Auto-Generated Interface questions

[DaveB]

Dean - I had no clue where this should be posted so I put it out of a specific beta directory;

I fixed my auto-gen interface by hand until you can get the other problem repaired. I have the following comments / questions;

1. In the now playing scene, the album art widget is set at 15%. You can barely see the art. I set it to 75% or so, but thought you would want to know.
2. What is the best method of adding a label to see what room you are looking at? I like the selector and all but really want to know the room.
3. I generated a 1024x768 interface to fit my in wall. The clock and Key did not scale properly at that resolution
4. The larger light bulb graphic on the lighting page also did not scale properly
5. Is Auto-Gen documented? I need some custom tiles. Do I just make a single tile scene and then enter that into the custom overlay tile field?
6. I thought the image below was worth posting! Bit of a scaling issue.

[Dean Roddey]

What do you mean in #3 and #5? Did they not scale at all, or are they distorted? They will distort a bit if you scale to a considerably different aspect ratio. But they are clearly being scaled in all of my tests. Did you maybe change aspect ratio and skip the image generation or something?

The album art it intended to be that way, though it can look a bit different depending on how you have the contrast/brightness set on your monitor, and to some degree the brightness of the particular cover image. It's not supposed to be all that obvious, just in the background, so that content can be displayed over it readably.

[DaveB]

Dean - To answer #3, See the screenshots below; My issue may be related to the Auto-Gen not really working and me adding the graphic files to the directory structure manually. I still can not locate the 0x0 graphic. I have looked everyplace.

[DaveB]

Dean - Concerning question #5, What is the Tile field looking for? Do I create just one tile by copying one that is generated? What size do I make it? What content do I place on it.

It is almost a chicken and the egg scenario; You need to generate an interface to get tile and page examples, then make your custom tiles and pages from the generated examples; then re-generate with them included.

I also am quickly not liking the directory structure. I added some fields to my Weather scene and realized that I then had to do that 9 times manually or create a "custom" weather scene and re-generate everything. The system seems great for initial generation but, unless I am missing something, is difficult to modify.

I think I may trump the system some. I am making a room called "Home" which will have all my typical items like RSS, Irrigation, Cameras, Weather , Security and so on. The Rooms selector will select rooms and those scenes will contain only media options for the selected rooms. That way, I do not get 9 identical weather scenes generated that I need to maintain and so on.

Now if I could get my #&^$% Foscam camera to show up on the home page, all would be great. Foscam does not like IE and loves Chrome. That is a problem.

[DaveB]

Dean - One further question - Would you mind sharing one of your icons created for this theme set? The key or the bulb would work. I want to make up matching icons for irrigation, news, cameras and so on and the original file would save a huge amount of reverse engineering time.

[Dean Roddey]

Dean - To answer #3, See the screenshots below; My issue may be related to the Auto-Gen not really working and me adding the graphic files to the directory structure manually. I still can not locate the 0x0 graphic. I have looked everyplace.

That would definitely be the reason. That sort of defeats the whole purpose. The 0x0 image is \System\Blank (or maybe it's \System\Empty) one of those. It's used where we need an image but don't want to actually see one.

[Dean Roddey]

Dean - Concerning question #5, What is the Tile field looking for? Do I create just one tile by copying one that is generated? What size do I make it? What content do I place on it.

For the content screen associated with the tile (if you use one) you should use one of the originals. You want it to be the original size, because it's going to be scaled with the rest of them, and you want the same resulting scaling. So, for now, just generate a simple room at the original 1280x800 size and use the resulting content screen as the starting point. Here soon I'll update it to just spit out an empty content screen for you to use.

For the tile, it has to be 242x390, and you want to use similar sized graphics relative to the size of the tile, because as above it's going to get scaled along with the original content. It doesn't include the tile background, it's just the contents inside the tile.

I also am quickly not liking the directory structure. I added some fields to my Weather scene and realized that I then had to do that 9 times manually or create a "custom" weather scene and re-generate everything. The system seems great for initial generation but, unless I am missing something, is difficult to modify.

For the most part, it's intended for auto-generation, where you may at any time come back and re-generate, which means any manual changes would be lost so you don't want to do that. Ultimately, every room could have different devices and different sets of features enabled, so it just generates each configured screen for each room and doesn't try to figure out if it can reuse the same screens for some of them and not for others.

It also uses relative template paths, so that it can just spit out each room separately and not have to figure out how to update paths to templates. Since each room is a complete entity into itself, and it uses relative paths, no paths need to be updated.

You can use it as fodder for customization where you never go back and re-generate, but it's not optimized for that. It doesn't attempt to make each screen super-runtime flexible so that it can be reused from every room. That's the benefit of auto-generation, that the screens can be fairly straightforward and have hard coded references to devices and whatnot.

[Dean Roddey]

Dean - One further question - Would you mind sharing one of your icons created for this theme set? The key or the bulb would work. I want to make up matching icons for irrigation, news, cameras and so on and the original file would save a huge amount of reverse engineering time.

Are you familiar with Inkscape? If not, you'll end up putting in a lot of time to figure out how to do it. It's not trivial, and learning Inkscape is sort of like learning Illustrator or Photoshop, it takes some effort.

I originally was putting icons in for every section, on the main tiles, but no one seem to like that, so I removed them. Given that, I didn't see the point in attempting to do a bunch more of them for all of the possible functional areas involved, given that they aren't used anymore.

[DaveB]

Are you familiar with Inkscape? If not, you'll end up putting in a lot of time to figure out how to do it. It's not trivial, and learning Inkscape is sort of like learning Illustrator or Photoshop, it takes some effort.

I originally was putting icons in for every section, on the main tiles, but no one seem to like that, so I removed them. Given that, I didn't see the point in attempting to do a bunch more of them for all of the possible functional areas involved, given that they aren't used anymore.

Yes - I use inkscape and I am familiar.

[Dean Roddey]

Here is the .svg file.

http://www.charmedquark.com/Web2/Downloa...ns_Old.svg