# GUI Design



## mphype (Mar 13, 2009)

Hay everyone!!!

Offering up my services as a graphic designer to help the scene out. 

If you have any apps you are working on in which you need a UI developed or any design work reply here or PM and i should be able to help you out.

cant code very well so this is my way of contributing ^_^

been apart of several scenes in my time everything from xbox 1 skinning and UI dev to iPhone cydia apps and im looking forward to addid these apps to my homebrew resume


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

sweet... some of us could use a lot of help ;]
I like doing that stuff, but don't have the necessary tools or time.

I have several ugly apps that would enjoy a makeover.
(Mainly Solitaire & Freecell... & working on a crossword... I guess that's most all of it, actually... the rest is just playing around stuff, or my multi-slide-show that doesn't have much of any visual UI... except the multi-tasker architecture's preferences editor.)
The card games have a customizable card back, and the suits were done in Word by using the suit characters in a really large font and saving them as images ;]

Colors kind of suck, too ;]

Card game was a bit of a challenge because of no control over Z-ordering of views, so each card view gets shrunk when it is "partially covered" by another card.

I know card games are probably not an interesting Graphic Design challenge, though.

Thanks for volunteering! The community can greatly benefit from your kind of expertise!


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

Actually, the more I think about it... you're exactly what I was waiting for...I try to make lots of re-useable widgets, etc, but only code them to minimal functionality with the thought of "someday this can be made pretty and everybody using it will have the pretty version automatically"... not that anybody is using them except me ;]
Color chooser, Quick Keyboard, simple Help screen are a few that would be interesting things to work on, I'm betting.


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

I don't know what happened to mphype... I hope he wasn't all hype. ;]

If it's more interesting, mphype, I've got about 80% done on an iCalendar viewer for the Tivo that could use some prettying up... it's basically an M$ Outlook-like view of a day at a time for ICalendar files (e.g. Google Calendar!).

By the way...if anybody is listening... I finally got my HD simulator working correctly... is it accurate in that the TiVo automatically scales apps that aren't responding to the resolution event so everything works by default? It just stretches everything, I guess. So I don't HAVE to add HD support to anything, but if I want it to look pretty, I need to have respond to the event and deal with the extra resolution myself (or with that HD-compatible toolkit ... whatever it is... Bananas2? not sure...no time to work on that anyhow)


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

davidblackledge said:


> is it accurate in that the TiVo automatically scales apps that aren't responding to the resolution event so everything works by default? It just stretches everything, I guess.


Not quite. The resolution event just reports available resolutions. The app can then send a command to change to one of the supported resolutions, if it chooses. If it doesn't, it continues to run in the default 640x480. (Exception: Taiwanese TiVos apparently use 704x480, which they attempt to report via parameters to the GET request. Handling a resolution reported that way is an undocumented feature of the Java SDK, not mentioned in the HME protocol spec.)

It should be understood that this is only the resolution of the text/graphics overlay, which is independent of the resolution of the video background. If your TiVo is set to output "native" mode, then it's the video background that determines the resolution. And if you're coming to HME from the TiVo's menus, the video background is the menus' background -- which is 720p if you set your TiVo to 16:9 output, 480i for 4:3.

I suppose the text/graphics overlay _is_ scaled, ultimately; but from the HME perspective, it's really 640x480, until you tell it to switch. In fact, an interesting point about this: The SDK docs claim that, in 640x480 mode, the SDK scales everything to 704x480. But no -- it's the TiVo box that scales it, not the SDK. Anyway, you can see the effects of the scaling, and you can see them go away if you switch to 704x480 mode. However, other problems arise in that mode. 1280x720 mode doesn't share the problems of either of the SD modes.


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## davidblackledge (Sep 9, 2008)

Very useful, thank you... 
As a non-HD-owning person I have a couple of clarification questions so I do proper testing (someday) with the simulator:
Sounds like you're saying the only modes I should bother testing against (since they're the only ones you can get from the TiVo Menu) are 480i and 720p... which correspond to simulator resolution choices 640x480 and 1280x720, correct? [and 704x480 for Taiwanese, but that's not a simulator option]

The exception to this being if I try to stream video, my resolution will be changed to match the video which can theoretically be any of the available resolutions in the simulator, correct again?

This gets the mental gears grinding... remember the 1-frame mpeg background trick?... I would bet based on the above info you could get a 1-frame of each of the different background resolutions and drive your resolution by picking the appropriate one.


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## wmcbrine (Aug 2, 2003)

No... The background resolution (= the video stream resolution = the actual output resolution in "native" mode) is completely independent from the HME overlay resolution. The latter is the one reported by the resolution event and set by the resolution command. You can have a 1280x720 overlay on top of 480i video, or vice versa. The overlay is scaled in hardware... except that I think 640x480 is actually scaled to 704x480 in software (704x480 and 1280x720 being the only "real" overlay modes) before possibly being scaled again in hardware, by the same process that up/downconverts video. This is based on observation and is somewhat speculative.

704x480 is also available on all Series 3's. (It's even reported as available by my 540 S2, but the 540 will crash if you actually change to that resolution.) My point about the Taiwanese TiVos was just that they use it by default, while other TiVos default to 640x480.


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## jtkohl (Feb 7, 2004)

Ah, so this explains odd behavior I saw on my S3 today.
Some of the Galleon applications were showing up as 720p on the TV, some as 480i but with the text/graphics layer sized for 720p and down-scaled.
It's the background images that are the difference.
Time to set up real 720p backgrounds for all the HD apps!


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