Cartwall v 0.5 by Thomas Preece
http://tpreece.net
thomas@tpreece.net

DESCRIPTION
===========

This is a cartwall program as used at URN and modified by me afterwards. I'll
write some better documentation later.
USAGE INSTRUCTIONS
==================

This software is intended primarily for use by student, community and 
other low-budget radio stations who can't afford professional cartwall 
software. Please note the "no warranty" clause in the licence - this 
means that if this software fails for whatever reason, you can't hold me
responsible or sue me for this.

You will probably only want to use this software if it's a choice 
between this and nothing at all: if you work for a big professional 
station and your cartwall crashing will get you in trouble or 
cause your organisation to lose lots of money, you can probably afford 
the professional equipment anyway - please use it. Otherwise, please 
read on.

To get it up and running, you will need a backend audio library (either
GStreamer or Audiere), and playstopaudio, which you can get from
https://github.com/tepreece/playstopaudio

Copy the 'playstopaudio' directory into this directory, or place it in your
Python site_packages directory. Also drop some audio files into this directory.

Have a quick read through config.py and make sure it all looks in order. You
probably won't need to change any of the defaults for now, but the options are
there and are documented in case you need to - with the exception that you must
set CONFIG_SET = True in order for the program to run.

Then run ./cartwall.py somefilename.json to see what happens. You can edit
things by right-clicking them; then the "Refresh" button will change to "Save".
If you click Save, it will write the file you specified on the command line; if
you quit the program and run it again, it will then read that file in again.

The editor is a bit rudimentary - note that the default background colour is
black, so you will have to change it to make a cart visible!

The "Refresh" button might not do what you expect - in fact, it quits the
program (albeit with a different exit code to "Log out"). The reason for this
is that we used Cartwall in a loop at URN to fetch a user's configuration,
write it to a file, and run Cartwall to use it; Log out returned the user to
the login screen, whereas Refresh just fetched their configuration again and
ran Cartwall again straight away. I'm still trying to find a more sensible
alternative to put there.

BUGS AND TODO
=============

Some better documentation is needed.

It doesn't prompt you to save if you try to log out with a modified file.

If you log out, it quits immediately, even if files are still playing.

The "Refresh" button is confusing.

LICENCE
=======

Copyright (c) 2009 - 2014 Thomas Preece

You may freely use this software under the conditions of the MIT licence 
- see the LICENCE file for details.

The images included in this software are taken from the Silk Icons project,
used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence. For more details please
see http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

SUPPORT / CONTACT
=================

No formal technical support is available for this software, however I am 
generally happy to answer questions and provide some assistance with 
setting it up; if you need help, please don't hesitate to contact me. I 
always like hearing from users of my software, and would be very 
appreciative to hear from anyone who is using this software and finds it 
useful, especially if you're using it in a live broadcast environment. I 
also welcome patches for bugfixes and new features in the usual git 
format.

VERSION HISTORY
===============

v 0.5 (2014-02-14) - update file format to working JSON; add some editing tools

v 0.4 (2013-05-08) - replace audio code with playstopaudio library

v 0.3 (2013-04-01) - ported some changes made by URN - these are untested

v 0.2 (2013-03-21) - first published version

v 0.1 - unpublished version