Note: This is an archived post that was originally sent to the Hollywood mailing list on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:04:07 -0000
Hi,
Thought I would share this. Nowhere complete or running but someone maybe able to learn from what I am doing and perhaps you might be able to provide a few handy hints along the way and help out with this project.
Simply put I am trying to replicate the programs like Meedios (formerly meedio) and xbmc from the PC which are preety front ends to media files mainly for home theatre setups.
These are much much more powerful and complex than anything I could create but I thought I could at least thrash out some nice screens in any case and increase my knowledge and learning with Hollywood.
In fact that is how this little project started. I wanted to write a framework for a game and thought that this might be a good starting point since it would have no scrolling a re fairly fixed graphics.
I have been working on this on and off for about a month but thought I would release the first menu screen and the code. The images that are required are currently being uploaded and are in the resources folder. You will need to extract the resources.lha into this folder and then copy the fonts into your system. Leave the other files where they are.
There are images in this folder and to keep the archive to a minimum I have only included the files that the first and only menu screen uses. All of the files have been used from a theme for Meedios called Evolution.
Eventually when other parts of the program are finished you should be able to download the full archive package to have all of the features.
At the moment the the graphics as well as look and feel are fixed but it is my intention to complete the framework that I started so that you can choose from three different themes (graphics provided by the Evolution theme) and customise which backgrounds to use.
I have been getting additional images from a scraper so I will use the format that this system stores files in to add to the functionality of the system.
I plan on doing an almost re-write (I have already changed the system twice already) as I have found flaws in my design which wont allow for customised screens.
I have a table and locale helper file (the locale one was thrown together in two minutes simply to extending the time and date functions of Hollywood. But the Table helper file has been refined from my classlib project.
The table help file was mostly converted from functions and source code I found on the Lua website. But I have made one important (at least for me) modification which was to add a metatable to initialised tables which will allow you to check for non existant entries without an error being thrown. You can already do this using GetType (RawGet ()) functions but I was getting frustrated with having to constantly use this.
Hope you find some use for part of this and as I have find the encouragement to make something for the community.
Feel free to write your thoughts or complaints on the mailing list.
Reagrds,
Dwayne