INTERACT FORUM
More => Old Versions => Media Center 11 (Development Ended) => Topic started by: nila on May 05, 2003, 09:39:27 pm
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Hi,
in the past I've read posts about us being able to customise remote server via a .css file that was in the plugin dir.
I dont find any sign of this file however and so was wondering if there was any more info on it?
Also, the web remote itself is pretty poorly thought out in terms of it's interface. It's a GREAT idea that could be soo much easier and better to use with a few simple tweaks.
The play controls for instance are a simple 5 or so controls that we have to leave our navigation spot to go back to the root to control. These could all be displayed easily at the top or in a <div> that we could control ourselves via an external .css
That way we could control the playing from any screen we are on.
Playing now again we have to leave where we are to look at. This could again be simply put into a <div> with some simple js that would expand or hide it so that we could instantly see it and remove items from it etc.
The ideal solution would be if we could create a template page in the same manner that we do with track info pages and the remote server reads in the template page and fills in the appropriate info in the template pages we make.
This feature could give us a GREAT interface to MC remotely that is fast and easy to use from any system yet because all the code is locked into the plugin we have no way to tweak it to our own needs.
Right now I've thrown together a rough page that uses frames and hidden frames to give me a bit better navigation and control through the remote server plugin but this has a lot of limitations in that all my pages that display info have to just be frames containing the MC default pages.
Later I might try to do this using php and make it read in the page produced by MC, extract the info and then display it again how I want it but this is total overkill to have to do simply to customise the page.
Now that MC is 'gold' could just a single day or something be spent on this feature to give us some form of control over how it looks, customising it etc.
Pretty please?
(p.s. Congradulations on going gold - I've been recommending and setting up MC on a lot of systems I've been building for people recently and also recommending it to alot of friends).
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Oh, and cause I'm always pretty vague, here are some specific things that would make it's interface 100 times better:
- Playing now controls (play, last, previous, stop, shuffle, mute, continuous) along the top and bottom of all pages with the page info displayed inbetween.
- A drop down list similar to the one displayed at the bottom of the forum pages with all the playlists in it so we could instantly and quickly play any playlist we want.
- Ability to modify and adjust an external .css file in order to customise the appearance of the page.
- All items on the page (play link, last link, next link, tracks, playlists etc) all given a unique class attribute ie <a href="playMusicString" class="playingnowcontrolsPLAY">play[/url] type thing so that we can control how these look and act via the external .css file.
If we dont set anything in the .css file then it will just assume default behaviors and works fine but if we want we can then totally customise it.
None of these things mentioned would be that hard to do but they would all HUGELY improve this feature.
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Seconded. A bit of Remote Server development would be abolutely great.
Thanks to all the J River team for all their work.
Chers jj.
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Thirded, or whatever I'm supposed to say to continue the support :)
Edit:
A couple more feature requests to add:
1) Display the cover-art and other pertinent info of the currently playing song on the playing-now page. Sure it wouldn't auto-refresh as the songs change (guess it could with a little javascript), but it would still be really nice...
2) Organize the playlists page somehow. It's currently a total mess...
-John