Homeslice, Homestar Runner Viewer Options

Hi guys,

Time for another new Widget. This one is called "Homeslice," my first serious foray into object-oriented programming.



It lets you view any cartoon from homestarrunner.com, with fullscreen, play/pause, rewind, and scrubbing capabilities. It also notifies you in the Dock when there's a new cartoon available.

It's very buggy. I'm waiting for the Konfabulator 4.5.2 release before I get serious about actually releasing it. It won't wipe your computer's hard drive or whatever, at least.

I decided to put it on the forum so that people could start using it right away, and to see what Flash can be when it's mixed with native Konfabulator APIs.

General issues:

• Playback is sluggish in fullscreen mode

Engine issues:

• Crashes after first Flash movie is viewed (Mac only)
• Offline caching doesn't work (Windows only)
• "Main Menu" button doesn't work in fullscreen mode (Cross-Platform)
• Widget flickers when fading in (Windows only; caused by workaround)

Widget issues:

• Does not start cartoons in fullscreen mode, despite what is set in the preferences
• The Widget does not fully collapse when you mouse out of the menu at times
• Does not respond gracefully to being disconnected from the Internet
• Playback controls aren't aligned as nicely as I'd like
• Dock doesn't update when you view a new cartoon

Hope you like it.

Download Homeslice 0.7

Crashes after first Flash movie is viewed (Mac only).

In KonAVio Media, I had to perform a test for LEOPARD and have slightly different code for closing Flash movies in Leopard and earlier versions of the OS. I don't understand why this was necessary, but it did fix the crashes.

The Flash code is towards the end of the main.js file in KonAVio Media.

It looks like all you're doing is removing the Flash object from its parent node and setting it to null, right?

I'm doing that as well:

CODE

    flashMovie.parentNode.removeChild( flashMovie );
    flashMovie = null;

The crash isn't 10.5-exclusive. It occurs on 10.4 as well.

This is a moot point anyway, because the engine should remove the Flash object when you tell it to do these two things, and yet when this code is called, the Flash object continues playing, indicating that it still exists.

I reported the bug when I was still at Yahoo!, and if I recall right, it was fixed in 4.5.2.

It looks like all you're doing is removing the Flash object from its parent node and setting it to null, right?

I do that on Leopard (10.5). On 10.4, I don't do that - I just do a swfPlayer.reload(), to use the same player again.

Like other public users, I'm still on 4.5.1.



This post has been edited by g6auc: May 11 2008, 10:16 AM

Cool! Very sophisticated and fun to use UI Great work, as always. I hope they'll fix the Flash bugs soon.

Are the names of the videos meant to display? I cant see anything in your post to suggest wether it works or not. For me they are not displaying. I can click on the lines, just no text

Are the names of the videos meant to display? I cant see anything in your post to suggest wether it works or not. For me they are not displaying. I can click on the lines, just no text

What should happen is this:

1. The Widget starts up and loads in the information from homestarrunner.com.
2. The Widget morphs into the "slice" view.
3. When a slice is moused over, the Widget should expand that slice and display the cartoons available for viewing in a list.
4. Clicking on an item on this list should trigger playing the cartoon.

I know you said this Widget was very beta, and I do hope that update 4.5.2 fixes a bunch.

Some things I found that you can't fix:
- Visual C++ Runtime error when the Widget was closed.
- Bad detection on the part of the frame/window when the mouse has exited (prevents widget from "collapsing")*

* I had the same problems with Clipboard. If I find a decent way to fix it or work around it, I'll let you know.

Something you might be able to fix:
- Widget not-so-slowly moves to the right every time it is "opened" and "collapsed".

Other than the last item there ... very nice job!


P.S. (I was wondering when you were going to post this! )

Nice.

Maybe there are two many fade and move animations running at the same time... Shorter chained animations may be simplier to control.

Collapsing the window is triggered by mouse out event of the parent frame of slices?... It may be easyer to trigger it from the mouse out event of an above transparent frame.

Can't wait to see this running in 4.5.2! I can't think of how many times I wished I could pause or fast forward a Homestar video...