Re: Menus and xAPNews etc.

[Stuart Booth]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 05:08:12 -0400, "<a
href="/group/xAP_developer/post?postID=p_J7D2AnffNLG3WehWn6480fRUQiJnMpRMbl9U4dk9rJymQ8YlYwGdW0NQpwXSAX1QMVbkDTiPqA2sM">i.bird@t...</a>"
<<a
href="/group/xAP_developer/post?postID=FCoLVOQ_YSmIekug3TIlWPkG5SU4_mpsDapaqixr27MkC7w-nMxNR5MkKSh37E8x3WwmGeynKEAFC5rOzA">Ian@M...</a>>
wrote:

>I was thinking last night (I try not to but sometimes...) that all the
menu
>stuff I have planned is great but wouldn't it be good if my displays
could
>also do just that - display stuff. I had a quick look at the schema
>examples on the xAP site for news and the other one?

A while ago James and I batted a few ideas around for a general text
display schema. We wrote a document describing it, but I confess I've
sort of sat on it for a while. It's different from the generic OSD
schema I've got on my web site here (this is the OLD one):

<<a href="http://www.xapframework.net/modules.php?name=Sections&op=viewarticle&artid=2";>http://www.xapframework.net/modules.php?name=Sections&amp;op=viewarticle&amp;artid=2</a>>

The new one works well for my purposes I believe (still to use it in
anger though) but the recent discussions on multiple bodies have
scared me a bit as it does use them quite extensively.

This is a style of xAP message I really like. I was once unsure about
the relationship of Class Name to Body Name(s) but I'm very happy with
that nowdays and think it's clear and readable, and makes perfect
sense.

Anyway, there's no point in sitting on it, I haven't really had any
other preferences, there are 6 million different things that could be
incorporated into it I'm sure, so why the heck don't we just post it
and get some even better ideas???? What say ye, James?

>They look pretty good
>but I was wondering how you cope with line width. My screens are only
21
>characters wide so would I need to support wrapping and possibly
scrolling
>or can these parameters be set in the news/weather/whatever
applications so
>the end device doesn't care?

At the moment my formatting intelligence is in my application that
sends the OSD message. So the device (TiVo or Slim in my case) just
does it. If it's too long, tough.

I believe there's also a preference elsewhere for doing the formatting
at the device end?

I don't believe the device will necessarily know how to format
messages X, Y and Z just the way I want it to in all cases, but I
daresay it can make a damn good effort.

So in your case above, if an ultra simple message arrived:

Display.Text
{
Text=This is a somewhat long and involved message
}

Then perhaps your device could do some processing on it?

But if a message appeared that had the text specially formatted by
something aware of the device, targetting it specifically, then it
doesn't need to do anything.

So there's room in the world to do both.

>Secondly, do the various display applications support targeting or is
it
>broadcast only?

I have two display applications, my TiVoYAC application (this routes
TiVo display messages to a YAC listener on the TiVo) and my SliMP3
Connector (which controls all aspects of a SliMP3 player).

These both support targetting and broadcast. They interpret the Target
address line, and match up the value to known parameters. TiVoYAC is
given a list of target names and their corresponding IP address,
SliMP3Connector does some matching to the SliMP3 Server software (so a
player named Office can be targetted by Target=SlimDevi.SliMP3.Office
or Target=KCSoft.SliMP3.Office).

A native TiVo xAP listener would be great, but adds load to the TiVo
(mine already feels stretched and I have to reboot it occasionally
when it just can't cope anymore), but Patrick's is xAP v1.0 compliant
I think, or maybe v1.1, but not v1.2, and I'm buggered if I'm going to
put the time in to making a TiVo cross compilation environment at the
moment. Too many other things I'd rather be doing first.

> I am thinking here of different infomation on different
>screens e.g. weather on the bedroom one but news in the lounge. This is
>kinda related to my last point.

It would certainly be ideal to broadcast a basic OSD message,
unformatted, and have it appear on each device, with each device
formatting it to fit.

I think the Display schema James and I knocked up allows several
possibilities, but until we try it out...

>On a network note - if these screens are network enabled e.g. using an
>xPort they will have an IP address. How does this work in broadcast
mode?
>Two devices will have two different IP addresses - will I have to send
to
>each in turn or does it work in some other way? Sorry for the lack of
>TCP/IP knowledge here. An xPort by the way does all the TCP/IP stuff
and
>passes the received data to the attached device (my screen) in a serial
>format.

I know nothing of xPort, but does this mean they're not native xAP
listeners? So you'd have an application that intercepts the targetted
messages, and routes accordingly?

That's how my SliMP3 connector works. It listens for messages,
recognises SliMP3 ones, figures out who the message should be sent to,
and sends it on, either individually, or to the matching wildcarded
set, or to all. Sadly, only having the one SliMP3, I haven't tested
that! The connector is the one that is made aware of the devices on
the network as it is the listener for each of the SliMP3 devices.

A native listener onboard the actual device doesn't need this though,
of course.

>And lastly for the time being, do the various applications out there
>support information on demand. For example the web access element could
>have downloaded news, weather, TV now and next and others. It would be
nice
>to be able to select a menu choice which says 'display the weather' or
>whatever. Is this possible now or potentially in the future? If it is
>future is this an application I would have to write myself.

I'm just about to move into that world as I want to do something with
James' xAPNews (which I think is an absolutely wonderful bit of
xAP-engineering :)) I haven't really thought about this much though as
I'm working on some things I've been wanting to for a while. And now
there are HowTo's to write that Mark McCall's requested as well.

Tonight I'm going to have to write some documentation for my plugin
modules. I'm soooooooo not good at writing consise documentation - as
shown by the complete lack of SDK documentation for my framework code,
9 months after I first wrote it!! I tend to blather on quite happily,
but when it all comes down to it, I just want to write the code !!

S
--
Stuart Booth
xAPFramework.net - a reusable xAP framework for .net

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