Aight, I'll Post It Then!

[skeezix]

Vimacs made this video, but I couldn't sit on it for a whole _hour_ without posting it, so here goes:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=h_6DE_14b4o

Not the most exciting video ever, but its pretty cool to those of us building this stuff

- insert SD
- .pnd files (a bunch of them) auto-recognized
- double-tap with finger on he screen, launches an app
- eject SD
- .pnd files automatically vanish

No installation, no muck, no leftover files, nice and clean and piece of cake.

jeff

edit: hole -> whole, I suck

 

[second exodous]

Man, videos like this just make me more impatient.

Keep up the good work though.

Edit: It's easy to configure it so a SD icon on show up instead of the files on the card right? I have mixed feelings about every file on the SD card just showing up on the desktop.

 

[dflemstr]

Nice. A bit sad that XFCE is the default UI now but if the general consensus is that that's what we want, then what can we do?

Really nice that the detection of PNDs happens so quickly (not that the PND discovery daemon picks them up because I already knew that it was extremely fast; it's XFCE that I'm impressed by ). Didn't really see whether the icons were loaded correctly (some .desktop files didn't even have icons it seemed; it was really hard to tell though) but yeah.

 

[Prometheus]

It's looking great - many thanks for the link skeezix, and thanks to Vimacs for the video, and thanks to everybody involved for making something to be featured in a video in the first place.

It seems like "magic" to the point that I do kind of wonder why nobody has implemented such a thing before. :lol:

 

[skeezix]

second -- it looks (by default) in /pandora/apps for the pnd's (and unpacked PXML.xml type directory applications.) So the rest of te SD card will not be searched. A config file can be put onto SD (or editted in NAND) to make it look elsewhere, though. (The fear of osmeone downloading 10,000 pnd files onto SD made me try to eep it sane

It is pretty magic, and really .. I would be surprised if something akin to this doesn't come up in other distribtions. Its too handy

jeff

 

[second exodous]

Oops, sorry, I did a google on [http://pandorapress.net/2009/11/02/libpnd-the-pandora-library-goes-public/]libpnd[/url], I understand whats going on now.

 

[skeezix]

oh, and icons being generic or what would just be because he acked together random bunk into .pnds, just for illustration sake.

(.pnd files can have their own icons, of course

jeff

 

[second exodous]

Holy cow, every one should read the wiki page, this is pretty cool.

 

[Etinin]

I love XFCE. It is currently the default DE on my Core Quad box.

 

[BaDToaD]

So good I watched it twice. Top job guys.

It doesn't look much but wow... just wow. Totally noob proof.

 

[MrBlais]

It doesn't look much but wow... just wow. Totally noob proof.

Classic...

(Sadly, that won't stop it from happening. You'll see tutorials ALL over YouTube)

 

[skeezix]

Naturally, after all this work, we all know the very first pnd app posted to the repo will be..

Bikini themer!
-> insert SD, runs a zenity script to show a menu of themes, and then applies backgrounds and images to NAND so you can have b00bies everywhere.

So sad its probably the future

jeff

 

[MrBlais]

I just want a nice frontend for my emulators. I don't care what it is, I just want to play Road Rash first... LoL

EDIT: Oh, btw, nice work skeezix! It looks smooth!

 

[skeezix]

We're planning on two environments to begin with; currently it is envision that machine boots and can either zip right into your desired environment, or show a picker to let you select one (X11 with xfce, or cpasjuste's pmenu launcher); another option in one of those environments should likely let you select the environment for next boot as well, but we're still fiddling with this stuff.

pmenu is a old-school style launcher, and it also uses libpnd to do its work; ie: shows pnd files, but does opengl screenshot previews and such of roms in the emu etc. Or go to x11 with xfce, a more full desktop that you might be used to.

jeff

 

[MrBlais]

ie: shows pnd files, but does opengl screenshot previews and such of roms in the emu etc. Or go to x11 with xfce, a more full desktop that you might be used to.

I've always wondered, and this may be a noob kind of a question, but how do you attribute screenshots and like info to a rom?

 

[skeezix]

busted actually, it shows 'preview pics' for the application, and those are whatever are specified in the PXML.xml; so presumably for an emu, its just got a bunch of random preview pics. So pmenu could show you a slideshow of images for the emu, but its not going to show you 'by rom', since pmenu has nothing to do with picking and launching a rom within an app.. it just launches the app.

(ie: Having pmenu pick a ROM is rather out of scope; some suystems need just a ROM, some also need a BIOS choice or hard drive or floppy choices, or how much RAM it has at the time. Further it coudl be a word processor, should the menu also let you pick files to hand to a word processor, video files for a movie editor, etc? Yes, PXML has some facilities to let that happen down the road, but none of that info is used these days. We got enough to deal with

jeff

 

[WizardStan]

Question regarding PND format: can you associate file types with a PND? So you can double click a ROM file and it kicks off the the appropriate emulator, with arguments? Or is that outside the scope as well? Perhaps a future revision, or not a consideration at all?

 

[skeezix]

The PXML spec includes a 'file association' bit where a PND can publish what types of files it expects to get, and how to invoke its command line to handle them.

We're not using that level of information yet, but down the road someone can try to sort it out. But it has been planned ahead for. (Credit to ED for the original idea in his original PXML spec.)

The libpnd page in the pandora wiki includes a link to the current PXML spec page, which should be considered 'current, and updatable'

jeff

 

[WizardStan]

The libpnd page in the pandora wiki includes a link to the current PXML spec page, which should be considered 'current, and updatable'

D'oh, that's the "associations" tag, isn't it? I read that before, and just plain forgot. Sorry. Thanks!

 

[renegadechic]

is it possible to have it so the pnd files show up in a slot folder rather than populate onto the desktop? when you have 32gig and only 4.something inches of space for things to spread over, populating straight on the desktop would get pretty mess at times i reckon. the option to load a SD1 or SD2 folder would certainly suit me