Naylia, that looks awesome!!
since this looks good thread to catch skinners attention, ill use it as shameless ad for xPerT. I have two features planned for next release, which can be greatly increase xlobbys capabilities to present for example weather.
Theyre called Mapcats and collagecats.
Idea for mapcat is originally from need to present zones of the house on blueprint. Certainly there is lot of ways to do that, but atleast as far as i know not one which is really xlobbyish and easily transferable from user to user. Mapcat is pretty much like any other category, except coverart of database items is presented on top of background (map), location of items is stored in database. So when skin is transfered to new owner, all he has to do is define his zones database (including locations of his room) and change the blueprint file (meaning user wont need to do any skinning himself).
Allthough it originally came from house blueprints there many ways to use mapcat, for example what im doing now, is to have map of finland and displaying weather and temperature of different cities on it on correct places. Aah u r prolly thinking how can present both? well im getting ahead of my self that is power of collagecat. Also u could display realtime info, lets assume u have some gps plugin which can update info in xl database lets say "cars" and u could present city map and keep track where your cars are going at the moment.
Idea for collagecat i got from the need to present both weather outlook and temperature on same icon on mapcat like explained above. Collagecat creates coverart for category in realtime combining several pictures or text items on way specified by skinner on "template" (template is done in xlobby on skinning mode like any other real screen). nice thing about collagecats is that they work within both regular xlobby cat and inside mapcats. Also collage cats has many other possible uses, for example im using one to create coverart icons for my dvd language setup in realtime by combining several single icons (countries flags, DTS, DD, number of speakers, wether commentary track or not) based on values in databases. If i couldnt do this combining on fly i would need insane amount of preworked combined icons, and i would need redundant info on database.
Heres little proof of concept to explain my words and also to point out that these ideas arent intangible babbling anymore but a proven prototype.
Mapcat is on right hand side. Notice how icons have both outlook and temperature, this is because of collagecat, u can see regular xlobby cat there on down with collage cat icons too. Unfortunate black background is because of xlobbys .png bug. XL will delete some of pngs as soon as theyre placed to coverart, and i havent found way around this yet, so i have to use jpg, hence no transparency.
I get weather info by means of variable smugglers (another new xPert feature) u can see text fields on left hand side, these are smugglers, they carry whole catfull of info from xoapweather for use of xPerT automaticly. In real life skins, skinner have to hide mugglers ofcourse.
(smugglers arent tied to specific plugins, They can retrieve info from any plugin which is capable to put it onto text field and they can deposit it to either xl variables or cats, where it is fetchable by any plugin. so in essence they make interplugin communication possible to some degree)
by dalanik on Tue Dec 19, 2006 3:26 pm 
