Doing weird things with dataTipFormatFunction

Question

OK, so here's my little problem:
I need to have a slider that spans a significant range of
values. The range (if we're talking units of time) goes from one
year all the way down to one second, with the difference between,
say, five and ten seconds being about as significant as the
difference between five and ten months.
"Aha!" I cried to myself. "That just means that I need to use
some of that fancy-dancy mathematics stuff that I learned in that
big brick building I went to once!"
And indeed, that's what I did: I put together a new component
by just inheriting from VSlider and tacking on some methods to
process slider.value as the input to a logarithmic scale. It's
pretty cool, too. All I do is bind to my slider.time property and
boom! I've got a slider that goes from a year to a second, with the
user being able to make fine-grained adjustments easily.
The only snafu popped up (quite literally) with the data tip,
which still showed slider.value. Kinda broke the illusion. No
problem: I just replaced dataTipFormatFunction with a function that
discarded the old slider.value-based string and returned a new one
based on my slider.time property. It even formatted it nicely,
switching units from seconds to minutes to hours to days to months.
But there's one last niggling problem. If I'm dragging the
slider along with the data tip showing and a neighboring text field
bound to slider.time, I get two different outputs. Dragging up the
scale, for example, my bound text field will say six seconds, while
the data tip still shows five. Releasing the thumb and clicking on
it again at that point will show the data tip at six seconds,
leading me to believe the following:
1) The string with which dataTipFormatFunction() is called is
based on the change event, *not* the slider.value, and
2) dataTipFormatFunction() is getting called *before* the
slider.value is assigned the new value.
So first, is that a fair conclusion? Since my custom data tip
function discards the old string and builds the new one based on a
function that accesses slider.value, it seems like a reasonable
guess.
Second, anybody have any suggestions? I see two alternatives
right now: disable data tips, or extract the number from the
original string and pass it into a method that will re-scale it.
The second option is just kinda kludgy, so I'll probably just kill
the data tips, but I do like having the pop-up feedback available
while the user is making fine-grained adjustments.
Any other approaches? Am I missing something? Should I have
gone into podiatry like my mother wanted?

Answer 1

Hi blob2,
Although it may not be the solution to your problem, there's been a new version of iTunes that was released a few days ago, which may provide some sort of help with this issue for you.
The latest version is 7.3.2.6, and can be downloaded from Apple's website, here:
Download iTunes - 7.3.2.6
By the way, does this happen when you're trying to view the album art on your iPod, or does this just happen with your iTunes library?
-Kylene