i just asked foosion the other day about that,

the answer

Spacer toolbars, that's an interesting idea, which you seem to have plenty of.

Maybe though it would be a better idea to incorporate this in the api instead. It doesn't make any sense for the spacers to be toggled, so it having an add new instance behaviour by default would probably make more sense.

But yeah I could do the same for the toolbars, if its not too much work Ill do it for 0.1.2 final.

Yay!

anomaly here, even though musicmusic said



if caption is disabled, it's hard (and ATM even impossible to me) to disable/enable panels cause there's no right place where to click - in the panel I have all the panel-options, outside (tried to drive pixel by pixel higher just not to miss any 1 pixel line, tried top- and bottom-border) I always get the options of the other panel, for instance playlist-switcher with no caption - where to click to enable caption or enable/disable other panels ('kay, I can remove the dll and then place it there again )
Having no caption looks fine but takes my place to have access to the menu..

Yeah that makes sense. It's one of the few toolbars that would actually need multiple instances as well I guess. Well, at least until I (or someone else) decide/s to code a general-purpose button toolbar...


You won't be able to right click to get the menu when there is only a single panel in the sidebar, since the resizing separator only appears between two panels. When there two or more there, just move your mouse in between two panels until you get the <- -> sign and right click.

There is also the "reset sidebar" option in the columns preferences that will reset the sidebar to the way it was when you first installed columns (i.e., with captions. And don't worry, it doesn't reset anything else).

musicmusic, is it possible to have a "show all sidebar captions" button somewhere? Or maybe a (small) "master" caption at the very top of the sidebar with the standard sidebar menu plus a checked "show captions" item, that shows or hides all of the captions at once. That way, you could set them up how you want them, then right click and uncheck "show captions." Well, thats just one idea anyway.

yeah, the old trick I was tryin but failed cause of missing resizing seperator (my '1 pixel-line' - a very unclear circumlocution by the way)



sth. my quick eye-check has missed - damn cheap 'Made in T..'-eyes



..could be one of these famous 1-pixel-lines , nearly invisible, but still fine enough

@musicmusic and Phi

I don't know where to put this, therefore I'll try it here:

In the foo_temple thread upNorth suggested the following



I think of a way where an extension could post a "make me visible" request to its host. The columns ui host would do nothing but foo_uie_tabs could make the tab with the extension visible.

Do you think adding such a feature to the extension API would make sense?

edit: typos
edit2: typos...

I think it would. Not so useful for non-"stacked" hosts though.

i think an even better idea would be yet another thing in preferences that simply lists the panels enabled with maybe a check box or something to enable/disable captions for each and maybe an add remove thing to add or remove panels. something like the current config page for DSP chain perhaps.

I also thought of sth. like this, dropt the idea as it would mean a bit more work for musicmusic. Nevertheless a place like this would also be fine for panels-preferences,adjustments and could offer a better placement regarding the treeview.

This has probably been ask a billion times, but has there been a support for album info in columns_ui?


edit:

found the answer

I will reply in the ui extension thread in a minute to keep this thread clean.


Basically yeah that is what I planned to do, for the version after 0.1.2. Maybe even more like the columns config, so you can edit caption titles etc..

Maybe a one pixel line at the top of the sidebar would be a quick fix, but I dont think its worth it. It could easily be done so the menu shows up on right clicking the sidebar / playlist view separator, as well, which wouldn't look silly, but be a bit wierd. Just wait untill options are added to prefs.

Anyone know how to make the columns look kinda raised or embossed looking like in that screenshot? Something like a highlight color and a shadow color for the playlist columns? Let me know please.. thanks!!

Please don't double post.

LINK

You can download that config here

Anyone has an idea what the "map colour codes" checkbox does in the global colour config? I couldn't follow columns delvelopment that well during my two months internet abscence and seem to have missed that one.

And another request for musicmusic. Do you think it would be possible to include some kind of "replace" and "replace all" function for editing .fcs files. I tried doing this in notepad and it somehow seems to corrupt my .fcs file.

However even if it was possible in notepad it would still be nice to have that function right in the columns UI config. It would make editing colors a lot easier for me.

If you store some colors as global variables it wont work as a color unless you check 'map colour codes'. Its mainly there I assume so that if you dont use colors you can speed up global string parsing by ignoring color codes

one simple feature that could add so much to your UI, please code _customizable_ tooltips, please

I've been wanting that for so long now. When you stay over an item in the playlist, a tooltip appears (can be multiline) with some random predefined scheme that you scripted ...

I dont think it would be so much of a pain to add this to your component and could be greatly appreciated

(of course the tooltip can be color customized, specifing if the borders should be 3d of flat, or none, etc.) ...

hope you like the idea

nIRV

I just thought of something that would be nice. How about a LyricShow sidebar/toolbar?

I'm also still hoping for a playlist/database search sidebar.

I agree. A sidebar version of foo_dbsearch would be great.

The top and bottom frame colour variables are your friend.

Hi, didnt read the entire thread, so maybe this has been asked before.

Will there be an option to have ASCII buttons, like in default user interface ? I really miss that

misread what you said

Hex editor?

You could use (global) variables for your colours, it would be slower, but more convienient.

That, and it is a bit of a hack and doesn't work properly.

To be more specific, last time i checked char code 3 doesn't work in special fields, and this option maps them to char 10s, formats the script, then maps char 10s back to 3. This obviously doesn't work for titleformatting functions taking colour codes.

If you read back over the thread, this could be done in tagz itself, but it is most likely slower.

I know its been requested, but so have many things and it takes time. I dont if if everything you asked for is possible, but I have nothing against this idea so it should be implemented eventually.



Open your favourite image editor, and use to make your ascii buttons, save it as a png or bitmap, set columns ui to use it, disable drawing of the button edges if you feel like it.

I have no standard menu, so I can't have ascii buttons exactly like the default ui. I could try and make a toolbar that looks like it, if you want that i'll give it a go since it probably wouldn't take me too long.

Oooops, could have guessed the hex editor thing.

Speed was indeed the main reason why I haven't defined colors as global vars, but rather always put them in when needed. Although I honestly have no idea wether this would even make a marginal increase in speed. Just want to keep the code for my .fcs to an absolute minimum.

I'm in the same situation as picmixer at the moment. Probably because I used his insomnia_0.1 as a template, instead of starting from scratch with my current formatting
I really liked his approach and wanted it to be as fast as possible.

Now, I've got some global colors, but have kept it to a minimum. At the moment I'm thinking about making everything global, but I'm reluctant to start this big task, in case it will mean a very noticable speed decrease. So, is the process of using global color variables in general very unefficient, or something I will hardly notice?

Note: I'm talking about colors defined as variables, not the "Global colours" tab.

I know I could test this, but it would mean alot of work, and wouldn't really tell me that much more about the inner workings of TAGZ. So, even though this of course depends on the amount of code in general, a qualified guess is good enough. Just to get an idea of if this is a trivial thing in general, and hence not the area to look for speed improvements.

just an idea:


background on columns support, like in HTML or tables.... how about that?

Try the ASCII playback buttons toolbar. It will blow up if you don't have IE 5.5+, or Win me/2k/newer.

I would have thought it would be slower, though what what amount I don't know. Some kind of preprocessed static global vars would solve that, but probably difficult to implement properly..

I also just discovered the new speed test is severely broke..

Sorry, I don't know what you mean by "background on columns".

i think he means adding css like syntax where the use custom color spec option is. so you can define borders, border colors, font styles, stuff like that.

Hey all,

I have been using Foobar2k for years now but actually I never had multiple albums by an artist before (nor cared how the files were really organized) but now that I do, I want to keep my files sorted differently than just alphabetical order of artists and then alphabetical order of the titles of their songs.

I am using Columns UI which is why I ask here. What I would like is alphabetical order of the artists, but then their albums separated from each other, and the tracks of each of their albums in the correct order (01-15 or so). With Columns, I just loaded all of my songs into a playlist, then made a column for track number and clicked at the top of that so all of my songs in the playlist would be in numerical order. Then, I clicked on album at the top so all of my albums would be in order with their tracks in order, and then clicked on artist so that all three would be in order. But I figure there has to be some faster way of doing this (sorting artist, album, and track number).

Can someone please help me out???

Thanks,
Drew

Your best shot at this would probably be to not use the columns header for sorting in this case. But to use the "sort - sort by" command in the playlist menu and then use a syntax similar to this one:

well.. what I mean is more like cell background...

But what about the background, do you want to put an image as background or something?

Anyhow beta 3 is out

changelog:
beta 3
-toolbars are added where you right click
-toolbars widths are remembered next time you add them
-you can hold shift when inserting a toolbar to force a new instance
-fixed bug in speed test, added total time to speed test
-other fixes/changes

having the possibility to put an image as the background would nice, so would be the possibility the insert images in the row (that would be cool to have an icon showing the type of file, mp3, ogg , etc.)

oh, yeah! , that would be great, for filetypes, nice rating stars etc ... though i'm not sure musicmusic would add this feature ...

as for background image - i have no idea what to do, as cells can have color background - so you would have to ignore that, or alphablend with the background image or something ...

I'm getting either an empty (corrupted) zip file or a warning that the file can't be retrieved Tried at home and at work...

Try this

Well the ability to insert images was one of the things I wanted to try and implement first for 0.1.3 actually, with the intension of it being used for ratings, pretty now playing indicators etc. I suppose it would be fairly simple to also add the ability to insert images in the background. But I dunno about choosing the overall columns background.


Probably me being silly and trying to work around lycos' blocking of the download of .zip files with an external referrer. What web browser/version do you use? I'll change it to a timed refresh and it should be ok.

You try copying and pasting this link instead:
http://members.lycos.co.uk/musicf/download....1.2_beta_3.zip

Thanks!


Maxthon (based on IE). Tried also with IE and still doesn't work.


Doesn't work. Same message that it can't retrieve the file. I guess as yous aid it has something to do with lycos blocking external download to zip files.

All ASCII-Buttons show "[..."
I'm on W2K SP3
FB2k 0.83
Columns UI Beta 3

What version of IE? Clicking it works here in IE, but copying and pasting doesnt work if no site is loaded in IE.
I dunno, maybe the headers lycos are sending is confusing IE or something. IE is very inconsistent with its behaviour, so at least some blame is on IE.

I'll just distribute using .7z instead from now on, IE doesn't have problems then..


Can you post a screenshot (with the mouse over a button)? What version of comctl32.dll do you have (prefs/columns ui/other/info) ?

IE 6.0.


Blame on IE


Cool, 7z is cool

Oh! And thanks for this new build.

how about the implementation of a css like syntax along with the background image thingo to overhaul the current color coding formatting. personally i find it confusing.

so it could be something like this:

isplaying-background-color: #808080;
isplaying-font-style: #ffffff bold;
isplaying-font-size: 11pt;
isplaying-border-style: dotted #454545;
isplaying-border-width: 1px 0px 1px 0px;
isplaying-padding: 5px 0px 5px 0px;

selected-font-style: #777777 italic;
selected-background-color: #666666;
selected-border-width: 0px 0px 0px 0px;

---
just a thought.

Ya! I'd like to put a background image. That would be neat!

Go to Playlist > Sort > Sort By...

I use:



It sorts by artist, then date, then album (to avoid conflict when an artist has 2 albums released in the same year) and then by the tracknumber.

All ASCII-Buttons show "[..."
I'm on W2K SP4
FB2k 0.83
Columns UI Beta 3
comctl32.dll version 5.81 in winnt\system32

I place screenshot in upload section of forum

About the HTML/CSS formating, well, when and if musicmusic makes the playlist a component as well, you could actually make a playlist component that uses an explorer control and actually displays and parses HTML... that would actually be pretty cool because then you could install PHP on your computer and like make some very interesting designs and not even be constricted to putting songs in a list with columns.

That would so rock!

What would you use a local PHP parser for? Connect something to a database? Just wondering because this sounds like a pretty interesting although far fetched.

I would love to see an implimentation of the Mozilla rendering engine. That way everything in the layout could be controlled through CSS. Firefox and all Mozilla programs use this sort of GUI. Worth checking out? Something to consider in the next major version I hope.

I don't think adding all this color/border/image stuff is a good idea. All I want is a fast, simple and clean User Interface and I'm very sure that adding this stuff will not speed up things.

I'm currently using a very simple design but in large playlists I got some unsmooth scrolling anyways (2.6 ghz Athlon Xp, 1Gb ram).