I love it when Blogger takes six hours to publish a post that I make via email. It fills me to the brim with joyous green radioactive goo, none of that half assed polonium business though. I apologise for my posting frequency in January – my residential campus Internet provider banned me for 28 days due to "suspicious use" which probably constituted using a wireless router to connect my Wii and a weekend uploading blitz that saw me backup 10GB of digital photos to some web space I have.
With no connection to the outside world I found time to complete all sorts of life changing things, from my previous posts it is evident I worked on my foobar designs; I also completed a number of assignments and project work. Life without the Internet wasn't hard, more inconvenient. Scrubs got me through (until I reached the rather unfunny downfall that is season 3… but that's another story).
Anyway, I was going to make this post about something. Yes – the price of cinema tickets these days. I wanted to see Hot Fuzz on Saturday in the Odeon but we thought better of it – no way did we feel that a discounted £6 student ticket was worth it, considering within 12 months the film could be purchased for that amount or less. I hate to think what the full price was. A shining example of the perfect cinema is the local Warwick Arts Centre cinema - £2.50 for a ticket and every sixth film is free. What's more it shows quality art house films, classic cinema and has comfortable homely seats. Even sitting in the very front row for the entirety of Babel I did not feel uncomfortable (the soundtrack for which is immense). So instead we decided to watch Woody Allen's Match Point, a brilliant (and very different to the standard Allen) thriller starring my favourite Scarlett Johansson.
My next point is the internet movie database, more commonly referred to as IMDB. What on earth have they done with their design? It is categorically the messiest and worst redesign since the all-music guide abomination. Huge over sized middle buttons, with an indistinct sidebar and non-fitting page highlight. Did they not realise that Web2.0 was/is a fad? – IMDB was the last staple & successful "web 1.0" site. Now section header images look small and out of place; the cast list is oddly inward shifted; the text is too small; it's not instantly clear what the information you are looking at relates to; nothing matches up; ratings are in a less important page zone and when I vote I need to count the stars. Give the main body some colour – make sections more distinctive, shade cells in tabled information, make the sidebar bigger, put the rating back in the middle of the page… it is that important. Yikes, I am very glad that the former IMDB layout is still online here.
In other news, I bought Okami for PS2 – a very original and interesting video game.
Many have asked for this, rather than rush out the first release I spent a while refining the code and commenting the various sections. Hopefully everything will be relatively understandable. All image sources are defined in variables at the top of the code, as are font sizes, colours and alignment variables. Please look at the readme.txt file which contains links and information about the required components, fonts and images. The code is in the new standard .pui format which should be placed in your " C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Application Data\foobar2000\PanelsUI" folder and loaded through Foobar2000's PanelsUI preferences dialogue.
The code has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
I am now openly accepting feature requests and answering questions. NOTE: For Single Column Playlist, Row Height: 17, Group Rows: 5 My Windows Visual Style is Inverso Reborn Balanced and a discussion and link can be found here. A good resource for downloading artist images is http://artists.trivialbeing.org
Components Required
- Latest Version of PanelsUI
- Quick Search
- Custom info
- CWB Hooks
- ColumnsUI
- Foo Run
- Album List Panel
- Windows Explorer Panel
- Bebas
- Calibri - Comes with Windows Vista and cannot be redistributed (but you may find a site that has it)
- BigNoodleTitling
Labels: Foobar
Pop-up playlist, this appears beneath when thin (as below) and to the side when wide.
A pop-up menu, buttons and control panel
Im sure I will think of some much more advanced uses of this integration in the near future. But for now I think this is exciting enough. For those interested, to get going, the code for tabbed panels in PanelsUI is:
$select($add($getpvar(display.mode),1),
$panel(Option1,Track Display,0,20,%_width%,140,)
,
$panel(Option2,Album list,0,20,%_width%,140,)
,
$panel(Option3,Console,0,20,%_width%,140,)
)
$button2(0,160,0,0,14,14,button text,button text,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:0',)
$button2(14,160,0,0,14,14,button text, button text,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:1',)
$button2(28,160,0,0,14,14, button text,button text ,'PVAR:SET:display.mode:2',)
This simple example (that needs the button text replaced with a $font()text code) is the basis for tabs, clicking the first button shows the track display, the second an album list, third a console.
My first use for this new script is to display my IMDB movie votes on my blog in a neat little package. Recently my votes list was made public by IMDB so I did not have to create a bot to login etc. Scraping the IMDB numbers and my votes from this page has allowed me to enter the movies into my service and create a sexy little list. You can now find this list of 500 movies here: http://fofr.trivialbeing.net/page.php?p=movievotes (or under the "My Movie Ratings" link to the right)
http://host.trivialbeing.org/up/foobarfixed2.txt
- Fixed the crop issues related to selected and now playing songs
- Made the track title text area adaptive to the width of the window, so it crops only when it needs to
- Stopped album art showing for groups with only 1 track, as in this case the picture is ridiculously small.
Some images:
