Feature proposal:
Currently, one can tell ui columns to display a popup when hovering the mouse over a cell which's content dont fit in. I think the potential of popups in ui-columns is very underused. Tracks often have much "secondary" info... data which is interesting sometimes, but uninteresting most of the time. In albummode, this is less a problem, because we have lots of room to display "secondary" metadata. But for singles, the choices right now are to either not display them, or clutter the screenspace with lots of columns which contain rarely needed metadata.

Popups could solve this. If the contents of popups could be formatted with a tagz-string (which would always use the same tagz-code, regardless of over which cell you hover the mouse), then one could move all the secondary metadata into popups, and use the static columns only for primary metadata. In practice, this would work the following way: Only the most important metadata could be displayed in the columns, saving screenspace - if you need additional info about a single-track, then you just hover the mouse over the track, and a popup will appear, showing all the secondary metadata. Of course, other interesting stuff may be possible as well - thats just a question of creativity.

- Lyx

From Columns UI Requests List: Customisable playlist view tooltips.

Isn't foo_uie_trackinfo already a solution for this problem? It even supports TAGZ.

I agree, It provides a way to display all the useless info per track.

A tooltip with the info (maybe only popping up while pressing Ctrl) would be nicer.

Well, some of us like to keep our foobars minimal and so even the trackinfo panel eats up too much screenspace

foo_ui_columns 0.1.3 pre-alpha 10 for foobar2000 0.9 beta 3 released:
Download
Changelog
Known Issues

Requires Microsoft C Runtime 7.1 libraries in your foobar2000 folder.

Warning: This is pre-alpha, so likely has major bugs, and has uncomplete features. Use with plenty caution.

Looks like good stuff. Too bad I cannot run fb2k anymore. (I run Linux now)

I'm getting this error when starting it up:

Adding the runtime libraries doesn't have any effect.

Sorry, foobar2000 components for 0.9.x do not work with foobar2000 version 0.8.3

Oh snap, didn't see that there's a beta of .9 out already. Downloading for science!

Ok.. so how would I add a panel above the main playlist? I notice that you can change the base layout view in the layout tab, but I don't see an option for that kind of thing.

as there isn't anything besides the playlist in the layout tab it doesn't seem you can do anything with it yet...

Edit: Also found a bug, it think, it seems when resizing the sidebar the playlist isn't redrawn right

Installed it, played around with it, nothing's crashed yet. Quite a few new features. It all looks good - thanks musicmusic

Will any sidebars be made available at this point, or are they going to wait until the alphas are further along?

(Also, so far, so good. No crashes with .9 all day, and 1.3 seems stable as well)

The 0.9 SDK is not publically available. As I understand it, neither is the UI Extensions API 6.0 SDK. So no panels will be available until both these items are available.

It seems that $set_style() function doesn't work, both under 'Display' and 'Color' tabs (Columns UI -> Playlist view -> Columns).

Here is the code I typed:

And it shows [UNKNOWN FUNCTION]. The same for $set_style(back,...,...).

@musicmusic
About availability of system-date/time:

In the past, there wasn't much reason to use the system-time for sorting. This has changed with the new playcounter-plugin. As you know, currently, system-time is only available in the global-string. This means that to use system-time for sorting, the global string needs to be included. This can be very slow whith a more complex global-string.

So, it would be nice, if one could have system-time available to sorting as well. Of course, in case you plan to introduce non-trackspecific global vars, then this issue becomes irrelevant(because the trackspecific strings would become fast enough for sorting).

- Lyx

You have to chenge the base to a vertical splitter, and then you can insert panels, or more splitters into it.

Well no, you cant do anything interesting, but you can do things, but you have to change the base node first.

Can you elaborate and/or post a screenshot?

Thanks, its working in global colour string only it seems, to be honest just use the old style for now, Im not decided on the new format yet, its certainly not finished yet.


What do you need to uses time for sorting for? Surely you dont actually sort by it

Only the hour is available anywhere else anyway; if you tell how exactly you want to use this in your sort string I can consider this.

For example, to sort by plays/day, using the first_played, last_played and play_counter tags. Any "hotness"-implementations will also rely on it.

In those cases, system-date/time is necessary, to calculate "how old" a timestamp(i.e. first_played and last_played) is.

- Lyx

Ok, Ill add them everywhere, and Ill see about adding that Julian date field..

I have the same problem using Win XP.

Steps to reproduce:
- start columns ui as a not-fullsize window
- activate the playlist sidebar
- maximize the window (double click ont titelbar)

-> the playlist sidebar takes not the whole available vertical space

Yep, confirmed on XP.

Ah I figured out layout now, didn't get it before

screenshot

Having something to the right of the playlist also seems to get rid of that redrawing problem

Trying with 0.9 and 1.3 I can't get the right columns size: if I check auto-resize I can't see all the titles length, if I uncheck it I can resize the headers but the rows in the playlist doesn't follow their headers.

I still can't reproduce this. (What do you mean by activate the playlist sidebar?)

If you rather meant insert a playlist switcher panel into the layout, and then double click on its caption, then that is the window overlapping bug, but it doesn't sound like that is what you meant.

Can someone post a screenshot, and very-specific instructions to reproduce? Thanks.


You mean the columns dont follow the columns titles? When you are resizing the columns, or something else?

I can't reproduce the redrawing problem anymore, not sure what caused it...

Yes, I do.

I used WinSpy++ to check the size of the 'Playlists'-listbox. As you can see from this screenshot its heigth is always 550 pixels.

After that, I removed the playlistswitcher and readded it to the sidebar -> the bug is gone and the listbox has the correct height. I'll see if I can reproduce it.

I wasn't sure if this was a columns_ui error or a foobar 0.9b3 error. I installed the new columns ui ans was checking the settings, trying to figure things out. I was on Prefs --> Columns UI --> Layout. I changed a few settings, to try to figure out what they did. Then I decided I wanted to start from scratch so I hit the "Reset All" button. Foobar immediately crashed and wouldn't open with the start menu shortcut after that. A quick check in the task manager showed that foobar.exe was still running. Ending the process fixed the problem.

I'm using WinXP Pro SP2 with foobar 0.9 installed to the default folder (I uninstalled 0.83 first).

I can't reproduce. Can you give some exact intructions to do so? Thanks.


That just looks like the panel is locked - though it shouldn't be by default.


Thanks, actually I just experienced that myself. It is only happening with columns installed so I assume its my fault; Im looking into it now.

Yes, that seems to be the reason fot this 'bug'. Sorry for the inconvenience.


One suggestion:
I think using 'white' as the default color for 'selected text' in playlistswitcher->colors/fonts is a much better idea then using 'black'. You can hardly read black text on blue background. White text on blue background is much more convenient.


Apart from that: Thanks for the great work, the new splitter system is awesome!

Hi, this issue is related to the restart function in foobar and will be fixed in 0.9 beta 4.
Thanks for the report.

Thanks

The colours default to system values now actually, but that colour was defaulting to the wrong value. This is fixed for the next version; thanks for the report.

I don't think this has been addressed: when I delete a playlist, the playlist view doesn't display the contents of a remaining playlist, but just blankness. Intentional?

What is this?

Try right clicking in the layout tab of ColumnsUI

hmmm.......did anyone else have a problem importing thier fcs??? It I had to enable legacy support and global varibales........also in foobar 0.8.3 the title column show just the track title, but in 0.9 it shows, the artist and the track name......did anyone else face the same problems??

yeah, i think the scripting has changed slightly in the new foobar + columns. We should probably start a new columns scripts thread..

I was wondering about the prudence of that...I mean, how much can we expect things to change between these betas and the finals? Would it even be worth our time to start writing new .fcs configs?

Hmm, actually I guess that isn't a good idea just yet.

Thats what i'm thinking as well and the reason why i haven't started any porting yet. Some nice things are in the pipeline, but the dev-environment for writing FCSs feels too unstable for my taste to start any real effort yet.

Finally, the words alpha and beta get their real meaning here - the current bleeding edge-state of fb2k is for testing - not for relying on it.

- Lyx

I was wondering if there would be the possibility to have the column playlist in two parts (with a horizontal splitter), parameterized with different "sources" for each instance, for example :
- the upper part would be displaying e.g. history, playback queue, DB search result
- the lower part would be "normal" (controlled by the playlist switcher) ....

It would be awesone ....

Wow! I wasn't expecting to see a Foobar 0.9-compatible version of Columns UI for awhile yet! Thanks!

The cleanup of the preferences is greatly appreciated too.

Drag and drop support in the Layout tab might be a nice idea.

It is intentional. Also, in the current alpha there's a bug related to this: if you ctrl+tab to switch playlists when there are none, foobar will crash. This bug has been fixed for the next version.

Known, but not really intentional. I'll change that for the next release.

Legacy support should have enabled itself, but it seems there is a bug so that "use globals.." isnt also enabled (when importing an old fcs). This will be corrected for the next release.

Possibly due to the new field remappings. You can use $meta() to access raw metadata now. See the 0.9 beta 3 titleformatting reference for more information.

I have no intention of breaking compatibility from 0.1.2 (there is 'enable legacy mode' for 0.1.2-style global string, that is checked automatically when loading a 0.1.2 fcs file). But, field remappings may limit compatibility. Also, support for the old old style global string is dropped. The other current issue is that when importing an fcs file made with 0.1.2, 'enable global vars' may need to be manually checked.


Yes, but not high priority right now.

Is there a way to enter a fixed width for the sidebar, not by dragging?

Better yet, a configurable width it can snap to :]

Is it going to be possible to also save the layout?