LavaJoe

Very artistic! I think the buttons are too big (use precious real-estate), and I need the keyboard, etc. Plus, I'm not sure how goo the GUI I am using is at incorporating "skins" - I know you can set bitmaps on the buttons, but the shape may not be configurable, etc...

-Joe

simon_C

but large buttons are necessary when driving. and the keyboard would pop up when you click on search, rename, or add/remove.

does it only take bitmaps? if it doesnt accept gif, tiff, or png, we wont be able to make buttons transparent over the background, so i'd have to incorperate the background into the buttons.....hmm lotta work there but i dont mind.

Shotty

Can I be so bold as to make a suggestion?

It seems most (if not all) the front ends are similar in that they use sometihng like visual studio or GTK windowing (i'm sorry, i don't know what they use in linux) to make the front end of the 'front end'.

What if the actual front end ran as a backend. Aka a service (as is the case in windows, I don't know what the equiv. is in linux). And the front end can be created by anyway.

That way you can have this rock stable backend with heaps of functionality and any frontend can access it.

Oh, the other idea is to have a front end created in openGL? You could get some great results I think.

seanz0rz

as for the size of those buttons, i love it. i have an aweful hard time driving and hitting the next button at the same time.

what shotty is getting at is say having a "carputer api" (windows terms i know), basically a program that includes everything, its own xmms, mplayer, gps, etc etc, and you could build a "front end" just as a skin, even a full screen webpage with image mapped images that control the different functions.

if you are fimular with roadrunner, this is how it works. it takes the different threads of programs, weaves them together, and then provides a "front end" or a skin that accesses these threads as needed and in a way that is accessable by the user.

__________________
1998 Toyota 4Runner SR5 V6 4x4 in Evergreen Pearl Metallic, Lifted, Locked, and Armored. CarPc in custom console with molded touchscreen.
Pictures
Photobucket is being updated, if a picture i posted no longer works, please PM me.

intuitionsys

Just my 2c here - I went the route of removing the necessity of buttons on the GUI altogether by using an RF remote control. It frees up alot of screen real estate and you don't have to mess around with a mouse or keyboard while driving. The touch screen works by tapping once, then it brings up a GUI representing very large buttons equivalent to what would be on the remote (depending on the module being used at the time) so even very large fingers on rough roads shouldn't have a problem.

Has anyone else taken this approach?

ThisBeMikey

I've been working on something that sound's like what your asking for. When linux starts it opens up some daemons and then starts a gui. (gui is not any where near complete) The gui is just basicly and xml document defining screens and buttons and actions for those buttons and the image to use for the buttons. It uses directfb so there is no X windows to install.

By the way I've been reading this forum for several months now (and now I finally decide to join in) and this place totally kicks some major ***.

DigitalExpl0it

suggestion if I may,

Anyone think about using sqlite or mysql for indexing the backend? Perfernces, music, file etc... indexing makes things faster to have the info index.

Just a thought.

LavaJoe

Yes! I am using sqlite on my prototype. I use an in-memory DB at the moment, read from a flat file at startup. Makes searching, etc. much easier, and it is fast.

-Joe

DigitalExpl0it

oh nice, thats the way it should be. Does the app index everytime it loads or will you have to do it manually or once a week, etc...

Thanks

samael

As always, whenever anyone has an idea, its already been done

mpd :

http://www.musicpd.org/

Its a daemon that plays music, you just connect to an ip and port, and tell it what to do.
Its pretty sweet, I almost used it myself, but I ended up using cajun instead.

It has many frontends, command line ones with tab completion, gui xmms-like ones, web browser one, you name it Hell, you can even telnet to it and control it like that

__________________
stupid quote # 1 : "i dont do drugs , i only ever smoke pot when i'm coming down" , Me , 6 september , 2001.

LavaJoe

Every time the app runs, it populates the in-memory DB from the index file, so as long as the file is up to date when you start up, you are good...

-Joe

pkg

How are you scanning the song names and info to the sqlite database? c++ or script? I am working out this issue and am weighing which way to go.

__________________
-pkg

Check out my tC: http://publicjestering.com/tc
Check out my site: http://publicjestering.com

kbyrd

A disclaimer:
I'm not running a Linux front end (yet), but I do know my way around software and Linux.

I've done a lot of data parsing work, loading things into this format, that format, in various programming languages, etc. Are you planning on parsing, manipulating, screening the input (file paths, id3 tag fields, etc.) while you load or are you just going to trust the input? How much control and feedback do you need over the loading process while it runs? Think about it for a bit. I've got mp3s that I "auto-tagged" with cddb/freedb and they have junk characters in the id3 tags. I'm slowly getting them out, but passing these characters to your sqlite db then later on to your UI could cause problems.

- If you was doing this and I had to do significant parsing, screening, checking of the input, I would not do it in C/C++. Obviously it can be done and sometimes it's the right choice, but I'm lazy and would prefer to have it done and work on something else. I also don't like writing parsers (or lots string manipulation) in C when I can whip something up in Perl (insert today's popular scripting language here). Perl (and others) have great text processing and surely have sqlite bindings for the language. This leads to more of a "just kick off this script and let it run" type of solution. It also means you've got one more piece (the script file) to keep track of on the installed machine.

- If the loading process is really just about taking the input as is, the you should integrate it more into the main app as a function call in C/C++. The advantages here is that there's no extra requirement for another language runtime on the installed machine, no extra script file to install and keep track of, and you can probably get progress/control the (sometimes) long loading process a bit better.

Of course, the advantages and problems I listed for each implementation aren't absolutes, you can certainly get progress/control a perl script from C pretty well, it's just that it's one more thing to do. You can also write advanced parsers in C/C++ and do all kinds of great pointer arithmetic, but it's really, really, simple in a scripting language like Perl that has regexp as a built-in.

__________________
In the service of a vengeful God.

My worklog.
Status: First carPC installed, uninstall, and selling off parts soon.

intuitionsys

I would agree to a point about parsing in C/C++, except using Qt (especially things like QString and QRegExp) make parsing pretty hassle-free.

By the way, when I get a few things polished, I'm planning on releasing the source code for Silverwolf. It uses modified versions of mpg123 and xine for mp3 and video playback, tv tuner, etc. The frontend is written entirely in C++ with heavy use of Qt and some KDE and aRts bindings for things like spectrum analyzer displays. When I release the code I'll try to make it as generic as possible (and include more comments )

__________________
Silverwolf 2.0 Progress: 100% (alpha)
Alpha Release Date: June 28, 2007

LavaJoe

I first make an index file, which has one song per line. This is done in Python, and it runs my my home machine when I need to update it with new music.

The index, along with the music, gets synced to the car system, and when the music browser launches, Python code reads the index file into sqlite.

The code is here:

http://www.skyrush.com/lavaMP3/

-Joe