Feed, UI, Viewer experience improvement, and some ideas

[samadtehrani]

1- Feed Structure Improvement

This great wizard is made for using an existing Roku Direct Publishers feed structure. This default made a huge impact on the app's capability and characteristics. For example, these ideas are impossible with current feeds:
1-1- Having split feeds for multi-step loading to improve loading speed on large channels (that improves search too)
1-2- Having different Item posters for different page layouts (See 3-3)
1-3- Having "More like this" or "Recommended" capability so you can group similar contents in some groups, so for example, you can recommend more movies with the same actor to watch.

2- Continue watching Ideas (Viewer experience improvement)

2-1- Capability to remove an item from the continue watching row. Sometimes, a viewer quits watching the rest of a show or movie. In this case viewer needs to remove it from the list. ( for example, pushing the option key and confirming)
2-2- Saving "Continue watching" data on an external server (with an API) so viewers can watch the content on another device with the same account.

3- Side menu, Tags, and watch list Ideas (UI Improvement)

3-1- Capability of having a correct aspect ratio content image in the tag, watchlist, and other pages in the side menu.
3-2- Saving "Watchlist" data on an external server (with an API) so viewers can watch the content on another device with the same account.
3-3- Capability of having customized tag logos for different tags. (See 1-2)

[rrirower]

Thanks for the feedback.

[rrirower]

For 3-1, please see issue #148.

[rrirower]

For 1-3, Content voting provides similar processing. If uses a back end call to a server to indicate the user's like/dislike of content. Would this help for 1-3?

[samadtehrani]

I'm not sure about that.
In (1-3), enhancements of the feed were in my mind, like suggesting some content for each item in the feed by the channel developer.
But your idea is great too, the app can recommend some content based on the viewer's taste. It could be based on viewers' voting or history of watched content.

[rrirower]

Content voting is already available if you're interested.

[rrirower]

For 3-3, what "tags" are you referring to? Do you mean the category tags that display when clicking 'Tags' from the main menu?

[rrirower]

Would either of you be available to test some code? I should have a new version soon that includes saving bookmarks to a server and some other changes.

[samadtehrani]

Sure, I am available.

[samadtehrani]

Thank you so much. When I read your comment, I thought the zip file would contain a folder, but unfortunately, it has an installer instead. And the installer looks like it does not work.

[rrirower]

The zip file contains the wizard program. You should use a program like WinZip to unzip its contents to a separate folder for testing.

[samadtehrani]

Correct. But when I click on the wizard, nothing happens!

[rrirower]

Are you running on the same machine you always use?

Do you have .net 9 installed?

Are you getting any error messages?

Have you tried renaming your current wizard program to save it and then copying the test program into the same folder?

[samadtehrani]

OOPS!. You are right. I am on my laptop, and it looks like I do not have the proper .NET.
I will check the file this afternoon.

[samadtehrani]

I tried everything but looks like something is wrong with the wizard. It does nothing.

[rrirower]

Are you still trying to run it on a different pc? If so, don't. The wizard is dependent upon other modules. At this point, the best thing you can do is rename the prior version you were using and copy the one I posted into the same folder.

[samadtehrani]

I tried on my main PC, the same PC that I have used for all other versions.
Test.DPtoSGWizard.zip contains only one file: DPtoSGWizard.exe. When I execute that exe, it does nothing.

[rrirower]

Did you copy the file from the zip to the same folder where you have the original wizard installed?

[samadtehrani]

I uninstalled the original wizard and installed it again. It starts working. I will try to make a channel and let you know.

[samadtehrani]

I managed to run the wizard with the new exe. Everything is working as a normal DP2SceneGraphWizard.
I am unable to change the aspect ratio of the images, and there is no new wizard page for API calls.
Am I missing something?
The "About page" is still the old version 1.0.1.2

[rrirower]

It appears you're still using the older version. You should copy the contents of the zip into the same folder where you have the current wizard installed. When I built the test version, it has the following attributes:

[rrirower]

Hold off for a bit. I need to make a slight change to the code and repost a zip for you.

[rrirower]

Ok...I've made my code changes. I did not need to build another zip file because the wizard code did not need to change. The change was made in the BrightScript code.

On another note...If you plan to persist channel content over multiple devices, you need to be aware of the following:

1. You must implement a REST backend function called cloud-get-registry. The BrightScript code will pass the unique device ID and expect a JSON string containing the device registry in return.
2. You must implement a REST backend function called cloud-save-registry. The BrightScript code will pass the unique device ID and a JSON string that represents the current state of the device registry.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[rrirower]

Any feedback?

[rrirower]

Version 1.0.1.3 resolves most of these issues.