Thread: DJiK's Jump-to-File External Control Plugin, v0.99b [BETA]

Wow, DJiK, I have now just discovered this thread. This little proggy is excellent! It's a major breakthrough for us frustrated searchers. I can't understand why there haven't been any posts on this thread since October. Thanks for your hard work and willingness to share. You are officially remembered.

Originally Posted by kbreeden

Wow, DJiK, I have now just discovered this thread. This little proggy is excellent! It's a major breakthrough for us frustrated searchers. I can't understand why there haven't been any posts on this thread since October. Thanks for your hard work and willingness to share. You are officially remembered.

Thanks for the kudos, kbreeden!

I will continue development once I'm on a break again.
Probably Spring Break.
I'm thinking on rewriting the app in Visual Basic.

If anybody needs help or has any questions, feel free to post them here...

I've now spent some time with this plugin (JTP) and thought I should report on my experience.

I've been using Winamp 2.95 because it's the recommended version for RR and it has been rock solid. Since JTP was designed for newer versions of Winamp, I loaded Winamp 5.13, which is a version others have successfully used with RR. Well, despite the fact that 5.13 works fine on my desktop, on my carputer it throws an error every couple of minutes. The same thing happened with 5.13 the last time I loaded it on my carputer so it has nothing to do with JTP.

I was a little discouraged because I knew I'd have to go back to 2.95. JohnWPB commented earlier in the thread that when he followed the instructions in post 28 for using JTP with 2.95 he had lock-up problems, so I figured 2.95 wouldn't work with JTP. I'm happy to report, however, that I have not experienced the lockup issue that JohnWPB reported and that JTP is working fine for me in Winamp 2.95. I will note that when doing the install I didn't see the "default" button described in post 28, but I left everything alone and it works fine.

I'm using JTP as an embedded application in JohnWPB's Blue Devil/Digital skin. It embeds well, but I did need to adjust the resolution in JTP's skin.ini in order for all the JTP buttons to appear (the bottom row of buttons was not visible). One minor annoyance is that when I first load JTP, Winamp's jump to window appears and remains partially visible until I move it behind JTP's screen.

I'm using JTP on a 20k song playlist and it performs reasonably fast; there's a couple of second lag after I type the first letter of the search string (which I would expect with such a large playlist), but it performs very quickly after that. I've found that it's best for me to just type the whole search string and wait rather than typing the first letter, waiting, and then typing the balance. I do think it would be helpful to have the skin show when a button has been pressed so I know when I'm hitting the correct buttons.

In any event, I'm really pleased by the availability of this plugin and how well it's working for me. Again, nice work, DJiK!

Originally Posted by kbreeden

I do think it would be helpful to have the skin show when a button has been pressed so I know when I'm hitting the correct buttons.

Right on! I'll do that once I switch to Visual Basic, it has a PaintPicture function so I could make it skinnable in a similar manner to RoadRunner.

Thanks kbreeden for this awesome feedback!

Ok, With kbreenen's coaxing & advice, I decided to incorporate this into my new skin that is almost completed.

I tried it some time ago, and never really got too involved with it at the time, to get it working correctly. At that time I had a lot of other stuff on my plate already. This was MY mistake, this is friggin fantastic!

So far, I have taken the time to skin it, and somewhat embed it. I say somewhat, as with the application window's name being:

"Jump to File Plugin -- External Control v0.99b"
(As reported by AutoIt's Window Information utility)

Road Runner does not seem to like that to well, and with some help from kbreeden, he pointed out that there were 4 spaces between the control, and the v0. version number.
. It is a far car from embedding...say "Notepad"

If you could come up with a simpler name, without spaces, that would make it a lot more flexible, and easier to embed for sure. Something like "JT_Plugin" or something else simple. I wouldn't put the version number in the title, as whenever you have a new release, the skin will have to be edited to embed it each and every time.

Without it properly embedded the window will disappear when any other buttons above or below are pressed, as well as opening multiple instances of it when navigating away from the skin and back to it again.

Now that you said you intentions were to recode the whole thing in VBScript, I have a couple of suggestions, thoughts ect...

The buttons to scroll up and down the list are really hard to press on a 7" screen. I often hit a song at the edge of the list boxes, or one of the center buttons on either side of the scroll buttons. The simplest solution I can see is to make the center Cancel, Play buttons ect, a little narrower, and give just a little more space to the scroll buttons.

One last little thing, a way to change the font color and background color of the scroll box area's. The white just will not fit in well with most skins out there. The option to change this to match the skin would be the final piece of the skinning puzzle.

Here is a screen capture of how it looks embedded into my skin:


As you can see, it does embed QUITE nicely, and really looks like a part of the skin! Great Work!



.

another endorsement for this plugin. I'm using it in the renesis skin as the primary search feature. The only thing i dont like is u cant enter the letters via keyboard but hey... its a great plugin!

Originally Posted by Sonicxtacy02

another endorsement for this plugin. I'm using it in the renesis skin as the primary search feature. The only thing i dont like is u cant enter the letters via keyboard but hey... its a great plugin!

Nice skinning there!

Sure you can enter songs by keyboard. See if the textbox gets any text from the keyboard. If so, press 'Enter' on the keyboard and it will perform search on that string.

Other keyboard shortcuts, if I remember correctly are: Alt+P for Play, Alt+Q for Enqueue, Alt+C for Clear, and Esc for close.

oh ok.. the text box is getting the letters i just thought it would work the way clicking the buttons does. fantastic!

This is a pretty sweet plugin. I have a couple questions/requests

would it be possible to be able to queue songs from outside of the plugin's screen in the normal audio player screen?

Would it also be possible to have the songs position in the queue displayed in the audio player's playlist, like in the winamp playlist window? (ex: 878. Deftones - Passenger [1])