Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Sound and colour!

To celebrate my birthday (tomorrow!) I took the liberty to implement a couple of new features. For a long while I've been planning to add tabs to the configuration options window, so that it could be cleanly extended with new options. After I got that out of the way, it was quite straightforward to go on and add a couple of additional options which have been requested several times before:

It is now possible, from Options => Colours, to select the 5 colours used for track lines. You can also tune the track line width to increase (or decrease!) the visibility of each line.

Each station always gets the same track colour (colour 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5) out of the 5 selectable colours. If you find that your car always gets a blue line, and you would want to switch that to red, you'll see that colour 3 is blue by default, so you can switch colour 3 to red. And maybe switch colour 1 to blue to reduce the amount of red track lines. You could also set all 5 colours to red, if that's your favorite.

You can also enable sound effects from Options => Sound. Currently the only supported effect is a "tock" when a tracked station moves to a new position. I'm going to add different sound samples later. If you have other ideas for events which could trigger a sound, please let me know!

10 comments:

Tregonsee said...

Looks and sounds great. As always, thanks for the extremely useful site.

Bobby said...

Very nice additions. They work great. Happy Birthday!

Anonymous said...

Happy birthday! Great enhancement, OM.

Anonymous said...

Hessu,

How can I tranlsate the configuration options window into Japanese? Is the translation tool for it yet available?

Hessu said...

Oba: I checked yesterday, and figured out methods to make the options window translatable. I'll do that soon, it should be easier now.

Turns out that the sounds do not work in some IE6/IE7 setups, but do work on some others. I haven't quite figured it out, but it might have something to do with the browser's security settings. The sounds require Macromedia Flash support, although no visible Flash animations are place. If there's no Flash installed on your browser, there'll be no sound output.

Phil said...

Happy Birthday Hessu!

Thanks for constantly enhancing this great page.

kacos2000 said...

Happy Birthday !!
Cheers :)

SCV said...

Happy birthday !!!

Anonymous said...

AN idea: for I-gates like me, a sound every time a the igate hears a station direct,and another sound when it relays a station towards the internet ? (like the 2 possibilities to view those on a map)

Anonymous said...

I translated the preference window into Japanese. Many thanks.