws6verts instructions for loading the debug plugin and see what the debug log tells you. We have yet to see a file that could crash the indexing so I would be very interested in seeing if we can find one.
edit:
i'll take a look at those

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

I have OMDebug already in the plugins folder, I opened it with VS but not sure what I am looking for in there.

The last few lines of the debug.txt file should describe the crash.

Originally Posted by theBeachBoy

For the framework, I think I understand, calendar, media, gps, raw and weather are like type sof info that can be communicated inside the framework. I'm not sure why weather is a special type, what kind of integration or talk a plugin could have about weather??

Well its all types of data that is stored inside the framwork:
gas prices, weather, contacts, messages (emails/sms), calendar items, a to do list, usernames and passwords and generic settings.
The reason its all stored internally is to allow for different providers depending on your location without requiring separate skins. You can use 3 different email accounts, 4 different gas prices sources and it all is easily accessible for any skin and about 10-30x faster then storing it in plain text files.

Everything is described in detail in our online documentation:
might want to just skim here to see how its all setup: http://openmobile.sourceforge.net/wi..._Documentation