Open Rokn / Blog: Recent posts

In the latest version of OpenRokn the splash screen was recoded to display a single full-screen image instead of creating the splash screen as separate layers. This was done to make it compatible with the splash attributes in the root manifest file. The splash attributes in the manifest file are optional. The custom splash screen included in OpenRokn will be displayed even if those attributes are omitted.... read more

Settings extensions

The settings item can be extended to provide custom features that don't necessarily have to involve saving a value to the registry. Think of the settings item as a multi-purpose item. It can be used to implement features that are unrelated to any of the other item types. One possible use for the settings item would be to display local movie showtimes based on a user-defined zip code. The example below shows how this could be accomplished.... read more

"Software and cathedrals are much the same - first we build them, then we pray" --Samuel T. Redwine, Jr.

As every programmer knows, the discovery of a bug is inevitable when you spend enough time working with a specific application or programming language. And the brightscript programming language is unfortunately not unique in that respect. There have been a number of bugs that I've encountered while working with the Roku device and the brightscript language. Most of them were easy to work around and didn't present any permanent obstacles to the development of OpenRokn. However, there are a few bugs that have never been patched and continue to hamper development efforts.... read more

The PONDcast channel is now running on OpenRokn v0.3. There were a few minor changes made to the channel in the new version. A few podcasts were moved from the "Fresh" category to the "Stale" category and the music/film/books row was removed. I discovered that a couple of the blogs weren't loading properly and updated the document templates to work with those rss feeds.... read more

UPDATE: Contest closed as of 12/27

All of the supported elements and attributes have now been documented on the wiki pages. I'll be adding another wiki page within the next week describing the template markup language and I plan on eventually posting a few blog articles about a few of the new elements (scrapers, extensions, streams) in ORML v1.2 to help explain them in greater detail.

In the Files section you will find a new beta version available to download. A few bugs were patched and 2 new preferences were added to this beta version to control the top margin of documents. The top margin of grid screens can be controlled with the GridScreenOverhangHeightSD/HD properties but for all other Roku screens the top margin is controlled by the height of the sd/hd overhang background images. If you modify the height of either of the overhang images please update the new prefs to reflect the exact height of those images.... read more

Yes, v0.3 has finally been released. I can't even remember how long it's been since development began on this version but it must be close to six months or more. I was preparing to release it a few months ago and then as I began working on other Roku channels based on this software I realized that numerous changes were necessary in OpenRokn in order to build the other channels. So more and more features were added and numerous changes were made to the source code and it eventually became so disorganized and inefficient that I finally decided to completely overhaul the software. I wouldn't say that it has been recoded from scratch but every single line of code has been inspected and improved where possible which should make this the most stable version to date.... read more