[mythtv] Changing highlight/button-on settings in themes

[Daniel Kristjansson]

On Sun, 2010-02-21 at 05:01 -0800, Yeechang Lee wrote:
> Daniel Kristjansson <danielk at cuymedia.net> says:
> > Until we extend MythUI with some layout smarts this is unavoidable.
> 
> This, and Mike Dean's preceding message, has piqued my curiosity.
> 
> My guess is most people who asking how to adjust the (tiny) default
> font size on the Program Details page do so because it's the only one,
> as far as I know, that uses the ZOOMIN/ZOOMOUT bindings. Is the
> long-term goal to extend this functionality to all pages via MythUI so
> themes will auto-adjust themselves when font sizes change, à la Web
> browsers?

No, I'm not that ambitious. All I'm talking about as far as a layout
management is getting voids filled correctly. The problem is that
when you resize a layout you need to round positions and heights and
widths, right now we truncate, but rounding instead wouldn't make any
difference. I can explain with an example. The Program Finder screen
needs the lists to be aligned with the center select stripe, but since
the anchor point of the list items is the top-left corner it means
that if the list items are resized because the screen is a different
resolution than 1280x720 then the difference from the exact scale
gets multiplied by the number of items in the list above the center
point (5) and that becomes the offset of the list item from it's
intended location, so instead of being one pixel off it becomes 4 or
5 pixels off, which is very noticeable. With some more layout smarts
we could make sure that the item's location less than one pixel off
from where it was intended to be. Note: Chris Pinkham already has a
fix mostly written for this particular example.

Creating layouts that scale with changing font sizes is really the
provenance of the UI programmer, and we're really trying to make
theming more accessible to your average designer in MythUI, so
creating that kind of layout manager wouldn't be a good use of time. 
If you think about it there is some logic involved, like on that
particular layout you would want to ensure that there are always
an odd number of items, and you would need a layout manager that
can center anchor the list, and you would need the designer to know
that these things needed to be done and how to do them. In commercial
settings there is typically a designer and a programmer who work
together to get this kind of thing done; and usually it isn't done
very well even then. We may create some really simple layout
management for the settings screens, but those only need to be
done once and don't need to look super pretty.

-- Daniel