A few questions about an interface

naevity · 10-03-2002, 09:34 PM

I got bored the other day, and since i am far from being able to afford to start putting the hardware aspect of this together, i started making the software part of it. I wanted something that was easy to use, easy to build, and looked nice. I spent about an hour and made a few screens in Multimedia builder. Here is the main interface.

I have a bunch more screens of the different pages here:
interface pictures

Now, my questions are:

I did this in multimedia builder, which is easy, but as many people have said before, its built in MP3 player leaves much to be desired. I have it open up winamp at the moment, but i also have a button to use the built in one. I think idealy i would want the interface to have it all built right into it. Would this be easy to do with Visual Basic? Its been awhile since i took a class on it, and its the only language i know/can pick up fast enough to actually do this without losing interest

On the layout, does it make sense? I dont want to be browsing like 4 menus to play a song, but i dont want to be overrun with too many options on each screen. I think from my HCI class last year i heard that 3 levels was ideal, so thats what i went for. (menu -> submenu -> program)

Any other suggestions of what to add or take away?

Finally, i went about making the interface the wrong way i think. I have each page as a real image, if you look at the pictures on my website, you can see the template i had. What I would like to do is make it so the user (me) can change the backround without having to go remake the whole interface. I think this could be done with Visual Basic, but i dont know if it will get me in over my head.

Thats all for now i think. There are also some pictures of my dash in there, its a 96 Volvo 850. I want to get a Xenarc screen, which would fit just about perfectly in my dashboard. I bought another volvo radio on ebay to hack apart to use so it can slide in and out. The screen leaves about 1cm on either side, so i can mount it in there, and hopefully use the 8 inches behind to house more stuff

any suggestions as far as that goes are appriciated as well

veedubya · 10-03-2002, 10:31 PM

If I am not mistaken you can have background image non-embedded in the program and hardcode image. That way all you have to do is change the image in the approiate place and run program

I hope that makes sense

OK i got this to work well

name background Object MyBackground
add Script
Refresh()
ReplaceImage("MyBackground","C:\MP3images/background.jpg")
I tried to set a new Script to RunScript("Script")
So it would automatically look for new image BUT that didnt work

What i did get to work was Set Script to run with a combo of Keystrokes i.e Control+Q

In a nutshell do as above and if you want to change background rename old image and move new image as the same background.jpg and run program and Control+Q as example

I hope that wasnt to confusing.

User Name		Remember Me?
Password