Bugzilla – Bug 15067
Support for third party now playing screen/styles
Last modified: 2012-03-17 03:31:34 UTC
There should be support for making it possible for third party applets to register Now Playing screen styles. At the moment the Now Playing screen on the Touch can switch among a number of different styles: only artwork, artwork + text, only text. There should be support for making it possible for third party applets to add their own style and information to this now playing switching schema. For example, making it possible for a plugins/applets like AlbumReview or Biography to display more information about the currently playing album/artist.
Suggestions on how you'd like the API to work are welcome. At a simple level it seems like allowing a 3rd party applet to layout the existing available elements in whatever manner or combination is a start. It sounds from this request you'd also like to be able to display arbitrary data on the screen as well, so that's an added layer of complexity. Further, how to allow a server-side plugin vs. a squeezeplay applet needs to be worked out. Certainly for the first pass I think the concentration should be for applets not plugins, but hopefully this can be built in a way to provide for both.
Ben: there are other (older bugs) open on this subject already, make sure you link them to this bug
(In reply to comment #1) > Suggestions on how you'd like the API to work are welcome. > I wasn't looking for custom layout of existing elements, although that could be useful too in case some people doesn't find your default layout optimal. What I was looking for was a way to add views with other data which is not available in the current Now Playing screen. Focusing on applets only in the first version sounds like a good choice. This also makes it possible for third party applets to retrieve additional information from the server if necessary. It would be good if the solution allowed to both add new views but also made it possible to replace existing. I wonder if the best solution would be to hand over an empty Window or Canvas to the third party applet and let it put whatever information it likes to on it ? If possible, it would be great if the third party applet was just responsible to handle its own items and the Now Playing applet took care of the switching. If that isn't possible, a solution similar to the screensavers would be good where the Now Playing applet would offer a service which the third party applet could call to let Now Playing applet setup all necessary window listeners that handles the switching logic. Some examples of views I have in mind: - A view that shows lyrics of currently playing songs - A view that shows artist images of currently playing artist (maybe through the existing flickr applet or by getting them from lastfm.com) - A view that shows more information, like conductor, composer, genres and maybe custom tags scanned with Custom Scan plugin - A view that shows a big clock Today I use Saver Switcher (Boom/Classic) or Screen Switcher (Controller/Radio/Touch) to switch regularly between clock and Now Playing/MusicInfoSCR screens. The clock view is probably most useful if you make it possible to automatically continuously switch between all available views.
Changing priorities due to management guidance.
Moving lower-priority bugs to next target
Just a simple request from me, to enable creation of buttons and link these back to plugin code, rather than having to build complex menu structures.