Author Topic: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?  (Read 10084 times)

tschak909

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #15 on: March 30, 2009, 05:48:19 pm »
among other things too. I was mainly talking about a web browser UI more apropos for 10' use.

-Thom


Seer

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #16 on: March 30, 2009, 07:57:02 pm »
Well, we can always create a theme for Firefox that meets our needs.  Check out some other examples of what people used for a "10 foot interface"

The Nintendo Wii.  This uses very large buttons to give you a few options.  Everything else is either done from the default home page, or not given to you (you can't change fonts and some other settings)


The PS3 has this as their home page.  The use the context menu (triangle) to bring up all the options, including "Address Entry"  Included a button to "zoom" in.


The Xbox360 doesn't include a browser, but it looks like there is a popular plugin from the MCE to use their browser.  Here's a link to a bunch of screenshots for that: http://www.anpark.com/MCEBrowser_Screenshots.aspx

What do people think of the above methods of interacting with the browser on the TV?  Personally, I like the context menu for everything, with the possibility of putting the URL on the top of the screen.  Also, zoom is a must.  Finally, we need to create a TV friendly "home" page that has highly used bookmarked sites contained within large easy to click buttons.

Any other ideas?

tschak909

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #17 on: March 30, 2009, 08:03:07 pm »
The UI ideas are good, BUT...

Like I said...

The way to do it is to make a DCE wrapped browser that exposes a designobj type that can be embedded into orbiter screens.

This can provide what is needed. Stop messing with the other methods, and do it right!

-Thom

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #18 on: March 30, 2009, 08:48:54 pm »
The UI ideas are good, BUT...

Like I said...

The way to do it is to make a DCE wrapped browser that exposes a designobj type that can be embedded into orbiter screens.

This can provide what is needed. Stop messing with the other methods, and do it right!

-Thom


Well I think Seer was only referring to the UI needed for interacting with Web based Apps from a limited devices such a Wii, PS3 or MCE remote... he was not saying how that should be integrated or implimented.

Do we have enough functionality in the Orbiter to build these types of UI's around a browser designobj type?

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tschak909

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #19 on: March 30, 2009, 08:53:23 pm »
We need to add that back in. Initially this was implemented as an ActiveX embedded form of IE under Pluto 1.

The code is stubbed out in the current Orbiter, and could even be implemented by embedding WebKit into Orbiter.

-Thom

bearslumber

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #20 on: April 30, 2009, 11:39:20 pm »
Hi,

I'm glad I came across this thread. I have been pulling my hair out trying to find an app that does just this.

My mate who has an x-box mentioned that the x-box live facility has an Iplayer plug-in that extracts all media available on the bbc website and presents them as a choice of thumbnails for you to click on and view. Apparently several other plugins service other sites. Also apparently it is written in python.

There is an old thread here...

http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=27063

and they have it working now.

I have extensive safety critical software development knowledge and dable with perl etc, and I would be delighted to get my hands dirty doing such stuff. Problem is I don't know where to start. There is mention of XULRunner and XPCom so I'll be reading up on these.

Cheers for now

Lucas

Aka Bearslumber....

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Re: Can I enhance Firefox and web browsing in Orbiter on touchscreen?
« Reply #21 on: May 01, 2009, 09:11:09 am »

Hi,

Heres more,

The link to the xbox Iplayer is
http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayer/.

Here are some images...





The python script is also available at this page.

Cheers

Lucas