Frac­kin’ A?

Terres­trial has done it again, this time it is his third com­po­nent, Panel­sUI . Until now, all foo­bar menus, tool­bars and panels were arran­ged using Column­sUI in any desi­red grid for­mat — these panels were dis­tin­guished by irre­mo­va­ble bor­ders that were defi­ned by Window’s visual style, much to the dis­tate of bud­ding user inter­face desig­ners everywhere. Panel­sUI offers a clean new approach — using scripts (in the fami­liar trac­kinfo mod for­mat) panels them­sel­ves can be abso­lu­tely posi­tio­ned and pla­yed with. New “per­sis­ting varia­bles” or PVARS allow these scripts to store and edit varia­bles in memory using but­tons (see func­tion: $but­ton). In com­bi­na­tion a slew of exci­ting new oppor­tu­ni­ties are pos­si­ble; tab­bed panels without the need for tabs_ui, clic­ka­ble pop-ups, scrip­ted inte­rac­tion bet­ween trackinfo’s, SCPL and Panel­sUI, amongst others. To explain in words the poten­tial is pro­ving dif­fi­cult, so I will show you some early design animations:

Im sure I will think of some much more advan­ced uses of this inte­gra­tion in the near future. But for now I think this is exci­ting enough. For those inte­res­ted, to get going, the code for tab­bed panels in Panel­sUI is:

$select($add($getpvar(display.mode),1),
$panel(Option1,Track Display,0,20,%_width%,140,)
‚
$panel(Option2,Album list,0,20,%_width%,140,)
‚
$panel(Option3,Console,0,20,%_width%,140,)
)
$button2(0,160,0,0,14,14,button text,but­ton text,‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:0′,)
$button2(14,160,0,0,14,14,but­ton text, but­ton text,‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:1′,)
$button2(28,160,0,0,14,14, but­ton text,but­ton text ‚‘PVAR:SET:display.mode:2′,)

This sim­ple exam­ple (that needs the but­ton text repla­ced with a $font()text code) is the basis for tabs, clic­king the first but­ton shows the track dis­play, the second an album list, third a console.

That movie found in the trash, the tag line, “A sup­po­sedly idy­llic wee­kend trip to the country­side turns into a never-ending night­mare of traf­fic jams.” really says nothing. This is cate­go­ri­cally the most weird, per­ple­xing and inte­res­ting film I have recently seen. Whilst I unders­tand some moments my lack of know­ledge of the era, poli­tics and movie his­tory lea­ves me lost in the subt­le­ties and the bri­lliance, that many revie­wers claim, is beyond me. I would love it if a kind sole could point me in the direc­tion of a good analy­sis or some back­ground infor­ma­tion. The above video is a 10 minute clip from the movie.

After wor­king on the artist ima­ges pro­ject, essen­tially a site that shows you an image of any musi­cal artist you spe­cify, I deci­ded to home my efforts on movies. IMDB has all the movie details you could ever need. Using a simi­lar sys­tem I have devi­sed a method (which again will not be made public) to obtain direc­tor, pos­ter image, year, run time, plot out­line, rating and most impor­tantly title when given an IMDB num­ber (the num­bers with which movies are cata­lo­gued). On each movie load the infor­ma­tion and image is sto­red or cached respectively.

My first use for this new script is to dis­play my IMDB movie votes on my blog in a neat little pac­kage. Recently my votes list was made public by IMDB so I did not have to create a bot to login etc. Scra­ping the IMDB num­bers and my votes from this page has allo­wed me to enter the movies into my ser­vice and create a sexy little list. You can now find this list of 500 movies here: http://​fofr​.tri​vial​being​.net/​p​a​g​e​.​p​h​p​?​p​=​m​o​v​i​e​v​o​tes (or under the “My Movie Ratings” link to the right)