Remedie

Some UI updates: jGrowl and Shadowbox.js

Here are some screencasts (no audio) for the the new UI enhancements matsuu and I added last night.

The first one is Shadowbox.js, the lightbox-ish media player that uses JW Media Player. Fortunately we used JW Media Player already, so the changes we needed to replace JW player with Shadowbox was not that big. (You might have noticed that with the mousemove events over the channel image gives a random list of video thumbnails in the channel, a la iPhoto/MobileMe style. That's a new thing as well :) This feature is under the development and you can get the code from shadowbox branch.

The next one is jGrowl, growl-ish jQuery plugin to display the notification window with an animation. So whenever you refresh the channel and if there's a new item in it, you'll get notified. This is not Mac's Growl, but the one that lives on the browser! This feature is ready to be used so it's in the master branch you can git pull from. (Note that this is quite a hack for now, since the plan is to eventually replace this with an upgraded server side asynchronous events using technologies like Comet.)

git pull the latest code and enjoy!

Upgraded jQuery and JW Media Player

Remedie includes jQuery and JW Media Player so that we can build this cool UI to play videos smoothly, and we recently upgraded the bundled versions of these libraries.

jQuery 1.3 is based on John Resig's sizzle CSS selector and it's brilliantly fast and has a built-in support of jQuery.live() to bind events on dynamically generated elements, which is very important because Remedie currently builds almost all of its HTML elements with jQuery DOM manipulation on the fly without any page load.

JW Media Player was upgraded to 4.4, the trunk version instead of the released 4.3 because we found some minor problems with audio thumbnails and RTMP. I needed to update parameters and what not to work with the latest but so far it works fine. I haven't realized it but JW Media Player seems to have lots of plugins to add functionalities to its player. Currently Remedie uses custom JavaScript code to, say, add keyboard hotkey to manipulate videos but I guess it could be done using Flash plugin as well. We haven't built  any ActionScript code ourselves but it might be fun to do, especially to add some useful features like these!

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This is a blog for the Remedie project, perl and JSON based pluggable Media Center application. See github for source code and Google Code for Wiki and issue tracker (SVN repository on Google code is OLD!).

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