Developing rich UI contents

"belltown" wrote:
......but they probably took a lot of hard work, time and expertise.

I'm not aware of anything worthwhile that isn't.
Just my 10 bytes.

"NewManLiving" wrote:
Don't want to be critical. But I thought it was hard to use and very unresponsive. What to you think

I thought the same thing, although I didn't sign up for a subscription, just perused some of the movie previews. Some of the qualities reminded me of the official YouTube channel, although Sling was easier to use; or the Vudu channel. They all feel to me like they weren't really designed for the Roku platform, lacking the smoothness you could get with roScreen or the consistency you'd get with the built-in components. It's like they were designed to run in a web browser and somehow ported to the Roku platform.

"belltown" wrote:
They all feel to me like they weren't really designed for the Roku platform, lacking the smoothness you could get with roScreen

This is what I can't figure out. One thing about roScreen is it can be really slick movement-wise, there's just no excuse to have stuff stuttering around, and yet a lot of these "partner" channels do just that. What are they actually building them with? I haven't seen anything that couldn't be duplicated with roScreen, so why don't they use it?

"EnTerr" wrote:

"Rek" wrote:
ImageCanvas is likely too slow for a whole application. You'll probably want to use roScreen.

Is this based on experience or mostly word-of-mouth?

Say this is a mostly static screen for a non-game app, with typical UI elements like text, images, buttons, checkboxes, popups and rare full-screen transitions which might be ok to be chunky. ImageCanvas sounds appropriate for that to me - in theory, but i have no experience using it. I have experience with roScreen but looking for some relief in managing a scene with limited animation. Anyone got tripped by roImageCanvas in such situation? Or know compelling reason not to use it?

My MainSqueeze channel is written using nothing but roImageCanvas (with the exception of the search screen). It's pretty responsive, but doesn't include any animation. The library screen is the least responsive, but it has a ton of text on it.

"NewManLiving" wrote:
Would be curious to know what Sling TV is using. I suspect image canvas

I haven't tried it, but based on how it looks identical to the app on other platforms, I'd suspect it's an HTML5 channel, which could very well explain bad performance.

"belltown" wrote:
In my limited experience, roImageCanvas is noticeably slower than roScreen when any kind of animation is involved (scrolling, moving doodads around the screen, etc.) However, for mainly static content it may well be appropriate (certainly a lot less work overall).

I just looked through all the channels I have installed to see which ones use roScreen. ...

How can you distinguish if something is using roScreen vs roImageCanvas?

Also, if i build my own UI widgets for roScreen, i think i will end up with scene with nodes at different zOrder... sounds like re-implementing roImageCanvas, no? (And if so, what would be a reason to think that my re-make will be any faster?)

"EnTerr" wrote:
How can you distinguish if something is using roScreen vs roImageCanvas?

The fonts are noticeably different, but a quick way would be to set your screensaver to 1 minute, and wait to see if the screen goes black or shows an actual screensaver.

"TheEndless" wrote:
I'd suspect it's an HTML5 channel, which could very well explain bad performance.

I was wondering about the HTML5 thing, although I didn't think the Roku was powerful enough for that. According to Anthony Wood:

we don’t use android or html – both require a lot more memory and faster CPUs than the Roku OS

"EnTerr" wrote:

How can you distinguish if something is using roScreen vs roImageCanvas?

r2d2_bitmaps

"TheEndless" wrote:
My MainSqueeze channel is written using nothing but roImageCanvas (with the exception of the search screen). It's pretty responsive, but doesn't include any animation. The library screen is the least responsive, but it has a ton of text on it.

I'll have a look, thanks!
Since you had perused extensively, bonus question*: Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?
Also the TargetRotation property - does it support arbitrary angles or only multitudes of 90?

(*) no good deed goes unpunished :twisted:

"belltown" wrote:
I was wondering about the HTML5 thing, although I didn't think the Roku was powerful enough for that. According to Anthony Wood:

'Tis true, which is why you and I can't do it, but we know the new Netflix is HTML5 (using their own custom web engine), and I'm 95% sure YouTube is (http://www.youtube.com/tv).

"EnTerr" wrote:
Can roImageCanvas draw anything else but images and text (i.e. lines, rectangles)?
Also the TargetRotation property - does it support arbitrary angles or only multitudes of 90?

It's been a long time since I wrote that channel, but it can do rectangles (and rectangles that look like lines). No triangles or other shapes, and I seem to recall TargetRotation being limited to 90 degrees, but I'm not positive about that.