Hijack v218 has succumbed to the barbarians at the gate.

-ml

sweet! cheezy poof!

Revision History
v218 Appease the barbarian hordes.

What did I miss?

AAAHHHHH Back up, whats happened, I thoght we all wanted menus like Hijack, not Hijack with menus like Riocar, or have I missed some vital bit of info as I normally do ??? Love the idea, but I preferv217 I think, but I will give it a go.

Cris.

Hello Mark,

As we know, you can do with your coding everything. But the old user interface was more user friendly....

anyway this is only my point of view.

bye

Is it possible to have a Hijack parameter :

Vertical_menu=1


I am not the only one that prefer old Vertical Menu.

Okay, who else thinks Mark is just trying to prove a point here.

Okay, who else thinks Mark is just trying to prove a point here.

That's what I figured.

Mark: I like it better this way. Nyah nyah.

choice is freedom

screw this noise, i'm reverting to v217. I agreed with him all along, no need to prove it to me =]

that is weird...
why would he do that?
is that ALL that is different????

why would he do that?

He did it on purpose to make a point. He is of the opinion that the player's User Interface should have had vertical menus instead of horizontal ones. Some of us said we liked the player's current horizontal menu structure better. He wanted to see how many people complained that Hijack used horizontal menus, and this would prove his point.

I think it was a good demonstration too... it's definitely more clear to me that i prefered the vertical over the horizontal. The only difference is that in the empeg interface, you can see the preceding and trailing menu options, where as in the newest Hijack... you can't, which makes it seem WAY more difficult to use than the empeg's UI.

I finally broke down and installed HiJack. So, being this is the only way I've ever seen it in action, this is my favorite version so far!

Just gotta be different. heehee

For what it's worth, guys, I am totally 100% with Mark here. While I think it was a little bit of overkill to put out a Hijack version to make this point, I think it's certainly illustrating the point for some people. I just wish the Empeg developers would reconsider their stance against vertical playlist menus.

I have no problem with the Empeg's *main* menu and sub-menus being horizontal, but I think the Playlists sub-menu should pop up into a vertical menu (which would cover the screen and visuals, oh well.) But the one thing I would change is that I would use the smaller Empeg font so five lines could be fit onto the display, and I'd always keep the currently selected playlist in the center (third line of text.) This is the way my trivia game scrolls, and though it's too slow because of my slow graphics API, I think it's a good strategy.

Or, in other words, instead of Hijack's "scroll the cursor until it reaches the top/bottom, THEN scroll the list elements" strategy, I would use a "never scroll the cursor, always scroll the screen elements" strategy, more like the way the horizontal menu always keeps the current item in the center. This would be less of a change for most people, and would be less complicated for the eyes to follow. (Obviously the current item would be either inverse or bold to distinguish it.)

Okay, Hijack v219 is out.

The only change is that the Left/Right channel delay code has been revamped to reduce cpu usage, and the settings screen for it has been slightly modified.

Cheers

I agree, you can't see the next choice and some don't even fit within the screen width. I like being different but not at the cost of functionality or total unusability which is opposite of the whole point of being different.
What barbarians are you referring to, I guess I missed some posts.

I can only envision it because I've never used a prior version of HiJack, but I'd have to agree that IF is goes Vertical, that the currently selected one should be in the middle and be either bolded or of a larger font.

IF the empeg goes Vertical, I think it should only be for playlists (as mentioned). For longer artist names, this would help.

EDIT: Woohoo! I think I got the first download. I went to the hijack site, and it still said 2.18 (wasn't cached). I was about to post back here saying "where is it Mark?" but decided to refresh first.... and there it was! Ah.. the trivial joys in life...

Cartman: "I saw Terrance and Phillip, who wants to touch me?"

I don't mind the horizontal menu structure of the player, but the horizontal playlist browser sucks bigtime.

Hijack got changed to horizontal because of a certain amount of whining on the BBS.

It'll go back to vertical shortly, before the horizontal menus turn off too many first-time users.

Cheers

Okay, v220 is out.

Please give the delay time code a workout and let me know if I broke anything in v219/v220.

Thanks

Mark, is that new record? 7 Minutes between publicly announced releases?

Mark, I just posted a desparate plea to the Empeg team to at least comment publicly on the vertical playlist suggestion. In the mean time, can you enlighten us on why you think it will never happen?

[brown]the currently selected one should be in the middle and be either bolded or of a larger font. [/brown]

Awww F*ck it. I just looked at the screen caps at the Hijack site and I think hi-light is just dandy.

I'll hush now. Gotta catch Furtado on CBS.

Awww F*ck it. I just looked at the screen caps at the Hijack site and I think hi-light is just dandy.

Well... The only caveat is that the Empeg's 5-pixel font uses two different shades and anti-aliasing in order to achieve readable text in such a small font... With 32 lines vertical, and one line spacing in between each line of text, you've got 2 lines left over. I just did a screengrab of my Trivia game's category menu which uses the 5 pixel font (or my hacked version of it which might not be quite as pretty as the current one):



So with 2 lines to spare, the current playlist item could be in a 7-pixel high font (not shown.) So while high intensity wouldn't distinguish it much from the other lines (which have to use a combination of high and medium intensity pixels for the anti-aliasing, I think inverse would. The size of the text alone would help, but the only way to know for sure would be to see it. (Now and Next is a reasonable approximation, I guess.)

Although this interface is cumbersome/lacking, it might actually prove to be useful for the purposes of this thread:

http://empeg.comms.net/php/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=empeg_general&Number=73262&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=all

In summary, it deals with inputting remote control style search patterns without having the remote present. Basically, a menu (not unlike the current hijack release menu) would pop up, and provide you with the option of choosing ABC or DEF or GHI and so on, and then it would pass that value onto the search function. That way, one could search without the remote present at all (OR one could configure their steering wheel remote to manipulate the search, using only three buttons: left, right and acknowledge).

Merely a thought...

>Mark, is that new record?
>7 Minutes between publicly announced releases?

Mmmm.. close, I think. Not sure though.

-ml

Have you tried using the item exclude ability to reduce your menu options to 1 fewer than fill the full screen?

I liked Tony's (ynot) suggestion of not moving the highlight when scrolling the menu. Of course this involves a bit more logic because you do have to allow movement when there aren't enough items to allow scrolling.

BTW, are you going to document exactly what the "label" names are for removing Hijack menu items in config.ini? Or are they the exact names as they appear in the menu? (even so, so you have a list already typed up anywhere?)

Also, a question I've never seen answered before. What codes do your button names represent? Care to put up a table of that too? (ie. are they Rio or Kenwood codes - looks like both, but which is which?) Not to mention that numerous codes repeat since there aren't unique ones available (Info and Details, 2 and Artist etc...)

Planning on supporting modifiers in Popups anytime soon? My primary one is for using "Detail.L" in a popup (aka Info.L)

How about taking care of some usability problems... Like disallowing button codes to be sent to the player while one of your popups is active? Extremely annoying to be using a popup and being able to do stuff behind it. The button that sends the "popup" code should act the same as pressing OK as well. Anything else other than cancel or next/prev should cancel the popup.

By the way, I agree with you about vertical playlists. However as some people have pointed out, vertical player menus would be pretty bad. As it is, I'd go about improving Hijack's menu as well. Small font with current selection large would be something to try. Obviously it would take up more font space (you could always use a 7bit font for each size to save space). You should also update your font to the player's current font. A lot of characters are easier to read.

Enough typing...

Bruno

>Have you tried using the item exclude ability to reduce your
>menu options to 1 fewer than fill the full screen?

I have no idea what you meant by that.. ?

>I liked Tony's (ynot) suggestion of not moving the highlight when
>scrolling the menu. Of course this involves a bit more logic because
>you do have to allow movement when there aren't enough items
>to allow scrolling.

I've been waiting for about 3 months for somebody to ask about that. If enough people care about it, it is very easy to do. And no, I will not make it a config option. Remember, this is non-pageable kernel memory, that is taking space away from buffering music from the hard drive.

>BTW, are you going to document exactly what the "label" names are
>for removing Hijack menu items in config.ini?

Sure, just hold down the menu button for about a second, and it gives you a complete listing of them all.

>What codes do your button names represent?

They represent the RIO codes, except for a few Kenwood-specific ones like DNPP. No need for a table, as the entire idea was to not to have to deal with the hex codes for them. If you care about the exact hex code, then just use the exact hex code in the IR translation.

>Planning on supporting modifiers in Popups anytime soon?
>My primary one is for using "Detail.L" in a popup (aka Info.L)

I believe you can do that already. [see next posting]

>How about .. disallowing button codes to be sent to the player
>while one of your popups is active?

What kind of popups? I kinda like being able to adjust the volume (or mute) at ANY time, even when a menu or popup is active.

>The button that sends the "popup" code should act the same as
>pressing OK as well.

Mmm.. I considered that one when implementing it. A problem was that the popup-button's "release" code arrives after the popup is on the screen. And if one of the front-panel buttons are used to activate a popup (or the knob), then it has to still be useable to navigate the menu/options.. same thing for some of the remote buttons, and it might be even more confusing/annoying if it didn't work that way.

>Anything else other than cancel or next/prev should cancel the popup.

Nope. Disagree there. Same as with the player menus.

>as some people have pointed out, vertical player menus
>would be pretty bad.

Yup, no problem there. I've never asked for vertical menus, just vertical playlists of some kind.

>Small font with current selection large would be something to try.

A new in-kernel font would add sever KB to Hijack's size/footprint.
And it would add even more for an aliased font & rendering code.

Do it in user-space, folks. That's where a vertical playlist browser should probably go, as well.. if we ever get the two necessary serial commands for one ("append FID" and "insert FID").

>You should also update your font to the player's current font. A lot >of characters are easier to read.

I'm not willing to blow the memory needed for such an extravagence. The folks with Mk1 players have too little music buffer space as is, and even the Mk2's don't have enough to buffer a single track in most cases.

But sure, 4KB here, 2KB there, no big deal.. but Hijack has probably about 100 features or so now, and maybe that many more to come in the future. That's a whopping big impact on memory usage if we don't keep things tight. Everywhere.

-ml

>>Planning on supporting modifiers in Popups anytime soon?
>>My primary one is for using "Detail.L" in a popup (aka Info.L)

>I believe you can do that already. Try it.

Actually, that probably won't work (but try it anyway).

But please do note that it is also unnecessary. On the remote, one just holds "INFO" for a second or so to get "DETAILS". Just do the same thing when using the PopUps. That part does work for sure, by design.

Cheers

.... I think hi-light is just dandy

You can set Hijack to highlight (box around) or just bold the letters.