peterw;564571 Wrote: > > > bklaas Wrote: > > > > My goal on 3rd party support this year is to get a decent means for > > developers to add custom Now Playing screens. > > > > > Am I the only one who read that as one of the biggest expectation > drops we've seen in a while? > This feels bit off topic but I suspect your expectations are too high considering the amount of resources Logitech has dedicated to Squeezebox development. Considering the silence in the forum during the last year, I've lowered my expectations a lot, honestly I'm happy as long as Logitech don't decide to shutdown the whole Squeezebox product. At the moment, I see a glimpse of hope every time a Logitech employee posts something in the development related sections in the forum because that's some proof they are still working hard to give us the best music listening product on the market.
Ben, it's really great that you are asking for feedback from beta testers, I really appreciate it. peterw;564571 Wrote: > > 1) the management UI should be better > 2) there should be import/export/backup mechanisms beyond restoring the > factory defaults. This is both for single-player households that want to > save their work and for multi-player households that want easy household > customization. > > You're devoting pretty much the whole CM, the whole screen, to > something that should be drag and drop -- even if that means using some > other app on some other system to do it. If you can't use the SBS web > UI, then build a desktop app that's mouse-aware in whatever language > you like. > I kind of like the idea of having a separate software for configuring rarely reconfigured things like this instead of creating addition clutter in the main device interface. It seems like the user interface currently gets more complicated than necessary because it needs to be supported on both Controller/Radio (which have a knob) and Touch (which have a touch screen but no knob). A desktop application would probably be a lot easier to make user friendly. However, its problem is to get the available menus since some of them are created in run time by plugins or even applets. So to make this work, it needs to read the configuration from the specific device and make it possible to push it back to the device after modifying it. Considering implementation time this might not be a faster way than the current approach, it might just move the implementation complexity from the GUI to the communication between desktop application and player. I wonder if something like this could be added to the already existing Control Panel applet we have ? Or maybe MySB web site ? Anyway, as I mentioend above, it's really time to look at the requirements and think outside the box. Everything might not be easiest and best to implement in SqueezePlay and context menus might not be the best solution for everything. Rarely used functions doesn't have to be possible to change directly on the device. I think no one would have a problem if they need a computer to reconfigure menus, the only possible issue is users that only uses MySB.com but they should also be fine as long as it's possible to install/access the configuration application without installing a full SBS. peterw;564571 Wrote: > > How about users with two Squeezeboxes? They have to go through all this > on each SP player? Is there hope of something like resolution of 'bug > 11442' (http://bugs.slimdevices.com/show_bug.cgi?id=11442) to make it > easy to clone customized menus (or back them up) -- or are we looking > at wiki pages & forum posts explaining how to use SCP to get/overwrite > userprefs .lua files? > Ben will have to confirm this, but realistically I suspect support for things like this will have to be handled by third party developers. If Logitech wants to take care of all advanced configuration stuff like this they are never going to get time to start working on the important music listening related enhancements which we all wants. Remember that most Squeezebox users not active on this forum probably only have a single player. However, a simple backup/restore should be interesting to all users to make it easy to do a factory reset and get back the configuration afterwards. Sometimes I wish there was a simple web server on the device, just to make it possible to access settings files and log files through a web browser. However, I suppose a web server might use too much memory to make that realistic. It would probably be possible to do something using your Settings Manager plugin and my SqueezePlay Admin applet/plugin combination if I ever finalize them to a non beta state. Of course, that would only work for users which have a local SBS but my guess is that this is the case for most users with multiple players. The menu configuration is only stored as standard lua preferences in a lua file. If we can accept that users need to activate ssh on the device, SqueezePlay Admin applet/plugin wouldn't even be needed, it would be enough to create a simple tool that copied the lua settings files over ssh. -- erland Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info)) (Developer of 'many plugins/applets' (http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80658 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
