Ok, time to get rough.

I'm glad you weren't designing the player UI. If we're going to start bashing the player UI, I think Hijack need a LOT of cleanup. If you're worried about kernel space, there's a lot of fluff you can clean up. A few bytes here and a few bytes there, as you said.

Let me try to explain the stuff you missed in my original message...

I said that you should update your font to match the current player font. To which you said:
I'm not willing to blow the memory needed for such an extravagence. The folks with Mk1 players have too little music buffer space as is, and even the Mk2's don't have enough to buffer a single track in most cases.

To which I'll say, what on earth are you talking about? Your current font is a knock-off (even if by fluke) of the player font before I made the clean-up mods (but 1-bit by the looks of it). I was just asking you to change the letter forms, not add support for anti-aliasing. The font would more than likely be smaller, not larger than your current one, because I made some characters narrower. Anyway, your font mixes serif and sanserif forms, plus a lot of the characters are unbalanced. I do use some antialiasing on "@" "%" etc. and the numbers have always had it. You want a 1bit bitmap of the current letter forms? Are you only using a 7bit font? (might as well if you're not gonna localise). If you're using 8bit then you could always switch to 7 and use another 7bit set for small characters. These can also be done without anti-aliasing (some characters will definitely not look as nice as the player ones).

Next...

>How about .. disallowing button codes to be sent to the player
>while one of your popups is active?

What kind of popups? I kinda like being able to adjust the volume (or mute) at ANY time, even when a menu or popup is active.

What kind of popups? The ONLY kind. The ones your hack creates (PopUp0 etc..). Are you trying to tell me, that within the short time-out time, you don't make a selection right away, but you adjust your volume? And then make a selection? That's completely bad UI. The focus is the popup. It is a menu. It makes zero sense to have input be sent to the player in the background. Not until that popup is gone. You're inconsistent here too. You trap the menu press, you trap next/prev and you also trap the "top" button. What if I wanted to switch tracks or pause, etc while a popup was active? Senseless, but just wanted to make a point. PLEASE fix this by trapping all buttons for the duration of the popup. If you don't like the idea of multiple buttons having the ability to cancel the popup, then just keep the "cancel" and "top" buttons allowing ending the menu as it is now. Speaking of trapping, while in the Hijack menu itself, you should be trapping button presses so they don't queue up and get spit back when you exit back to the player.

I also find that the time-out on the popups is too short. Maybe a global hijack time-out setting would be nice (which would apply to your main menu and those popups - I also think the Hijack time-out is too short ).

Another popup complaint. The selection is prefaced by the text "Select Action:" That takes up more than HALF the wdith of the screen. What were those complaints about horizontal menus again? I'd rather have no prompt text at all, but see multiple of the choices presented at the same time (horizontal would be fine, it would match the player software.) At least change it to just "Select:" or "Action:" - it's pretty obvious what to do.

Back to the fonts for a sec... You can see on the popups that they don't match the player font forms. Is there any way you can access the player font while doing those popups? I'm assuming it's in memory at that point. Do you know how it can be used? You mentioned before that you need to have a font as part of Hijack because it needs to be able to display data before the disks spin up. Well, have you thought about a very cut-down font and then just using the player font once everything's started up?

I vote right now to change the Hijack menu to prevent the highlight from ever going to the very bottom of the display or the very top. Keep it in the middle.

Which brings me to my first point that you didn't get. If I use your config.ini feature to remove hijack menu items until I have only THREE items, what happens? Does the first item appear twice in the list? Once at the top and once at the bottom? If you have a fixed highlight, when you have less items than fill the entire screen, you should allow the highlight to move and not loop the menu. That's good UI.

>BTW, are you going to document exactly what the "label" names are
>for removing Hijack menu items in config.ini?

Sure, just hold down the menu button for about a second, and it gives you a complete listing of them all.

Umm, that's a bit of a pain in the ass. I'm sure you can just copy the menu name list and put that up somewhere, right? LOREN! This is some of the stuff (that isn't available on Mark's site) that you should grab to include in your FAQ.

Back to button code names. This list is confusing as hell and shouldn't be. You want to save some space? Remove all the duplication and stuck to what's actually on the remote. I don't think we need 3 ways to do NextTrack. It's also inconsistent because you're missing "hush." You also have both "play" and "pause" and all sorts of non-existent long-press names that will obviously NOT work because they don't automatically translate to long presses (they're just a duplicate name for the raw button: Detail and Info for example)

And yes, I just found that doing a long-press of the OK/Menu button when selecting something from a popup allows you to send the long-press of the selected button name. For instance, "Detail" that I mentioned before. However, this doesn't make much sense because there's no visual clue as to whether you're supposed to long-press or not. (Of course the Rio remote itself is pretty inconsistent as well in labling... But that's not an excuse).

If you wanted to kill two birds with one stone, you could make button names like "Detail" already equal the proper long-press value. Then it wouldn't simply be a duplicate of "Info" and we could use them in PopUps with a single normal press. Ok, please consider this an official request for this feature. I'm using a nice little steering-wheel remote that has very few buttons. The popups will become MUCH handier with this implemented.

So now you want to save space? Kill the view font option/menu item. Remove Breakout, expand it so it doesn't end after the first line, add multiple rows of stuff to break, make the break-away sections smaller as you progress in level and... Make it a useland app that doesn't reside in kernel space.

I appreciate the small footprint and I appreciate all the features of Hijack (I meant to follow up to the thread where you were mentioning some of its features - I thought you weren't even pointing out its mist useful parts). But, with all the praise you get (from me too) I wouldn't want your head to get too big and think that there's no room for improvement.

Bruno