Brainstorms

[ryan.s.lee]

Welcome, harsha. To all, feel free to discuss ideas here.

I have some minor, short term goals listed in the issues:
http://code.google.com/p/dashflix/issues/list

Generally, I'd focus most on the mini widget. The larger one is about
5 times less popular on download count, probably because it is too
large. The current code repository setup does allow similar work to
progress on both at the same time, though, so just comes down to
leaving the visuals on the big one alone.

Visually, mini needs some work.

A major goal is to add in the ability to re-sort the queue from within
the widget. I doubt it's hard to do, just taking a glance at the
traffic when I sort my NF queue, but it would require more attention
to maintenance.

[harsha]

hi,
i am working on new interface for dashflix mini, if you have any
ideas on new interface please send across.. i'll put mine.
i am looking at adding the resort.

[flyingout]

Greetings,

I've been using a version I modified a long time ago. Basically, it
only has the back side with checked out movies as the first (three)
entries followed by the queue. For the queued entries, I added the
small description line below with star rating, genre, and rating (I
think it was, haven't seen it in a while). I think I added some
additional description elements to the checked-out items as well. I
needed to tighten up the spacing a bit to maximize the number of
entries. Finally, I turned off the automatic refresh and converted the
flip button to refresh instead. (i didn't care for the refresh every
time I entered dashboard.)

Just a hack, but you get the idea of what I found useful. If I get it
working again, and anyone is interested, I could supply a screenshot

[ryan.s.lee]

I think I hear some themes emerging. For the next version, a change
in refresh behavior would probably get a cheer; I rather like
consolidating the entire queue on one side. Flipping for that's
unnecessary, and I really didn't like having to move the mouse from
one side to the other just so the flip arrows would be consistent with
the flip animation. Perhaps options for refresh configuration and
which elements (star rating, etc.) to show would then be appropriate.

Screenshots are welcome, as is code.

[flyingout]

Sounds good Ryan. I got mine working again yesterday. Lost the MPAA rating and the availability got a bit wordy, e.g.,  "Releases on DVD May 06, 2008" so additional parsing work would help. I used to have the stars after the title on the first line, but this seems to work better now.

My code's not pretty, since the goal was to patch the original in such a way that makes applying them to a new version as easy as possible. (Much easier with the Makefile, thanks.) And I doubt it would help you much anyway, except maybe for the Regexps, but I'm sure you can do a much better job with those than I did. Basically I just put in an extra bit of parse and output code. 

Scrolling works but I haven't (or couldn't) put the scroll bar back in. Tradeoff there. I prefer to avoid line breaks as much as possible and although my queue is long, with the widget I'm mostly interested in what's going on near the top of the queue anyway. You might want to add a little more width, or narrow the scroll bar. At least with the current font sizes, a long title that NF cuts off with a "..." just barely fits on one line, almost hitting the red. A few spill over when the queue numbers go over 100.

Oh, also, squeezing in the watch-now indicator might be useful.

Paul