Can't get Sage to give XLobby focus....help!

[Naylia]

Hey guys,

I'm having trouble getting SageTV to give up focus and give it back to Xlobby. Sage is running by iteself and not in an windows in xlobby. When I sleep sage it's keeping focus. Any ideas for good work arounds? I was thinking a girder event of some sort based on sage sleeping command being issued but that's a little sloppy. Any better ideas?

[rika]

Have you tried sendfocus.exe, if you download the heavymetalskin you can find the prog there and also see what events to use.
Rika

[tswhite70]

Very frustrating I know. Here's what I ended up doing. I created a command in girder and mapped it to a button on my remote that does the following.

Sleep Sage
send ALT+Tab key sequence

If you perform alt+tab after sleeping Sage you'll see that it still shows up as a running application. So if you called Sage from Xlobby the Alt+tab will return focus to Xlobby (or whatever program was active before Sage).

The problem with this for me is that you have to remember to use the Sleep button on the remote to get out of Sage instead of the GUI sleep button in Sage. This isn't very user friendly for the wife but was the best I could come up with at the time.

You could try using sendfocus.exe instead of the alt+tab but you'll still need a way to tell it to fire. As far as I know there is no way to do this via Sage itself (ie hit Sleep in the Sage GUI and have it fire sendfocus.exe). I'm not sure if Girder can monitor the button presses in the Sage GUI or not....

The focus issue was reported in the Sage forums a few times but a fix never materialized that I know of. There's some stuff over in the Girder forums about setting focus too.

Let us know if you find a better way to do it!

good luck,
tsw

[Naylia]

ts,

that's whay I had been thinking...unfortunately

rika,

the problem isn't getting xlobby to give focus to sage, it's getting sage to give it back up, since sage can't issue a command to sendfocus

[rika]

Ok, i see.
i´ll post if i find any thing usefull.
Rika

[meinmaui]

Naylia,

I have been following your progress on your skin with great interest. I can't wait to try it.

So here is a really dumb idea. If you enable the external DVD player in the SageMC STV, you can put the line

"c:\sendfocus" xlobby (I have it in the root directory)

in the cmd file instead of the external dvd player. The 'Play DVD' menu item will now run the sendfocus program and send the focus to XLobby. I've tried this on my test system and it seems to work. The next thing to do would be to find a way to change the 'Play DVD' text to something like 'Back' or 'Return'. I know this is a really hairbrained idea but maybe some variation on this approach could give you the work around you need.

Anyway, thanks for all of your hard work and good luck!

[Naylia]

That's not a bad idea, on that note an idea may be to create a custom menu, which I know is possible but I have not tried doing before. SageMC has support for Nielms custom menu, just haven't looked into it.

I think people are going to have to just do a little bit of customizing to determine the best solution for themselves. I have girder so i think I'm going to give that a shot using sendfocus or some alternative.

Custom main menu that can call send focus would be nice too, but I really would like to be able to leave the Sage main menu out of the picture and using girder I can go straight from the My TV menu to xlobby. This can be done seamlessly with girder and a usb-uirt.

Here's what I'm thinking.

Configure Sage to sleep on 'Menu' being pushed on the remote.
Configure XLobby to goto the Main Menu when 'Menu' is pushed on the remote.
Configure Girder to give XLobby focus when 'Menu' is pushed ont he remote.

This way whether Sage is open or XLobby is open you'll always end up a the overarching Menu in XLobby.

Pushing My TV in XLobby takes you straight to the My TV screen and skips the Sage main menu. I did this with a Sage Power On, then Sage Select. Since My TV is the default item in the Sage Menu, it'll wake up and push select so fast that you don't even seen the menu appear and it looks like you transition straight from XLobby to SageMC My TV.

Skin should be posted tonight!!!

[meinmaui]

Naylia,

Your solution sounds much cleaner. I also remember reading in the SageMC thread that "Custom1" is mapped to the "My TV" menu. You could configure Sage to execute Custom1 when the 'back" button on the remote is pushed. This would allow returning from "My TV" submenus to the "My TV" menu withou ever accidentally returning to the main SageTV menu.

Thanks again!

[Naylia]

Does anyone know if XLobby can accept a sendmessage command that will bring it into focus? I'm trying to narrow the scope/number of programs needed to accomplish this.