[Jeroen]

I know there have been discussions about this way back, but I have to say I really like how Boxee does this type of scrolling:



I know we're in a feature freeze and all, but maybe there's a chance to consider this in the future.

[mkortstiege]

Trac it please in case there's no such ticket yet. Otherwise this might get lost in the forums.

[RockDawg]

I second this suggestion. It would be really cool!

[Hitcher]

Couldn't it be emulated using smart playlists?

[Livin]

Is there any type of code share between XBMC and Boxee teams or does Boxee just "license" XBMC code so the can sell and profit... and not give back to the XBMC community? If they do, my apologies, I just have not seen anything announced/posted publicly.

[RockDawg]

Couldn't it be emulated using smart playlists?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you could properly emulate the way I assume that works. Take the letter "G" for example. You could make a smart playlist that contains all movies beginning with the letter "G" and map a button with the label "G" to that playlist, but wouldn't you then see only movies beginning with "G' and no others? I assume the solution Jeroen mentions is only taking you to the "G" section of your entire library. Meaning you could still manually scroll to any other movie title and not be limited to only movies beginning with "G".

[Jeroen]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you could properly emulate the way I assume that works. Take the letter "G" for example. You could make a smart playlist that contains all movies beginning with the letter "G" and map a button with the label "G" to that playlist, but wouldn't you then see only movies beginning with "G' and no others? I assume the solution Jeroen mentions is only taking you to the "G" section of your entire library. Meaning you could still manually scroll to any other movie title and not be limited to only movies beginning with "G".

Yeah, the aim would be to stay in the same window and skip to the start of the movies starting with a particular character. Using smartplaylists would replace the entire window. Still, creative thinking

And actually I would change the behavior a bit from the Boxee implementation. In Boxee you scroll to the character and then have to confirm by selecting it. I would actually prefer to have the container scroll immediately when hovering on a particular letter.

Basically sort of a combination of a regular scrollbar and using <shift + character>, sms type navigation.

So, if there would be a way to perform the action <shift + letter> as an <onfocus> action, this could be emulated I think. Although a proper control for it would be prefered of course.

Trac it please in case there's no such ticket yet. Otherwise this might get lost in the forums.

Cheers, I will do that as well. Just thought some opinions by other skinners would be nice

[Hitcher]

Just had a play around with this and while only work when the button is placed over the list, as soon as you place the button outside the list it doesn't because no list is focused. But seeing as have already the JumpSMS/SHIFT+LETTER function built-in we just need a way to use it from another list control.

[da-anda]

can't we trigger/fake keyboard presses in the skins, so that the ABC nav would just trigger a command for each letter?
*pseudo code*
onClick="focus(list);keypress('A');focus(self)"

[Hitcher]

Pieh would be the one to answer that but it sounds good to me.

[Jeroen]

can't we trigger/fake keyboard presses in the skins, so that the ABC nav would just trigger a command for each letter?
*pseudo code*
onClick="focus(list);keypress('A');focus(self)"

Looks good to me Another possible use for this would be to skip by season at episode level.

Ticket created

[pieh]

Is there any type of code share between XBMC and Boxee teams or does Boxee just "license" XBMC code so the can sell and profit... and not give back to the XBMC community? If they do, my apologies, I just have not seen anything announced/posted publicly.

Boxee of course shares its source code (http://app.boxee.tv/download/source).

Boxee has simply hardcoded lists (ids 7000 and 7100) which is being populated automaticly by window (in boxee source code see xbmc/GUIWindowBoxeeBrowse.cpp:L340 - CGUIWindowBoxeeBrowse::GenerateAlphabetScrollbar).

I didn't tested it too much but I think their solution will only work with latin alphabets ... to be honest I don't know how it should work with more exotic (at least for me) ones (like cyrillic or chinese). In any case I think we need other solution that will fit better to xbmc (something more like <pagecontrol> that would point to container xbmc will automaticly fill with letters).

Next not obvious question - what if our list isn't sorted by titles, but by date of premiere - how should such scrolling work?

I'd like to avoid key-press emulation way. I'm affraid that this "onClick="focus(list);keypress('A');focus(self)" could not work correctly: this assumes that right after execution of "focus(list)" we have focused list control but depending on order of our controls this may not work.

[Jeroen]

I didn't tested it too much but I think their solution will only work with latin alphabets ... to be honest I don't know how it should work with more exotic (at least for me) ones (like cyrillic or chinese). In any case I think we need other solution that will fit better to xbmc (something more like <pagecontrol> that would point to container xbmc will automaticly fill with letters).

Yeah, that's a good question. Boxee seems to have opted to only use this type of control with latin characters. Maybe something like this can be implemented with other alphabets, but I guess we would need some input from people more familiar with those.

Next not obvious question - what if our list isn't sorted by titles, but by date of premiere - how should such scrolling work?

I think in that case it should fall back to a "normal" scroll control. I think this type of scrolling control should be optional for the skinner to implement and for the user to use. So I don't feel that would be a big problem.

[TeOS]

The problem with multilingual support is that you can't fit all of the alphabets in a single vertical scroll list. Adding a switch button on top should do the trick.