[tw5] A question about Widgets

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#1

Hello,

I’ve recently discovered TiddlyWiki and it’s excellent. I’ve always wanted notes that are somewhat interactive-automatic reminders based on the data I put in, managing tasks right inside notes etc.-and TW seems to be wonderful for that sort of thing.

to that effect, though, I needed some custom functionality. I’d like to have timers, where I’d get an audio indication when the timer is done. After reading around for a while, making a custom action widget seems my best bet-I’d like to use webaudio, and from what I know JS macros don’t allow me access to the DOM.

What I want to know is…is there a way to have persistent data inside widgets, such that an expensive computation only takes place once, perhaps when the wiki starts? right now I’m planning to store sound files as base64-encoded data, either inside the widget directly or as a tiddler (somewhat ugly, to be sure, but it seems like the most portable solution) and decoding this data into an audio buffer would take non-negligible time. I would prefer not having to create an audio buffer each refresh cycle.

More fundamentally…my question is-do widgets get recreated every refresh cycle? or do they only get created once, perhaps when wikification happens, and then they just have refresh called on them?

(Maybe a startup plugin would work well for this, too. I’m not quite sure-I’ve read quite too much in the past few days, without having enough actual experience to turn all my knowledge into a working product.)

Thanks,
Dhruv

#2

Hi Dhruv,

I’ve recently discovered TiddlyWiki and it’s excellent. I’ve always wanted notes that are somewhat interactive-automatic reminders based on the data I put in, managing tasks right inside notes etc.-and TW seems to be wonderful for that sort of thing.

Thank you! It’s good to hear TiddlyWiki discovery stories.

to that effect, though, I needed some custom functionality. I’d like to have timers, where I’d get an audio indication when the timer is done.

There may already be plugins that provide this functionality, I think Eric Shulman has some timer tools, and I hope he’ll jump in.

After reading around for a while, making a custom action widget seems my best bet-I’d like to use webaudio, and from what I know JS macros don’t allow me access to the DOM.

It’s correct that JS macros can’t access the DOM.

However, here an action widget may not work either.

What I want to know is…is there a way to have persistent data inside widgets, such that an expensive computation only takes place once, perhaps when the wiki starts?

No, instances of widgets are ephemeral: they are destroyed and rebuilt as the refresh process proceeds. Only the tiddler store can be used for storing state data by widgets.

right now I’m planning to store sound files as base64-encoded data, either inside the widget directly or as a tiddler (somewhat ugly, to be sure, but it seems like the most portable solution) and decoding this data into an audio buffer would take non-negligible time. I would prefer not having to create an audio buffer each refresh cycle.

Not ugly at all: TiddlyWiki handles images the same way, and it works surprisingly well with modern browsers.

More fundamentally…my question is-do widgets get recreated every refresh cycle? or do they only get created once, perhaps when wikification happens, and then they just have refresh called on them?

The lifecycle of a widget is that it gets created, refreshed zero or more times, and then destroyed. Many widgets do indeed cache information in the widget object instance, but…

(Maybe a startup plugin would work well for this, too. I’m not quite sure-I’ve read quite too much in the past few days, without having enough actual experience to turn all my knowledge into a working product.)

…Yes – anything more substantial is better handled via a “daemon”: a long lived, global JavaScript object instance to which widgets send messages. In TiddlyWiki, daemons are packaged as startup modules.

Here, it sounds like a “tm-play-sound” message with a parameter indicating the tiddler containing the sound sample to play would be a reasonable starting point.

I don’t know if there’s any prior work on audio in TiddlyWiki, but I’d certainly be interested in improving core support. The blocker in the past was always that browsers could only capture audio in enormous WAV format, but by now perhaps they can capture straight to compressed MP3.

Best wishes

Jeremy

#3

Hi Jeremy,

thanks for the detailed response.

I do know about the timer tools by Eric Shulman-I’m using one of the action widgets from that package, and it makes my life a lot easier.

I managed to get a rudimentary version of audio working-it’s a startup module that can play base64-encoded tiddlers when it receives a message, as you suggested. A quick question though-is there a difference between adding message listeners to $tw.wiki and $tw.rootWidget? I’m presuming $tw.wiki is for things which are more global in scope, handling messages related to the browser and such, but I’m not sure if there’s a functional distinction or just a semantic one.

With regards to audio in the core-that would be excellent! browsers have support for quite a wide array of audio formats now-WebAudio has DecodeAudioData, which supports everything that the

Again, thanks for the advice, I’ll be able to take this a lot further now.

Dhruv.