A few months ago i wrote an article on how the first .net library prototype worked and submitted it to Microsoft’s Coding4Fun resource. Yesterday the article was posted and i just thought i would link to it here too so you can check it out.
Here’s something completely useless: a pong game for your optimus mini three keyboard. Featuring bleeding edge graphics (see keyshot), superb AI (try to beat it) and … some sluggish animations. The device hangs from time to time and can take up to a second to recover, no idea what it is doing. Still playable though with 10 fps most of the time.
And why did i create that? I wanted to try out if it is possible to make some very limited animations by just sending the modified lines instead of all 96 everytime. Line commands take 2-4 ms, the show afterwards around 20 ms. Restricting it to a small area would allow a few fps. But i’ll drop that idea, it’s not working reliable. Maybe i’ll add it to the general library code to reduce the cpu load a bit. And in the meantime i’ll just wait for v3.0 to get fluid animations.
Click here to download the pong game, source code is also in there. Use at your own risk of course, but i guess there’s nothing to worry, mine is still working. To play it hold the mini horizontal with the usb cable on the right side, center key shows game, other keys move left and right (yeah, that would’ve been hard to figure out, i know ;).
It’s not very long ago that i finally started using feeds - unbelievable how long i thought i don’t need that and kept checking my favorite sites manually. I’m using google reader now to stay up to date. One nice feature is the “next” link for the bookmark bar which takes you directly to the next unread item (you get that link on the settings/goodies page).
If you’re also using google reader then this is a plugin for you. It checks regularly for unread items and displays their titles sequential. The action for double press can be configured, for instance to open google reader’s home or that “next” link to jump directly to the first unread item. You can get the plugin on the download page.
All the source code is now available in a google code project, including the library code which i didn’t release at first. The application download doesn’t include the source anymore, it’s all on that page now.
And a new plugin is available, the email notifier. It allows to check any number of accounts for new emails and displays the sender and subject. At the moment only POP3 is supported and lacking a few other things, like applying the correct encoding as you can see on the keyshot. If you double press it will open the accounts with new mails and at the same time mark them as read (locally for the plugin only of course, nothing is changed on the server). You can also hold down to mark as read without opening the accounts, good for the first start.
Later i want to add IMAP support which provides read flag on the server side, would make checking for new messages more reliable. Though POP3 should cover most (if not all?) mail accounts. Does also work for gmail by the way, you just need to enable pop access in the settings and when you add it to the plugin check the “use secure connection” box.
This time no update to the application, but a new plugin instead. I’ve had this one in the works for some time and got around to finish it this weekend. It’s lacking a few minor things, but overall i’m quite happy with it. You can get it on the downloads page, then just put it in the plugins folder and configure it for your location.
The plugin gets its data through a free xml service provided by weather.com®. It shows “detailed” forecast for the next three days and summary for the following weekend. That detailed forecast isn’t really that detailed at the moment, just showing low/high temperature. I’m thinking of making the icon smaller to put more of the provided information on the screen. When you double press it’s opening their home page - wanted it to directly jump to the forecast for your selected location, but didn’t figure out yet how that works.
I’ve also replaced the icons provided with the SDK by much better looking ones. They were done by Jani, creator of the myWeather plugin for google’s personalized home, and he lets me use them for free (thank you!). These icons are also the reason for the rather big size of the plugin, ~400kb.
The latest version 0.2.0 contains an important milestone, the plugin browser class. It is looking for plugins in external assemblies in the Plugins sub folder which can then be assigned by the user to the keys. I’ve also revised the plugin base classes to support a configuration form and added some very basic settings storage.
I’ve to admit that the result is a bit messy because one important part is still missing, the plugin manager. This one will be the bridge between the plugins and the controller, at the moment the UI took over that role somewhat. The plugin manager will also have the ability to switch between different plugin layouts, not like now where you can only assign one plugin to each key. Expect to see some further changes in that area in the next release.
And no release without a new plugin (i’m wondering how long i can keep that up …). This time it’s not an all new one: the previous time plugin is now known as world time plugin. Comes in very handy if you’re like me working with people in different time zones. You can configure it to display the local time in up to five time zones.
Back in the early days of the internet you always used to see these image-based counters and nowadays i still stumble upon them from time to time. I’ve created such a counter as plugin, the data is loaded from a file on the website which is updated by a simple php script.
Not very sophisticated yet, but it’s a start. Later i want to update it to show more live stats, like number of online users, visitors this day, total count, etc. Data will be read from an xml file which can be provided by just about anything - a blog system plugin for example.
Beside that new sample plugin there’re also some updates on the .net library. I did some code clean up and added an idle time. Setting this will turn off the device if there was no user activity for the specified interval. And the test application minimizes now to a taskbar icon.
Version 0.1.1 can be found on the download page, the simple php script for the counter is included. Currently the plugin is pointing to this site and it can very easily happen that it won’t change for hours, not that many visitors yet :). If you want to try it out with another site you need to change the url in the plugin code.
In its current stage the om3 controller is a .net 2.0 based library to connect to and use your optimus mini keyboard. Beside settings for brightness or layout mode it also has some basic plugin functionality built in. This library is the result of me having some spare time …
… and also my not so good c++, otherwise i would probably write plugins for the original software. I’m a bit disappointed because i just can’t find any useful plugins for this otherwise cool device, though it seems like there’re people doing some stuff with it. But now that i can use .net i can make the plugins i’ve always wanted - yeah, that’s cool!
The library is free to use until i find a way to make a fortune on it - but i guess that will never ever happen :). It’s an alpha version with a few glitches, but overall it should work ok. You can get it on the download page together with a simple windows forms application to see how it works.
One new feature that the original plugin model doesn’t support is an extended key state handling: beside the existing key down the library does also provide events for up, hold, release, press and double press. Don’t know yet how useful that will be, but my stop watch plugin i did for this alpha release does already make use of it.
The plan for the near future is to put a better plugin manager in place (with settings dialog and persistency), ultimate goal is to create a .net based configurator application and turn this website into a place to download plugins for it. Now that’s not something done in a day, so if anyone is interested on helping out send me an email.