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Menu system with RSS Hello all, I've been lurking for awhile marveling at the stuff you all do and I had a few questions. I'm pretty much an amateur when it comes to QC, I've built some fairly simple RSS feeds and things like that, but this latest idea has me stumped. I'm attempting to build a rudimentary email reader (from a GMail RSS feed) using the RSS download patch and the Speech Synthesis patch, but honestly I'm at a loss of where to even start. Anywhere from breaking up the feed and selecting it to triggering the speech synthesis for that specific part, using only the four arrow keys. If someone could point me in the right direction to get me going, it would be hugely beneficial. I can stumble my way through it, but there's only so much I can do before pounding my head against the desk...
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I find the first thing to do is decide the basic structure, then it's just a case of figuring out how to implement it.
Here, you'll have an rss downloader providing a structure, so you'll extract a particular entry and display it on screen. You want to control it with the keys, so you need a key input patch that controls which entry to display, and another that enables the speech synth.
I've not used the speech synth stuff yet, but here's how I'd do the other bits (going from memory of how stuff works, so this might need some tweaking):
First, get your RSS downloader, and use structure index to get a particular entry. Then use structure key or index member patches to get the actual text parts out that you want to display. Feed them into 'image with string', so you have your initial display and you can check it's all working.
Now, use keyboard input patches to generate a signal, one for up arrow, one for down. Connect them to a counter, up to increment, down to decrement. Connect the output to the structure index member patch's index input. You should be able to select the RSS index using the arrows, with the problem being that you can select any index number even if it doesn't exists.
I guess you should be able to restrict that by using a range patch at the output of the counter, and using the rollover output so that the numbers go to say 10 then restart at 0. Use the structure count on the RSS output to get a count of the RSS entries, and feed that as the upper range limit to make it work with a variable feed length.
That should be a start, anyway... and it will probably need a fair bit of tweaking to get working :)
Thanks for your help, it's worked out immensely in making out a rough sketch, and filling in the blanks.
Unfortunately I haven't been able to get the speech synth patch working under Leopard, it doesn't do anything with any string I pass to it from any patch. Any ideas if it's compatible with Leopard, and if so what I'm missing?
Thanks so much for your help!
Our speech synthesis patch does not work on Leopard, because there Apple made their own for Leopard. It's an example plugin, so you may have to compile it yourself.
Ack, I missed that. /slpasselfintheforehead. Thanks :D