Terres­trial has upda­ted his track info mod com­po­nent to allow quick and easy image rota­tions, upon my request and within an hour of making that request which is quite asto­nishing. Any­way, these new found super powers ena­ble us to create sexy image reflec­tions which fade out using a sim­ple trans­pa­rent to black (or wha­te­ver colour) PNG overlay.

My latest design efforts see a sca­la­ble ver­sion of this with top left artist ima­ges. The art­work itself acts as a Play or Pause but­ton, unless the cover art does not exist, in such a case the but­ton action calls up a Cus­tom Run script Cover Down­loa­der which uses Ama­zon to find album art ima­ges and save them to the audio file direc­tory. Simi­larly, when artist ima­ges do not exist a cus­tom run GetAr­tis­tImg script that I crea­ted down­loads the image and saves it as %artist%.jpg etc.

I’m always adding func­tions and twea­king it so it’s not quite done yet, but here are some screenshots:

And so my 35 hour eye-popping 700dpi 6ft by 3ft retina scratching marathon to com­plete my 4th year pos­ter pro­ject pre­sen­ta­tion has finally ended. It is entit­led “Cap­Sense” and thusly covers a “non des­truc­tive elec­tros­ta­tic ima­ging tech­ni­que for the eva­lua­tion of conc­rete”. I am now awai­ting it’s final print and I hesi­tantly look for­ward to seeing its lami­na­ted phy­si­ca­lity before I and six other group mem­bers are quiz­zed on the con­tent. I would link you to the PDF that took 90 minu­tes to gene­rate and 10 to open but it is 1.1GB large; sad thing is, I had to create 3 sepa­rate PDFs as the first two came out wrong. Purcha­sing that 512mb of RAM the wee­kend before was cer­tainly a subli­mi­nally good choice as edi­ting kept up a surly 1.9GB of page­file that would pre­viously have sent my AMD into catatonia. 

(The full ver­sion is 12960 pixels across and its sca­la­ble vec­tors give my pro­ces­sor its long desi­red wor­kout, it was begin­ning to put on some pounds after all those mp3s and spreadsheets.)

Terres­trial has made another great update to his sin­gle column play­list module for Foobar2000 v0.9. This latest change adds the follo­wing functionality:

+ some tweaks to mul­ti­ple win­dow / mul­ti­ple play­lists
+ added “Pla­ying” play­list selec­tion
+ $filee­xists()
+ added NOKEEPASPECT option for ima­ges
+ added wild­card sup­port for ima­ges
+ added align­ment options for ima­ges VALIGN-T (ver­ti­cal align-TOP), VALIGN-B, HALIGN-L, HALIGN-R

I have high­ligh­ted the key impro­ve­ments that I am now making use of. With these new addi­tions ima­ges can be stretched to fit a give frame, for example: 

$imageabs2(100,100„,100,100,5„$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)

This will dis­play an image (finds any .jpg in the song’s direc­tory thanks to the new wild­card func­tion — * is the wild­card) and stretch it to fit a 100x100 frame. Expan­ding upon this using the new filee­xists function: 

$if($fileexists($replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg)),
$puts(albumMarg,110)
$puts(datax,160)
$imageabs2(100,100„,100,100,5„$replace(%path%,%filename_ext%,*.jpg),NOKEEPASPECT)
$imageabs(5„images/artoverlay-1.png ‚)
$drawrect(5,0,100,100,brushcolor-null pencolor-0–0-0)
$drawrect(6,1,98,98,brushcolor-null pencolor-150–150-150)
,
$puts(albumMarg,10)
$puts(datax,60))

This checks that the ima­ges is there, if it is it defi­nes a spe­ci­fic mar­gin for later use in posi­tio­ning of artist, album and trac­kinfo. It then draws the image, a PNG over­lay and some surroun­ding bor­ders. If the image doesn’t exist it defi­nes a dif­fe­rent mar­gin so that the song data does not surround an empty space and ins­tead is clo­ser to the left, for example: 

Fin­ding the elu­sive per­fect black theme for win­dows XP is nigh impos­si­ble. The thwar­ted erro­neous or incon­sis­tent use of SYS­CO­LORs throughout appli­ca­tions ine­vi­tably leads to a mix mash of black on grey (Fire­fox says grey can only be spe­lled gray, silly thing), black on black, url-blue on black or many other una­voi­da­ble clashes that make using that par­ti­cu­lar pro­gram impos­si­ble or pain­ful. Whether it be unchan­gea­ble back­ground whi­tes with white text or the fixed black font on the new dark-grey 3D win­dows there’s always a rea­son to switch back to the eye-ball pene­tra­ting white the­mes. Even Mic­ro­soft appli­ca­tions lay foul to this pro­blem — you’d expect pro­per SYSCOLOR usage here at least: 

MSN & Microsoft’s Tweak UI

No mat­ter what you do, that black text can­not be fixed, no mat­ter what you do that blue hea­der and frame in MSN can­not be fixed — no tweak will suf­fice. All black the­mes face these pro­blems. The only way of fixing such issues I ima­gine is to apply a cus­tom visual style to each pro­ble­ma­tic appli­ca­tion and the only pro­gram that allows this, as far as I am aware is Win­dow­Blinds, which I shud­der to use as I like my sys­tem resour­ces. This pro­blem extends to brow­sers whe­rein web-pages adopt the default color sche­mes; brow­sing under the guise of black­ness you become aware of the sites that assume ever­yone uses a black on white setup and the pro­blems in crea­ting an incom­plete or ill-defined CSS sty­lesheet. For exam­ple, defi­ning the back­grounds as white but lea­ving the default text, defi­ning text-color within an input box but not its back­ground color, visa versa, etc. In IE this can­not be fixed remo­tely and your theme beco­mes abso­lu­tely impos­si­ble to tolerate: 

But in Fire­fox this pro­blem can be fixed by ove­rri­ding default theme values via the UserContent.css file, found here:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\PROFILE\chrome
for a stan­dard ins­ta­lla­tion. I added these settings: 

Which chan­ges the page (and others that rely on default sche­mes) to look like this:

A sig­ni­fi­cant and usa­ble impro­ve­ment that allows for an impro­ved and enjo­ya­ble brow­ser expe­rience. Note: It seems Fire­fox defi­nes text-colour default to black and igno­res the the­mes value, so no chan­ges have to be made here. To have a brow­ser wor­king within a black theme beco­mes a sig­ni­fi­cant bene­fit and the pro­blems and woes of the few assor­ted clashes elsewhere become tole­ra­ble. Now a beau­ti­ful black theme such as Inverso-Reborn-Balanced can be used func­tio­nally in day to day life without just loo­king pretty (screenshot sho­wing Foo­bar, Explo­rer and Notepad):

If only more appli­ca­tions allo­wed com­plete CSS re-styling of their user interface.