Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Just installed the latest version and some great updates - but there are also two things that i think goes completely against what I perceived as the 'philosophy' of flipclock: Having buttons named 'Setup' and 'Alarms' on the main clock display.

The 'Setup' button is rather distracting where it is at at the upper left corner and way to prominent.

When I wrote 'philosophy' of flipclock I meant that it seemed like much was done to keep a very clean appearance and a very subtle UI. These buttons, to me, ruin much of the clock display's simple and clean look.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Indeed, indeed. I concur. I would further suggest that if the snooze button is tapped, the display remains in the "night" display, and returns to fully dimmed.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Please read post #142, Jolouis is already making that change.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Okay lots to deal with but let me address a few things quickly first...

Sampieter, I've tried both VBR and CBR mp3s on flip here and all seem to be working just fine. Perhaps it does have something to do with the ID3 version but I have no idea why that would be the case. Can anyone else try some VBR mp3s and see if they can find one/ones that don't work please! If you can find one that doesn't work that's fairly short and.. you know... redistributable without violating laws... let me know so that I can grab a copy of it and do some debugging/testing here with it, as I have not yet been able to find one myself that doesn't work...

In regards to other points:
Dimming issues.

The problem here is that the advanced backlight app is cheating. Flip now implements the same brightness features and control of advanced backlight internally, so you don't need to have it installed in order to set lower brightness levels. However, if you do have it installed, Advanced backlight uses it's own gconf settings to override the built in ones... Flip currently reads the built in settings, so that's why when you change your setup with advanced backlight and then go into Flip it seems to act strangely. I will try to update Flip to accomodate advanced backlight, but the point remains that you don't NEED advanced backlight installed in order to get uber low brightness... that's why I rebuilt the Insomniac mode a while ago.

That is the correct command that is installed into /usr/sbin... if it's not there, then you have a problem with the installation. I have confirmed that this is the correct command on two fresh installs on different tablets, so the packaging is putting it there properly, not sure why you're having problems with it but check that path to make sure it exists...

Interesting idea, hadn't even crossed my mind... I'll try moving it and see what it looks like. I've also fixed the "pixel off" problems with the alarm time button when I implemented the updated settings and alarm controls as described previously.

lol a while yet don't worry! I still have to finish the tweaks, fix up the default night theme, try and optimize things a bit more, fix some bugs... and THEN build the theme manager/selector as well as the help/about screens... so there's a ways to go yet!

Jim, thanks for confirming that... I upped the values yesterday when I implemented the horizontal swipes for theme changing as I found it was WAAAY to sensitive on the vertical; it should be much better in the next beta.

I'm in agreement with Den on this one... that being said, if you prefer single tap/double tap for snoozing/alarm off... you can tweak the theme or make your own theme that implements that very easily ;-) Once we get to Release 1.0 bring this question up again and I'll point out how to do it (and how to make a theme so you can share it with others!).

I had the same thought last night! This may or may not make Release 1.0 but my idea would be to have two settings on the clock controls page... "auto day time" and "auto night time", that would determine when the clock automatically changes themes. Perhaps even a tie in/option for doing it based on your location/etc though that's a bit of overkill I think...

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

"I had the same thought last night! This may or may not make Release 1.0 but my idea would be to have two settings on the clock controls page... "auto day time" and "auto night time", that would determine when the clock automatically changes themes. Perhaps even a tie in/option for doing it based on your location/etc though that's a bit of overkill I think..."

And a setting for which theme is your day theme and which is your night theme.

Will it be possible with themes to change the AM/PM alarm settings? I can't think of a use case where I would want PM alarms, or at least verrrry rarely!

Thanks again for you prompt and flexible design changes.

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

why not use the light sensor: if it's dark in
the environment go to night mode and dim
display; otherwise not

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Of course, this would only work on N810s , not N800s.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

but but but N800's have the fm radio that the N810 lacks!:p

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Oh, I forgot about the radio! I think I will listen to it now!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

absolutely! If we are trying to get a few more minutes of sleep, we certainly want the display dimmed. Once I hit the “Alarm Off” button, I want the display to be bright enough to light my way to the bathroom.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

FlipClock on a freshly flashed N810

Because I ran in so much issues, I thought 'heck, why not re-flash the device and start anew?'

Before I can install Flip
You cannot 'just' install FlipClock Beta on a fresh device. First, you have to install libsdl-ttf2.0-0 and libsdl-gfx1.2-4 which can be done by executing this in Xterminal:

sudo gainroot apt-get install libsdl......

But that only works when you actually can gain root access to the device:

So, step 0.a would be:

enable maemo Extras
Goto Application Manager -> Tools -> Application Catalog
Edit 'maemo Extras'
Un-check the 'Disabled' box

and step o.b is:

Become root
In Application manager, install sudser

NOW you can execute these two commands in Xterminal:
sudo gainroot apt-get install libsdl-gfx1.2-4
sudo gainroot apt-get install libsd-ttf2.0-0

On with the program!
I installed Flip using this link from the first page of this thread:
flip 0.9.4


FlipClock works! But .....
- There's no Insomniac mode. Even when I push the hardware button, I don't see 'Insomniac On' of 'Off'
When I change the theme, the brightness stays the same.


- There's no flipAlarmSync in /usr/bin
I only have: flipFMRadio; flipclock and flipclockSync
However, I was able to use command
flipclockSync clear clear clear

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

sampieter, thanks for the fresh install and walkthrough! A few points:[*] I heard today that the extras repository should be back up and working, so Flip will be extras shortly which means no more manual "gainroot" and apt-get installs... that will make things much easier for fresh installs![*] Very strange about the no insomniac mode... I don't know what would cause it not to operate at all! It sounds almost like the x86 or Fremantle version is being installed... very strange though; many updates have happened since 0.9.4 (I did finally fix the 24 hour thing... hopefully!), so I'll put out another preview in the next day or two; please try manually removing Flip, then try installing the newer version when I get it up to see if that fixes things.[*] flipAlarmSync should be in /usr/sbin. The program /usr/bin/flipclockSync is just a shell script that calls /usr/sbin/flipAlarmSync; you should be able to run either one manually if you need to... not sure why flipAlarmSync isn't visible to you, but if flipclockSync works, then flipAlarmSync is installed and running properly...

Everyone else... thanks for all the feedback guys! I kind of got lost a bit there with the random comments and things, can somebody who was involved in that discussion (Den, iamNarada, somebody?) please summarize what the desired results/conclusions were? I got the "clock changes theme from day to night at times of the day" part, but what was all that about snoozing and brightness and things?..

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

It seems that we all wanted a dim screen in "Night" display until we hit "Alarm Off", then it could change to the "Day" display with full brightness to safely get out of bed in the dark ( I get up at 4:30 am). If we hit "Snooze" the display should remain dim. If we hit nothing the alarm sound or music and the display brightness should slowing increase for 60 seconds at which point the sound and brightness are at max.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Yay: flipAlarmSync resides in /usr/sbin !

Not so yay: I still get a 'not found' error when I do flipAlarmSync ... And I am in the proper directory (/usr/sbin/)

and now for something very strange:
- I set up an alarm in FlipClock;
- the alarm is for a time earlier than the current time;
- the 'Alarm Set' window shows the alarm in a 24-hour format! Flip is set to AM/PM, and all my N810 settings are for USA;

strange... But it gets even better/weirder:

- Exit the program;
- In N810's main screen, I see a tiny clock icon, this shows me that there's an alarm being set;
- Xterminal command 'flipclockSync clear clear clear' - the alarms are cleared;
- go back to Flip and the alarms are still there...

Jolouis, will you let me know how to manually uninstall Flip when a new beta is out?

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Linux wont let you run something in the current directory without doing something like ./flipAlarmSync - I don't understand the reasoning behind this. It seems counter-intuitive to me.

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

The current directory is not in the path by default in recent Unix configs to avoid accidentally running an executable which might be called, for example, "ls" in the current directory instead of the real ls program. To run a program in the current directory you have to make a conscious decision that that is what you want to do, which seems fine to me.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Pelago, perhaps you know why I cannot execute:

flipAlarmSync clear clear clear

when I'm in directory:

/usr/sbin

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

I obviously didn't explain very well! You will need to type:

./flipAlarmSync clear clear clear

while in the /usr/sbin directory. Or just type:

/usr/sbin/flipAlarmSync clear clear clear

from any directory.

But if I'm understanding Jolouis correctly, you should be able to type:

flipclockSync clear clear clear

from any directory, because flipclockSync is in /usr/bin which is already in the path, and because flipclockSync is a wrapper around flipAlarmSync.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Yes that worked, thank you!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Okay I can do that... should I incorporate that the day/night changes and things into Insomniac mode, or should I add another option somewhere do you think? I'll make the "dim to brightness" thing happen in insomniac mode anyways, cause that's just a cool idea... but the changing day/night thing I might want to add as another option as some people might not want that (in case you set an alarm at night, or some other reason)

Thanks everyone for helping sampieter out with running the command; I'm not sure why he couldn't run it globally, as /usr/sbin is in the PATH var on my tablets here, but as long as he got one of them to run that's the important part.

This was a bug that went unnoticed; I've now fixed it in SVN.

that "clear clear clear" only cleans up the alarmD stuff; alarms are still visible in Flip itself because they're stored locally in the preferences file. The "clear clear clear" was really only there as an emergency debugging/panic option to clean up from previous bad installs, never meant to be used by end users on a regular basis.. I will setup the package though so that uninstalling it will clean up any alarms you left active though since it currently doesn't do that.

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Jolouis, The day/night changes can be a user option. The best feature so far is how my music alarm sloooooly increases over a 60 second period. Thanks!!!!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

heh I like the way how 'clear! clear! clear!' sounds: reminds me of those U-boat movies.


Dive! Dive! Dive!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Theme idea:

Yesterday I was pointed to this clock: http://yugop.com/ver3/stuff/03/fla.html

What do you think: would it be nice to have something like this as a FlipClock theme?

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

There's an interesting one! lol though I have to admit I remember seeing that as one of the "new and interesting interface idea examples" from one of my college courses when it first came out years ago! Would be doable, not sure how quickly the animations would play but might be worth trying... see what other people think, or just do it yourself anyways and see what happens!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Help! All of a sudden no FlipClock alarms. At the time of the set alarm, nothing happens. First thing that I tried was rebooting. What can I do to trouble-shoot?

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

I'm just implementing this now and need a bit of help/clarification with the "snooze" bit. Here's the problem: when you're in insonmiac mode, I set it up to mimic the normal tablet dim/brightness behaviour, which means if the screen is off or dim, when you hit it the first time it brightens up but doesn't actually do anything; that way you can hit anywhere to turn the screen back to full brightness, and then press the button/part of the screen you actaully want since you can now see it.

For the "snooze" description as quoted above though it's a bit different... as hitting the snooze button would cause the tablet to go fo normal brightness, you'd hit snooze again now that you can see it, and then it would go back to Insomniac birghtness. Does that make sense? or should I be adjusting the insomnaic mode so it responds to button presses/etc without returning to normal brightness?... I think the first option is best personally, but what's the opinion from you guys?

Den - Do you still see the "Alarm icon" in the status bar on the tablet? Did you recently change the time on any of the alarms that aren't working? Does the alarm "countdown" timer still show a proper/actual time value?

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Good, at "wake up" time the display should be bright enough to see buttons.

Yes, makes sense, when you hit "snooze" display should then become dim again.

Jolouis, I recently went into "Control Panel", "Panels", and disabled the status bar for "alarm". When I click to enable "alarm" there is a check mark, but the icon is not displayed in the status bar. When I set the N800 system alarm, the icon is displayed and tit alarms at the set time. I noticed that when I set a new alarm in FlipClock, I no longer get that "alarmsynced" message that I got previously.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

As long as the seconds aren't displayed! I got a headache looking at it for a few seconds.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

I guess I have to go back to my original request of Single tap for snooze, double tap for Alarm Off. Tap once, screen stays dim. Double tap, it goes bright, alarm goes off. No searching for where to tap.

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Seems to be a problem with the OS itself; I just did the exact same thing as you described and sure enough the Icon didn't come back. I opened up X-term, became root, and ran the command
/etc/init.d/alarmd restart
That got the icon back and alarms working properly again.

lol come on guys help me out here, I've got one request to make snoozing and turning off alarms easier, and an opposite requesting to make it harder! lol I'll put some notes down on my todo list, but not making any promises until we can get a bit more of a consensus because I want to try and keep the app fairly straightforward... having three different "ways to turn alarms off" is going to be mighty confusing...

As a general update, I've been getting a lot of little tweaks in recently. The alarm stuff as discussed is done now, the only thing I didn't do is the auto night/day thing as that really needs the proper theme browser/support going to make sense. I've fixed up the main interface, got rid of those ugly buttons and moved the seconds bar down to the bottom. Fixed the 1 pixel problems, and also added a little notification thing to tell you when Snooze is active and how long you have left before alarm goes again. I'm going to package up what I've got here and try YET AGAIN to get into extras... there's still lots to go, and the graphics need more tweaking but at least it's a good update from where we were before...

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

"I've got one request to make snoozing and turning off alarms easier, and an opposite requesting to make it harder!"

Just out of curiosity, which do you think is easier and which more difficult, and is this from a user's perspective, or a programming perspective?

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Jolouis, before loading to extras, can you give us a link to your latest version? Thanks!!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Strictly from a user-interaction point of view was my thinking there. As in, when you roll over in the early morning to hearing the alarm, hitting the screen blindly makes it much easier to ignore the alarm/put it into snooze; hitting it twice to turn it off is also relatively easy to do without actually being consciously awake to see what the heck you're doing.

On the other side of the coin is the request to have a 15 key passcode/sequence you have to press in order to turn the alarm off or make it snooze. In the early morning this requires a lot more conscious effort and co-ordination.

From a technical point of view they're both relatively straight forward to implement; the sequence one would be a bit slightly more so, but not by much. My point though is that I don't want to "overload" Flip with so many options for doing things that users will be confused and uncertain of what's going on. I can make all three modes available, but it means the themes will be a bit more complex, and there will have to be obvious documentation explaining the various alarm modes. Right now all of this would be because of two different requests... I'm all for doing what you guys want here don't get me wrong! But I want to hear some confirmations from other users that these features will be worthwhile and NOT overly confusing or complex, that's all.

Since you made the original request for the single/double tap alarm thing Jim I haven't noticed anyone else posting their support or disagreement, so it kind of gets shuffled down the priority list until I get more feedback (maybe I missed it? Sorry it's a busy thread some days!). I do know that a lot of people complained about the way the old Flip handled alarms saying it was far too easy to turn an alarm off by accident, so I want to avoid that a bit.

Thanks!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

It was my assumption that the 15 number code to disable was a joke, but you know what they say about assuming....

Maybe a user option to allow single tap snooze, double tap alarm off, but can turn that off so you must tap then look for a button that allows snooze or off? I can't read well without my glasses, so I would need to put them on, find the snooze button, then press it, and then take my glasses off again. I'm pretty sure I would already be wide awake by then. On the other hand, I actually never use the snooze option, anyway. I set the alarm to wake at the time I really want/need to get up. So for me, ideally a single tap to turn off alarm is best. Maybe these issues can be determined by the skin that you use?

Thanks again.

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Here you go guys, get up to the latest build and check things out for me! Let me know if I'm moving in the right direction here! There's still a lot to be done, but hopefully this will be better than the last update...

0.9.5 Preview 3
Which you can get from the garage page here:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/downloa....9.5_armel.deb
You can also grab the Fremantle build for testing from the garage page:
https://garage.maemo.org/frs/downloa...ntle_armel.deb

I've updated the first post of this thread as well to reflect this latest version. Fremantle testers are also appreciated since I have yet to hear of anyone even trying to run this app on an N900/Fremantle device (yea don't worry Diablo is still the primary target for this, but I'm curious to know if my code at least runs/functions on Maemo5 as well!).

Thanks all!

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

I get a dependency issue with libalarm2. Any idea what suppository :) I need to re-enable?

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Normally I'd have agreed with you, but I have seen other posts in other sections requesting more difficult ways of turning alarms off than just hitting the screen (apparently this one of the things people don't like about the built in alarm app in Maemo 5), so I had to take it a bit more seriously until a few voices come in to clarify. Personally I think the 15 digit sequence was over the top, but I'd seriously consider a 2 or 3 step process if people requested it as I can see if making sense for some people.

That's what I was thinking, perhaps a second option for it. The other point of course is that it can be controlled by the themes... also remember, if you don't want snoozing, just turn it off for your alarm(s). (On the alarm settings page, where it says "Snooze" "10 min", just press the "10 min" thing a few times until it changes to "Off"). If snooze is set to off, when the alarm gets triggered, the snooze button isn't shown on screen anymore so all you have to focus on is hitting the one big button on the screen to turn the alarm off.


Aww bugger, if you're getting that with the non-fremantle file then I goofed, let me double check things here and make sure...

Thanks,

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Jolouis, Sounds like you need to make it difficult to hit the wrong button. (Alarm Off - Snooze).

Therefore I suggest that both buttons be as large as possible but separated by a dead zone. Hitting within the dead zone could make a loud buzz sound to let you know that you missed both buttons.

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

I did not know that. Thanks!

Jim

Re: FlipClock Beta
 

Jolouis, I get the same message when I try to install.