Thread: Coders! Streetdeck needs more Digitalmods!

The iphone has a background of the album, which would be cool, but the problem is, album art is too small to use the background of an album for the screen background. ITunes would be really cool, but flipping art like that is impossible without a modification of the core engine (and that would be a pretty big mod I would think). RR is pretty much like ITunes I think... I think this whole album art flipping thing I first saw on a Mac and would be cool, but is a heck of a lot of work for someone...

Originally Posted by Enforcer

Thanks LS., you saved me a whole lot of typing.

I have looked at porting the iDrive skin to other FE's (Centrafuse, SD, ME, MI and others) but was dismayed at the lack of flexibility and from what I could see it was virtually impossible to do with the lack of flexibility.

I have also looked at trying to interface my pugins to CF but don't really 'get' their SDK yet. I haven't looked at SD's yet but from what has been said in this thread I doubt I will.

that was my original intentions when i left Frodoplayer and started working on the next skin. I wanted it to run on RR,CF and SD when it came out. But its pretty much impossible to port the skin to either of the other frontends, and not just functionality wise, it wouldn't look the same either.

Originally Posted by 06TC_OWNER

The iphone has a background of the album, which would be cool, but the problem is, album art is too small to use the background of an album for the screen background. ITunes would be really cool, but flipping art like that is impossible without a modification of the core engine (and that would be a pretty big mod I would think). RR is pretty much like ITunes I think... I think this whole album art flipping thing I first saw on a Mac and would be cool, but is a heck of a lot of work for someone...

i think u can use album art as a background fine, depending on where u get your album art, it can be very high res. I actually plan on doing exactly this in RR, and ive seen it done in 2 other rr skins using flash.

I also think the flipping of the art isnt such a hard thing to do either, in CF and RR maybe but SD is a prime candidate to do it as its already based on DirectX so it should be easy for them to do it. But this is still something i have yet to see working perfectly in a frontend. There is a plugin for RR that does the coverflow, but its very cpu intensive and thats the only real down side of it. But it does work. But everytime i pull out my ipod touch and look at what they are doing UI wise on a very low powered piece of hardware, i wonder why the same thing cant be done on hardware many more times more powerfull? Im certain SD could do coverflow if they wanted to, just a matter of someone wanting and knowing how to do it.

also, commercial apps dont have to be closed. Many times people will say its closed cuz we need stability since its commercial etc, etc. Personally, i dont buy it. It can be done and it doesn't have to sacrifice stability. I think the potential to degrade stability definitely is there, but its just a matter of two different groups of people using the software in different ways. One group who will use it stock and not change anything and another group who wants to hack it apart till it does exactly what they want it to do. These two groups expect 2 different things. The stock group just wants it to work with minimal effort on there part. The hacker group (US) isnt put off with an occasional crash or something not working perfectly if its something that you yourself has changed or modified, it comes with the job. And part of that job is tweaking things till you reach maximum stability with maximum flexibility.
So while im not a SD user or CF user, im still rooting for you guys to do some kick *** stuff as it brings the whole carputer experience up a notch for everyone.

Ok, well I took on the night mode thing using a file-based day time and night time that polled on intervals of one minute to toggle night mode based on the time of day, got it working pretty quickly, BUT man..., adding design elements in through coding (i.e. buttons, labels, etc) for the control interface is DOWNRIGHT PAINFUL! I wish there was a way to use the IDE to throw items on there, then just grab them in the dll (i.e. module.GETPANEL - instead of module.CREATEPANEL) and manipulate them there.

Anyhow, this isn't what I would consider "closed source" - SD has tried to open up the engine enough so people can develop whatever the heck they want, but... its learning that interface. Even if they did open up the source completely, besides writing hacks, and pirating software, I SERIOUSLY doubt we would see too many mods of the application that would be positive. This was written in C++, not VB or some toy language anyone can hack their way through...

How many hard core coders are there out there willing to take on the complexity of C++ just to add a mod?

I think the reason people have found the other interfaces easier to code, is (please, correct me if I'm wrong here) they were written in languages like VB, or they allow the inserting of flash elements, which anyone with a little bit of programming background can hack their way through. I honestly think SD wasn't looking at the hacker car computing community but more at targetting the broader average vehical audiophile community with little to no understanding of the junk we are trying to dive into.

As far as the album flipping thing... I don't know how hard that would be using directx and the engine that drives SD, but being a programmer myself, I would not even dare to take a stab at guessing.

CHUCK (GOC) - module.getPanel function for C# to get existing buttons, labels, lists, etc? Am I missing something here? Does this exist? This would REALLY cut down time spent programming.

The StreetDeck API was initially designed with 2 goals in mind. 1 to be easy to use for anyone without knowing too much about programming and 2 to seperate out coding from interface and abstract the addins from the underlying platform. In theory, StreetDeck should be far easier to code for since it has a built in scripting enviornment and GUI that allows dragging and droppign of controls and coding behind them. You shouldn't have to install another IDE or have to worry about setting up a system to develop digitalmods or worry about dependancies as it all comes with StreetDeck. The reality is we haven't had the resources to making the development enviornment as easy to use as it should be and the easy to use vision has never been achieved. We realized this a year ago and opened up to the API to be used from C# or any COM capable language. This forces you to use both the development enviornment for skinning and visual studio for coding and is done as an after thought rather then how it was designed to be used and is really just something that lets us offer customizability until we can finish the development enviornment. It is still very much capable of doing a lot and we have and continue to use it internally for projects for other clients, its just not yet the end user enviornment it was designed to be.

We thought about open source models, but in general they are very hard to make into a business. In our case, I don't think it would work because 1, this is very much a niche market and 2 a significant part of the price of StreetDeck is to pay for dependancies so even if we gave away everything we do for free, it would actually end up costing more to buy all the dependancies seperatly.


The album flipping should be totally possible. You have direct access to the Direct3D objects in the StreetDeck API. I have only done this from a C++ addin though and don't know if it works from C# and in any case it wouldn't be a trivial thing to do or something you could do without knowledge of Direct3D programming.


YOu can get any panel you created in the skin editor through the following code:

Code:

                for (uint iPos = module.GetHeadPanelPos();
                    iPos != 0;)
                {
                    StreetDeck.IDualPanel p =  module.GetNextPanel(ref iPos);
                    module.MsgBox(p.GetFunctionName(), "Panel  Name");
                }

Originally Posted by god_of_cpu

YOu can get any panel you created in the skin editor through the following code:

Code:

                for (uint iPos = module.GetHeadPanelPos();
                    iPos != 0;)
                {
                    StreetDeck.IDualPanel p =  module.GetNextPanel(ref iPos);
                    module.MsgBox(p.GetFunctionName(), "Panel  Name");
                }

As mentioned in another thread, I cannot get the above code to work. Please download this addin (C# project source including .sdz file) and confirm that it DOES work. The addin is the example addin from the wikipages with the above code added. The pointer is not null at the end of the list. There is an internal access violation and the module breaks. This means that it is not rendered at all!

ok, this code seems to work... Excellent! The downside to this is that it clears all the properties from all the items on the first run (associated classes, etc)... I am not sure what is up with that, but this is definitely a start. If I can grab items (without destroying them) from the IDE designed interface, that would definitely make this the easiest to use development environments...

Whether these results are the result of an internal access violation, I'm not sure at this point, but it does render all buttons, etc, invisible and unusable. I will continue to play with it though and see what I can do...

some more testing revealed that it destroys everything it grabs... (all the properties, etc) I watched each item disappear one by one each time it grabbed something... i.e. - the button still works, but it disappears (class is gone, words on button are gone, etc, but yet the invisible button still works).

Lastly... in my code it DOES NOT error out - I did a try catch and it produced nothing. I believe it is just a matter of how it is passed. Once it is sent to the C# code, it appears that the only issue is the wiping of any settings set in the IDE - oddly enough, this doesn't affect the width or the height of items, it appears (based on my testing) to only affect the caption and the class (as far as I can tell now).

The main benefit of being able to get these items is we could create a collection, then call the items by name - this would require one class used in every project that would wrap the design interface.

Keep it up, 06TC! Looks like someone is finally delving in and getting their hands dirty. Hopefully this will lead to bigger and better things in Streetdeck.

And just to speak to one point raised above about Album Art... Amazon has high-res album art, and both Tag&Rename and MediaMonkey have the ability to automatically download album art from Amazon. So that should address the concerns of art not being high-res enough.