Hi,
A few clarifications regarding the ScenePlayer app for Android:
* The app faithfully implements all features of the iPhone app that were publicly documented last summer, including rj_image, rj_text, sensor input, etc. There have been a few additions since (scaling and rotating text, I think); those will be easy enough to add when I see the new specs, and I'm not aware of any scenes that require them. In short, a properly written RjDj scene should look and behave the same for both versions.
* The Android version implements rj_image and friends as abstractions, not externals. The immediate practical reason is that the architecture of Android apps pretty much requires this, but it's also a simpler design that was possible because of the message-passing features of libpd. Generally speaking, I believe that the only externals that you would really want to use with libpd are those that enhance the signal processing capabilities of Pd (e.g., fiddle~). Everything else is more easily implemented outside of Pd and controlled with messages.
* I don't think it would be a good idea to generalize ScenePlayer to accept image sizes other than 320x320 because that would almost certainly break compatibility with the original. A more realistic approach would be to tweak the UI so that it'll scale to fill up the screen (while preserving the aspect ratio) or at least center itself on Honeycomb devices. I won't have time to work on this, but if somebody wants to implement this, I'll be happy to consider a patch.
Cheers,
Peter
On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 9:53 AM, Chris McCormick
<chris@mccormick.cx> wrote:
Hi Joe,
On Wed, Jun 08, 2011 at 01:59:44PM +0100, Joe White wrote:
> Couldn't we just update the [rj_image] external in the ScenePlayer on Android
> to accept any sized image?
Sure, but then scenes you make and run with ScenePlayer would be incompatible with RjDj on iOS. There are other things to be taken into account too, like what happens if your user has a tablet with a different aspect ratio? How should images be stretched etc.? A fixed 320x320 bitmap is not a great starting point to make things more flexible and still look good. Basically you have to break the existing RjDj format if you want those features.
With PdDroidParty I am going to provide a facility to bundle SVGs ("Scalable Vector Graphic") for your patch background and for each GUI type in order to theme them. I was also thinking about 9-patch graphics[1]. Hopefully this means that patches with fancy graphics will look reasonable on all devices. I am some way off from doing that though, and I may run out of steam before I get to it. :)
Cheers,
Chris.
[1] http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/draw9patch.html
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