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+--- Forum: Suggestions for new plugins (http://forum.tordex.com/forum-16.html)
+--- Thread: Looks like some people have similar ideas (/thread-609.html)
- EuroMartin - 02-11-2003
There is a new program available for the Macintosh OS X called: http://www.konfabulator.com/
They have a similar concept of plugins which do all kinds of nifty stuff.
Maybe You can get a few ideas from the different plugins created for that program.
Best regards
/Martin
- shapeshifter - 02-12-2003
Great find, Martin!
So here's my idea, along the same lines: essentially, take the weather monitor model and expand it. The provider file would define variables extracted from practically any unformated text file format (TXT, HTML, INI, etc). These variables could be text or images, and you could change one into the other - turning "Sunny" into "sunny.gif" for example. The skin file would then specify a provider file along with a default path to the text file (either web or local). Clicking the ">>" button would take you to that path either in the default web browser or file explorer, as appropriate, where you could browse to find your specific file, if necesary. The skin file should also define a default set of variables to be displayed, but you could change them if desired. The plugin's size, general layout and images (sunny.gif = \images\small\clear.gif) would be defined in the skin file, but the skin file could also (possibly) allow the user to change the height, width, or both to better fit their taskbar or toolbar. Each value area would be defined as two sets of coordinates representing the top left and bottom right of the rectangle. Positive values would be relative to the upper left corner of the plugin, negative values would be relative to the plugin's lower right corner, and values preceded with a "c" (as in "c5" or"c-12") would be relative to the plugin's center point. The skin author could specify "best fit" instead of a font size in the skin file. The user should have the option to turn variable labels (also defined in the skin file) on or off for any given value (for example, putting "Humidity: " in front of the value contained in the variable for humidity"). Another option would be to set the scrolling speed (0 to disable) for values that don't fit in the alloted space (text only - images should probably be resized or stretched to fit). Both variable labels and scrolling behavior should have a default defined in the skin file. The goal would be to have one skin layout to fit all taskbar/toolbar sizes. It would be nice to be able to "skin" the letters and/or digits of a value (and label) with a custom, image-based, scalable font, and be able to have a different font or skin for each value location. It would also be very nice to have user-definable actions on left and right clicks (defaults, naturally, defined in the skin file).
Using this framework, the possibilities are almost endless. A few examples off the top of my head: news and stock tickers, an atomic clock, a plugin to monitor web pages and let the user know when they've been updated, current winamp song title, somebody else's current winamp song title, a webcam feed, weather and traffic conditions, current IP, and the list goes on and on.
So Yuri, what do you think? It sounds like a lot of work, but a lot of it's already implemented in weather monitor 1.2, and you'd essentially be creating hundreds of plugins at once. But more importantly, you'd be distributing the ability to make future plugins to us non-plugin programmer types.