xAP Desktop Beta 2

James Traynor’s has just released beta v2 of his excellent “xAP Desktop” software…

New Features

• Proxy support for all internet access
• Much faster xAP processor
• The Display library is now web enabled. So as well as loading displays from the local library that ships with Desktop, you get them from the web. Sounds complicated but very simple to use, in fact other than a (Web) in the display name you wouldn’t know you were getting them from the web at all.
• The tray icon now features a web menu that as well as being the place to set up your proxy server also has an update option. This downloads a small text file that contains the latest list of available displays.

and finally the big new feature, A script engine.In the previous Desktops all the displays basically took info straight from a xAP message and displayed it. You could tweak it a bit but that was all. Now you can pretty much do anything you want with it using standard vbscript. Scripts are part of a display and are loaded along with all the other display files. They are stored as simple .txt files and you can have as many as you want. Scripts are run be three means. By button push as part of an event, when a xAPVar is updated and when a xAPVar changes. What the script does is up to you but you can use all standard vbscript commands along with a load of extra ones to control any aspect of any display, not just the display that triggered the script.

What does this all mean? – Using the two example displays that use scripts News Display – Normally scrolls through news headlines from 5 sources. It has a button that when clicked expands the display and now shows more info for each news sources and has back and forward buttons to cycle through the news sources. Each story has a button that when clicked causes a web page to be displayed, the page being the full story. Each of these buttons is a script that moves labels, changes the background and updates the labels and tooltips.

Audio controller – When a new track gets played this display listens for the path of the song. Using an on change script it goes to where the mp3 came from and looks for cover art. If it finds some it displays it inside the display.  All thats on top of the original display and transport controls. The guides section on mi4.biz has more info on the script interface and more guides on it will follow

Click here for xAP Desktop

Want More? – Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, or subscribe to our RSS feed. You can even get these news stories delivered via email, straight to your inbox every day