			Snow* notes


What is Snow*?

Snow* is a Tcl/Tk GUI for the Snowblind Alliance 'rio' interface tool.
It wraps the rio command-line tool into a point-click-drag type of 
interface.

Why "Snow*"?

Uhhh....*twitch* *blink*blink* 'cause I was trying to come up with some play
on the whole 'Rio' thing(as in Brazil, as in Scantily Clad Women With Large
Breasts) and all I could come up with was really lame things like "Thong"
or "Buttfloss" and they just weren't flying w/ me internally. Then I started
running through all the snow-related ones like Snowplow,Snowblade,Snowspeed,
Snowtrooper, found that I liked them all and couldn't decide which one I liked
the best so in a fit of brilliance I decided to choose them all. Besides,
I had to do something before Discreet copyrights all the regex characters 
out there. 

I also hate names like "MyGtk--MondoTool-0.05" too, so there you go.  
UNIX commands used to be no longer than 3 or 4 characters, and I try to keep
 to that tradition when possible.

I got my Rio just a few days ago and started playing around with the 'rio'
program from SBA. Normally I hate GUIs, but I could see myself loading and
reloading the Rio pretty often and knew that this is one occasion I would
probably cave on and want to just drag out a bunch of songs and plop them onto
the Rio. So, while all my other friends were out dealing with the required 
socio-sexual rituals of Valentines Day, I stayed home and started hacking this.
 Rather than start from scratch, I took to ripping the guts out of 
tar front-end I wrote this fall called  "tkPave".

 By the time said friends had most likely finished dinner and 
dessert and were getting down to the main business of the evening, I had
some initial crude functionality. A couple hours after that, when they were
most likely passing out, well-fed and well-laid, I had removed all remaining
vestiges of tkPave,killed the initial round of bugs and added in things like
the progress meters. I ended up abstracting the tkPave event model a couple
levels higher than I thought I'd have to, but it was worth the work 'cause 
it'll be fairly easy to drop in new commands or keep up with changes in 
output from the 'rio' command. Total time, approx. 4 hours, 6 if you count
all the general abstract busyness I did with the Rio itself.  

Snow* currently supports(or makes a pretty good passing leer at) all the
current SBA 'rio' tool commands, including single up/download, playlist
uploads & downloads, init, dir/TOC,delete. There should be no problem 
with any of the single or multi-file operations, although I don't entirely
rule out the possibility of the multi-select operations going a bit wonky.

Use is pretty straightforward. The current directory you are in, is in the
scrollbox on the left, with the Rio's directory in the right pane.
The buttons in the space between these two browsers should be fairly 
explanatory by themselves. 

BTW, if you get a message that says something like "rx: directory read failed,
suggest init", the problem is most likely to be that your Rio is actually 
turned off. For some odd reason, you can upload/download files from the Rio
with the LCD display off, but getting a directory listing requires it to be 
on. This implies some sort of sleep mode, IMHO, and hence, a much smarter 
device that it appears to be on the surface. 



TODO:
-Clean up multi-select code

-Clean up internals from tkPave(The tar front-end that thong started life as)

-Add features to deal with rio-fs when it reaches a non-dangerous state.

-Provide some sort of ls -l functionality on both side, esp. since the Rio
 gives you all those block #s and checksums in a directory listing. Woohoo!
 When was the last time you saw hex #s in a consumer product? :)

-Some sort of integration w/ cdparanoia, BladeEnc, etc. to allow for an end to 
end conversion and download. You choose the tracks you want, pop in the CD
and at the end it's all sitting right there in the little black'n'silver box.


-Suggestions?(I am probably going to avoid things like skins since, IMHO, this
              isn't a player, but a loader/maintenance tool, but I wouldn't
	      rule out a cool graphic or some sort of E -ification. )

Contact:
Send bug reports,suggestions, color commentary, praise,death threats,
offers of sex,trips or gifts to:
armadilo@daft.com
