Thursday, November 12, 2009

Clawmotia, look and feel and portrait mode

Clawmotia is a remote control for MythTV using Qt and qedje. The claw works on maemo and desktop systems. I have updated submenus to fade better, added hotkey support, and improved images and icons since 0.2. Grab it at my maemo repository.

In the shot of it running on the device shown below, the euro sign is for commercial skip forward and back. Having the skip back in the top right of the device makes it very easy to hit if an auto skip has gone too far. It is no accident that pause, mute, and cancel are placed in the other corners. The icons below change the volume up and down. In the middle of the top is an icon to bring up a submenu letting you set the aspect ratio and stretch the video in various ways to get maximal use from your screen.



I have also been tinkering with allowing switching between landscape and portrait mode, the edje is ready, there are just a few things to iron out before it works as expected. Of course, such switching will be far more useful on an n900 where it can happen automatically as you rotate the device. But for n8x0 users a button will be available trigger a rotate...

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Varying the colors and sizes of your buttons a bit would do wonders with the usability. Right now I just see a cluster of yellow buttons I have to look and think hard to understand what do.

monkeyiq said...

great idea. I have made the arrow ones and ff/rew not be in the circles and have a gradient color fill in their primary direction. These 6 buttons are now also a bit larger. version 0.4 will have them by default.

Marcel said...

Is it possible to add XBMC support? An alternative to this: http://code.google.com/p/android-xbmcremote/wiki/Gallery

monkeyiq said...

Yeah, XBMC, ampache, vlc, mplayer, maybe amarok should all be possible. I'd also love to make a UPnP controller as a remote. Currently I tend to be "at con" when using any of the other apps. Clawmotia uses Qt to perform the HTTP requests to make things happen, I would probably aim to make a base class that handles request dispatch and issuing any error to the edje. Then make a collection of little apps that are subclasses and know how to drive a tool, then its just a matter of creating edje files with icons and commands in them.

Also, creating a common edc file as a base with the panel, button, and image macros in it would make other remotes easier to make.