2008-07-28, 22:40
This is something I've been wanting to do for awhile, but haven't had the time. I sat down last night and I've gotten it close enough to working order than I can run it by people and see what they think.
I've made a video that demonstrates the basic functionality so that it's very easy to see how it works and what it intends to do, but here is a text overview:
The Idea/Problem
When I wanted to watch a specific show I would have to scroll through the list of shows. Since I have quite a lot of stuff in my library this actually takes quite awhile to find a specific thing even with paging/scrolling. The other options is to use the Filter (or search) to limit results. Unfortunately this just takes more time to find something rather than less when you don't have a keyboard so is useless as a navigation tool.
The solution
I found myself wishing XBMC had a sort of adaptive text filtering on the various views. Something like T9 on verizon phones where 228 is (cat, bat, etc). So if you want to find a show you just enter the numbers that correspond with some consecutive group of letters in the title. For house it's 46873. This is a very quick and responsive way to find information.
The Code
I'm not the best coder and my knowledge of the codebase is limited, but it does what I want it to do and I think it's fairly unoffensive. The regular type filtering is a bit messy right now, but something easily that can be cleaned up once I finish this out.
I also fixed stringutils::findnumber which would not return a number as being part of the string if it started with that number. (for instance 46 in my house 46873 example)
I'd like comments and suggestions as I clean up the code and hopefully get it added. I imagine this will need to be some sort of configuration option for those who don't want to have this on or find it confusing.
Here is the youtube example an explanation of it's functionality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcbs7RsrPHM
The code is definately not completely finished, but I'll post a patch tonight. For now I have to run. Check out the youtube let me know what you think!
I've made a video that demonstrates the basic functionality so that it's very easy to see how it works and what it intends to do, but here is a text overview:
The Idea/Problem
When I wanted to watch a specific show I would have to scroll through the list of shows. Since I have quite a lot of stuff in my library this actually takes quite awhile to find a specific thing even with paging/scrolling. The other options is to use the Filter (or search) to limit results. Unfortunately this just takes more time to find something rather than less when you don't have a keyboard so is useless as a navigation tool.
The solution
I found myself wishing XBMC had a sort of adaptive text filtering on the various views. Something like T9 on verizon phones where 228 is (cat, bat, etc). So if you want to find a show you just enter the numbers that correspond with some consecutive group of letters in the title. For house it's 46873. This is a very quick and responsive way to find information.
The Code
I'm not the best coder and my knowledge of the codebase is limited, but it does what I want it to do and I think it's fairly unoffensive. The regular type filtering is a bit messy right now, but something easily that can be cleaned up once I finish this out.
I also fixed stringutils::findnumber which would not return a number as being part of the string if it started with that number. (for instance 46 in my house 46873 example)
I'd like comments and suggestions as I clean up the code and hopefully get it added. I imagine this will need to be some sort of configuration option for those who don't want to have this on or find it confusing.
Here is the youtube example an explanation of it's functionality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcbs7RsrPHM
The code is definately not completely finished, but I'll post a patch tonight. For now I have to run. Check out the youtube let me know what you think!
