Windows > Third Party Plug-ins, Programs, and Skins

Playing Now PopUp Skins (x4)

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marko:
New for Media Center 33, cncb has been working hard on this new feature.

For any other of you long time users who may be familiar with rhinobanga's decades old plugin, cncb's work is at least as good, and in some areas, quite a bit superior.

First off, rhinobanga is an absolute legend, to me ;) He built a full featured, rock solid plugin that has worked, pretty much, flawlessly with MC for decades. Time, sadly, was catching up with it... FTP, awesome back then, but no sFTP... hosting providers do not like that these days... only 32 bit compatibility... that's not, erm, compatible, with the general desire, user-drift, towards 64 bit.

cncb's work takes care of all of this, and a little bit more...

For anyone who fancies a stab at creating a skin, this new MC feature gives access to three extremely useful things...

* Any visible item shown can be assigned an MCC command
* Any item can use the output of an MC expression
* It is possible to create a dynamic skin, where backgrounds, ratings, fonts etc are all inherited from whichever standard view skin is currently being used
I also feel it's worth pointing out a 'thing' regarding settings, and what may or may not be acceptable to you personally... namely, the "Show for (seconds)" setting...
When I'm using the "Notify" skin, I find a time of twenty seconds is good. The thing is, the popup offers useful information via tooltips, such as album review (if set) and artist Bios (if set), along with ratings and next/previous track info... so long as the mouse is over the popup interacting with it one way or the other, it will not hide after the set twenty seconds. This, is wonderful :)

For decades, with the old plugin, I've used, exclusively, the 'Top Toolbar' skin, but recently, I've leaned heavily towards the "Notify" skin. imho, it's pretty cool :)
I strongly advise making the ctrl+i combo global (via settings). It will then hide/show the popup as desired regardless of what you're currently doing.

With that, and in the hope of inspiring some others with vision/imagination way better than mine, this weekend I am sharing the four skins for the playing now popup feature that I've kept up-to-date as development has progressed. Pictures and links to the popup skin threads are below.

Note:
All of the skins below have been produced on a screen using a 1920 x 1200 resolution @ 100% on Windows 10 Pro. Feedback from users on other platforms is especially appreciated.

Logo

Info and download

Notify

Info and download

Play

Info and download


Top Toolbar

Info and download

Enjoy :)

cncb:

--- Quote from: marko on September 13, 2024, 02:32:57 pm ---The only things currently lacking in the JRiver iteration are the "Current Playlist" button, and sliders for volume and progress, none of which, to me, are deal breakers (though the current playlist button is a really close call) :)

--- End quote ---

Check the next build for a "current playlist" command that shows a popup list.  It will take more work if you want the list customizable.

I'm not sure about .mjp.  I will check it out.

JimH:
Craig,
Open any mjp file in notepad.  MC owns the file type (Media Jukebox Package) and will execute the contents of the file when you click on it.

Marko,
Thanks for the great write-up!  Remind me to suggest you to jmone for VP of Marketing when he finally gets to work!

Rhinobanga,
If you're reading, thank you!

marko:

--- Quote from: cncb on September 13, 2024, 04:26:00 pm ---Check the next build for a "current playlist" command that shows a popup list.  It will take more work if you want the list customizable.

--- End quote ---
Nice. Will test as soon as it's out. Customizable would be a bonus, the old plugin's list was not, it just showed [artist] - [name]

I'll update the attachments in the first post as the skins progress. "Notify" has been changed for now as I've found that's reliably causing MC to crash if you try to move it with mousebehavior set to "1"

-marko

cncb:

--- Quote from: marko on September 15, 2024, 01:43:44 am ---Nice. Will test as soon as it's out. Customizable would be a bonus, the old plugin's list was not, it just showed [artist] - [name]

--- End quote ---

I was referring to the list colors, etc., but we can make the actual text customizable if you want.

Note that the next build supports Popup skins in .mjp files.

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