undefined, undefined, undefined... buy now!

Seems like the N800 page is having some problems today ;-)

Toolkit adventures

So it seems that I have become a TreeView hacker ;-) Well, not the GTK+ one as we all know that Kris is doing a splendid job at that, but the ETK one.

Gustavo and me sat down to discuss what features we need for a list widget for Canola and had a few choices as creating a new list, merging the list I made and the one Gustavo made as they both have advantages and disadvantages, or we could use the ETK one. Andrunko convinces us that using ETK was the way to go. I had a quick look at it and agreed.

Andrunko already implemented proof-of-concept kinetic scrolling and I improved it a bit, by extending it to stop at the right position. Andrunko, working on another project, requested me to add separators, and I took a look at it... SCARY!

Tree view code is scary, and complex and I was met with functions larger than 500 lines of code ;-) uh... where to start... I started out my doing some refactoring and it actually took me 2-3 days getting to understand the code, and actually refactor it, but the funny thing is that when I understood the code it took me like 10 min to actually implement the separators :-) Now all there is left is implementing support for different row heights, as I would like the separator rows a bit smaller.

On a related note, Gustavo made a website where you can download the EFL Maemo Edition, so that you can run apps based on EFL on your N800. Go check it out:

http://maemo-efl.garage.maemo.org/

Also, a few new guys jointed the Canola team here at INdT; Caio who is working on creating python bindings for ETK, and Eduardo Lima aka. Etrunko (known for many Maemo ports, such as Gnumeric, Evince, and also for the cool Carman project) who will also be working with ETK. A warm welcome to them both!

Mamona FAQ online!

I have known about Mamona quite some time, but I never really got it, if you know what I mean.

But now, after some talk with Abner and Vivi, Vivi created a nice Frequently Asked Questions section on the new Mamona website which clearly states the purpose of the project and its relations to other similar projects like OpenEmbedded, Poky Linux, et cetera.

Mamona now also sparks an übercool logo thanks to our designer Patricia!

The FAQ is available here:
http://osmtc.indt.org/projects/mamona/wiki/FAQ


Kinetic Scrolling, yet again

Marcelo Oliveira pointed me to some links on the kinetic scrolling, and it seems that my video hit Gizmodo; nice :-)

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/nokia/nokia-n800-wants-iphones-kinetic-scrolling-285552.php

Also, it seems that after I released the source, a few people have been looking it over and implementing their kinetic scrolling lists as well. There are some nice videos (and source code) available online from a French speaking guy - pretty cool :-)

http://blog.calaos.fr/index.php/2007/08/02/18--efl-iphone-like-scroll-list-source-code
http://blog.calaos.fr/index.php/2007/08/01/17-iphone-like-scroll-list

The man himself!

I have always been a big fan of Quentin Tarantino, so I was very surprised when he showed up at my work! And to make it even better he brought t-shirts from GUADEC!

Here he is our famous Quentin (aka Etrunku), using an algorithm for determining who will get which t-shirt.

Vala - vai lá!

Lots of talk about Vala these days [1] [2]! I never really looked at it, until about a month ago where my friend Marcelo Lira showed me some examples. Very interesting indeed, very C# like (which is not a bad thing as I like that language) and a lot nicer than coding C with glib.

Now Marcelo did it again, as he created Hildon bindings for Vala. He even has an example online: http://live.gnome.org/Vala/HildonSample

The patch isn't in trunk yet, but he expects it to be soon.

[1] Alberto Ruiz (arc) on Vala:
http://aruiz.typepad.com/siliconisland/2007/08/the-first-vala-.html

[2] pvanhoof on Vala:
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/07/21/some-cool-stuffs-going-on
http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php/2007/08/06/vala-tinymail-irc

So, it is now public...

So, it is now public... I drink a lot of coffee, too much actually, and indeed that is the way I am pictured on the INdT news site... with a cup in my hand ;-)

So, what has happened today. Well, I worked a bit further on the kinetic list view, as I had a few feature requests, like make horizontal scrolling work and make a nice API using cell renders, much like GTK+ does. That has now been done, so if I lucky I will soon move onto something else.

I noticed that the article that Gustavo and I wrote has been posted on OSNews[1], pretty cool! I also saw yesterday that Gustavo is a tenacious hacker[2] according to Engadget. Who would have imagined! :-)

[1] Creating Edje User Interfaces
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18351/Creating-Edje-User-Interfaces

[2] Tenacious hacker brings the iPhone keyboard to a Nokia N800
http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/30/tenacious-hacker-brings-the-iphone-keyboard-to-a-nokia-n800/

Uh, I almost forgot to mention that LinuxUK.org has a nice entry on the future of mobile interfaces, mentioning our Canola and EFL work here at the OpenBossa Lab at INdT.

http://linuxuk.blogspot.com/2007/07/edje-evas-and-python-future-of-mobile.html

Source available

As I promised in a comment some days ago, I have now released the source of the kinetic list example. It has been modified a bit by Gustavo, so if it looks a bit different you know why.

I also modified the code to have a grid mode. This means that you don't need the items to span the with of the row, but you have define a width and it will try to stuff as many items in a row as possible; quite nice if you want to make a thumbnail view or something along those lines.

The code is available here:

http://www.enlightenment.org/viewvc/e17/proto/python-efl/python-edje/examples/evas-demo/03-kinetic_list/