Photo App - multiple image gallery

[James]

Hi Team

I was thinking about my use of the tidbyt and I realize I find myself having too many individual photo apps among the other apps I have.

I think it would be very helpful if the Photo app could contain more than one image, and then rotate through the image it displays each time it comes up in rotation.

So simply, I can have 1 photo app that contains 2 or more images, and when the app is displayed, it will display one of the images, and the next time it displays, it can display the next photo and so on.

This would extremely simplify my apps and make it so I can see my other apps and not my photos majority of the time.

Any thoughts?

Thanks!!

[rohan]

That totally makes sense. Originally my philosophy was “one instance of an app should only display one thing”, but it does get cumbersome to configure.

A related “power user” feature I’ve been thinking about is “playlists”. These would be a list of configured apps that you could enable/disable/schedule as a group. So you could use this for the “multiple photos” thing, but also do the same for other things like messages.

For the particular case you’re talking about, for it to work as a “playlist”, I think we’d need some way to configure “display one item from this playlist per rotation” or something like that. What do you think?

[James]

Hi Rohan

I agree with you with the philosophy, it makes a lot of sense and is part of the simplicity to tidbyt.

Very interesting concept regarding this playlists feature.

You could have a playlist dedicated to transit info, for example. Then as a group, these apps could be scheduled for display exclusively as needed.
I could see this being useful, and perhaps you have an option picker available on how you would like to display multiple playlists.

If you only have 1 playlist (default) The tidbyt will display these always.

When you have 2 or more playlists, You can
a. sequentially go through one and then do the other, or
b. you can present one app from playlist 1, then present an app from playlist 2, and then return to playlist 1 to display the next app, and so forth like a round robin.

In the case of the photos playlist, adding a toggle to "display one item from this playlist per rotation” like you mention would be perfect.
Where, when using the scheme a. above, it will display all apps within playlist 1, then playlist 2 with this ‘single random app’ option applied, will display 1 app from random within the playlist then proceeding to the next playlist in the list.

Do you think that could be a feasible use case? Perhaps this playlists idea may use it’s own thread, but this is a great idea as in the future, many tidbyt apps might come out with users submitting their own some day

I can see this being useful for grouping similar apps too, as I have multiple crypto trackers, you can have one displayed at random, rather than the whole ‘playlist’ of crypto apps, unless you want to

Thanks Rohan