Okay, I've been spending more time working on my XUL frontend. I started this as mostly a proof of concept and also because there are certain things I need for my system that aren't in current frontends. So anyways, now that I know a lot more about XUL and CSS I basically started from scratch and to make things easier I'm using Centrafuse skins. I'm doing this for 2 reasons: 1) I liked the Brushed Metal skin for CF and 2) CF Skins use XML files so all I needed to do was create an XSL template to output a CSS file I can use with my frontend. Pretty much all the GUI work is done by CSS. For stuff like the lists, I use XUL elements that are modified using CSS. So I just download a skin, run my template against the skin.xml file and it outputs a CSS file that I point my frontend to. There are some limitations, specifically with the gradient selection highlight that CF uses. For now I'm just highlighting the text. Firefox is supposed to have built-in SVG support but it's not very complete yet, otherwise I would use that.
Right now the frontend is mostly just the GUI. It can change screens, popup dialogs, etc. but I haven't integrated the actual media player part yet. As soon as I get all the GUI elements done the first thing I'm going to do is integrate my XUL XM player which uses the JavaXM player JAR library. Basically, using XUL and Java I could make this a cross platform frontend. I don't know how far I can go with that and it's not crucial for me, but I'm sure some of the Linux and MacOS guys might appreciate it. Java has a Media Framework (JMF) which has MP3 support, but no WMA obviously, and last I checked the OggVorbis plugin was pretty old. There's always the VLC plugin which I'll consider as a last resort since it doesn't have very good JavaScript support. I could always use the JMF for audio and VLC for videos. In my first XUL frontend I was using VLC, but I wasn't too happy with it. We'll see. Navigation of course is the big issue. On Windows I'll just use the Mappoint ActiveX control, but I don't know what you could use on Linux or MacOS.
Anyways, now that school semester has started again I'll probably have more time to work on it...(grades are overrated anyways
). In the screenshot I took I have the frontend running with both the Brushed Metal and Aluminum skins in what I consider "debug" mode which is simply in the regular browser window. When you run it for real there's a special commandline switch to make Firefox (or Mozilla) run in "chrome" mode so it would be full screen without borders.
PS - Oh, and I decided to name the frontend "GranTuring"... haha.. get it??? Okay, I couldn't think of anything else, sorry...
Linear Mode
