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...

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Improving the CLAW!

Clawmotia is a MythTV remote using edje and Qt. It works well on maemo, desktop and other devices. It requires a MythTV Web setup to talk to. See previous posts for how to set it up.


I got rid of the rendering artifacts on maemo, added hotkey support (volume, fullscreen) and some of the buttons on the main remote screen now bring up submenus. This paves the way for more advanced remote control configurations where intricate but rarely used controls are still available on the remote. For example, aspect ratio and image fill are unlikely to be needed on a well setup MythTV installation, but they are in a submenu of the remote should they be needed. I know the backgound for the submenu panel is not really nice, but with the drop shadow and pan in effect (which also needs tweaking) you can easily see it's a submenu.


Grab it here. I've included the x86_64 and armel binaries as well as the edj "edje" file. You'll need QtCore and qedje and you're in business. For the mameo you'll still have to make a menu shortcut yourself, and of course, see the README.

Better artwork very welcome. If you have skills, I should be able to take an xcf file and turn out a theme. Conversely, take a look at the edc file and you shouldn't have much trouble adding/removing buttons and changing the images.