A belated happy first birthday to my beautiful daughter. It’s been a fantastic year.
Since then it seems like I’ve been sick most of the time. Instead of doing something useful, I’ve taken to fidding on a re-write of my Agave colorscheme designer, and I’ve made a decent amount of progress. It still lacks a lot of features of the original, but it benefits from my vastly better grasp of gtkmm and related technologies. I still don’t know if I’ll ever actually get around to releasing it. It’s currently serving as a way for me to relax and take breaks from my other projects. It’s become sort of a playground for me to try out new technologies, and I think I’ve succeeded in making it nearly impossible for normal users to build as it requires quite a few very new or unreleased libraries (goocanvasmm, giomm, glibmm-utils, etc).
Here’s a little screencast of what I’ve done so far:
I’ve set up a repository on github for anybody that’s interested in playing around with it.
Interesting to see Agave featured prominently in the screenshots for ubuntu studio. (That site might be down, it doesn’t seem to be withstanding the traffic very well).
Things with nemiver are coming along at a decent pace and we’ll probably be doing another release in the near future. The next release should bring quite a few nice new features and a lot of bugfixes, most of which Dodji has already mentioned.
I recently bought a new Digital SLR camera, the Nikon D40. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the best camera I could find, just something reasonably priced that took decent pictures. The D40 is relatively small so I don’t feel like I’m lugging a huge camera around (which is important or I probably wouldn’t end up using it as much), it’s cheap (it comes with a reasonable lens kit for around 600 US, which isn’t much more than I paid for my old point-and-shoot digital back in the day), and it takes vastly better pictures than my old camera. I’m really loving the fact that I can actually get decent pictures even if the lighting and environment is less than ideal. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a decent entry-level DSLR. I still clearly have a lot to learn about photography (this camera just lets me take better-looking crappy photos). But I’m slowly learning, and I’m getting lots of practice, like any new parent.
So I’ve found myself hacking on agave a bit more lately, and I thought I’d experiment a little bit with some different UI ideas. Any thoughts and comments are welcome, of course.
Keep in mind that this is just at an experimental stage at the moment, so I may just throw it away if I decide that it doesn’t work well. I do think it gives a better sense of how the colors are related, though.
In any case, it’s been fun playing around a little bit with cairomm for once. In the end though, I’d probably want to implement this using some sort of canvas library, but I haven’t done enough research on the options that are currently available.
