Play MP3s and Emulator from Minimenu..


MooTheKow

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Joined
Oct 8, 2008
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182
Anyone have any good suggestions for a way to both play mp3s AND play games in an emulator from minimenu?
 
Not sure about the mini menu but Dead Beef and an NES emulator is a match made in heaven, in the Xfce.


you could play games with good B.G.M. :) j/k I understand where your coming from.
 
I'd be inclined to use Minimenu a lot more than I currently do if it had some basic app switching/multitasking capability.
It was intentionally designed as a stripped down, single task interface, something to give the non-power users something more familiar to use.


If you really want to multi-task, you actually can, but it requires using the command line. You can start a terminal, and then execute your programs (including PNDs) in a background process.
 
I get the stripped down design philosophy and i'm all for it. I'm just saying that in my version of a perfect world, we could have the simplistic interface of Minimenu with the ability to alt+tab(essentially) to another full-screen application or to the launcher.
 
Alt-tabbing between full-screen applications doesn't even work decently in XFCE, you can't even switch to e.g. Mousepad.


Due to this, multitasking is horribly broken right now. I agree that some basic alt+tabbing from Minimenu would make sense.
 
It won't work on fullscreen, because fullscreen apps are really fullscreen.. They skip window managers and all. The way modern games eg. in Windows do it (And on Linux nowadays) is that it runs on Window, but the window is maximized without border.
 
Alt-tabbing between full-screen applications doesn't even work decently in XFCE, you can't even switch to e.g. Mousepad.
That's standard behavior when dealing with fullscreen apps. It's a design choice of all (Does MacOS do this too?) OSes which some modern games, as Cloudef mentions, hack around. The reason for the decision is that a lot of games will use tab and alt (and escape and control and enter, etc...) and pressing any of the usual keyboard short cuts, such as alt-tab, should be handled by the game to perform the alt and tab actions, not by the OS to swap tasks. The simple and obvious solution is that when any application goes full screen, it is acting as and assumed to be the only thing the user cares about, so it gets full keyboard control.


That being said, some keyboard combinations are always active. On Windows, Windows-L will always lock the terminal, and several others as well, so that you are never stuck with an application you can't get out of. On the Pandora, pressing and holding the Pandora button for 4 seconds is a hot key to opening a "kill" dialogue. Once that window pops up, you can ignore the kill button and just choose something else. What may be useful is a similar hot key, say "Pandora+tab" or something, to minimize the current application and get you back to the desktop. Find the hotfix suggestion thread and post your recommendation into it.
 
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There was a wmcontrol program downloadable via opkg or something which ED said was pretty cool, what happened to that?
 
Alt-tabbing between full-screen applications doesn't even work decently in XFCE, you can't even switch to e.g. Mousepad.
That's standard behavior when dealing with fullscreen apps. It's a design choice of all (Does MacOS do this too?)
With the exception of misbehaving applications, OS X allows for command+tab task switching. It's a system-wide function. Being able to hold Pandora+Right/Left Shoulder, for example, would be pretty nigh-on perfect for this scenario, or Pandora+Dpad or what have you. Just some unused key combination that isn't hard to hit would be superb.
 
Personally, I'm not a big fan of hold down a button for x seconds interfaces. So if technically possible it would make sense to make the Pandora a universal system-wide modifier button (super perhaps). This way we could easily map several key combinations to the Pandora button.


Some quick suggestions:

  • Pandora + <nothing>: application menu of active application (e.g. emulator menu)
  • Pandora + q: close application
  • Pandora + k: kill application
  • Pandora + home (= A button): previous application
  • Pandora + end (= B button): next application


This can be easily expanded upon and should be customizable by the user. I'm not entirely sure yet how to address the discoverability of such a mapping though.
 
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