Month: March 2007

GNOME Roadmap Process


Here we go! Vincent and I have been working on a roadmap process for GNOME. Well, here’s the result:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process

We expect the following benefits from the process:

  • Stimulate a roadmapping culture inside the community so that we discuss more often where we want to go (based on concrete plans);
  • Increase the awereness about the future steps of the project inside and outside the community;
  • Help with the release notes writing.

As announced in d-a-l, all maintainers will receive a mail asking some questions about their plans for the modules they’re maintaining. Also, we’re looking for more people to be part of Roadmap Gang. So, if you’re interested, contact us.

Hei Ho, Let’s Go!

Crappy QOTD

I got this comment in my previous post with the screencast about writing Python plugins for Hildon Desktop.

There simply is nothing cool about python. It’s VB on Linux, and a horrible language with horrible OO bolted loosely on the side (split/join/len illustrates it beautifully). It’s worst sin however is that because it looks easy, really bad programmers unleash things on the world. Like VB. (Anonymous)

WTF!? How can someone see Python this way? As a counter-argument for this “worst sin”, this nice article by Paul Graham comes to my mind. :-)

Writing a cool Python plugin for Hildon Desktop

Ok, now that I’ve shown how easy is to have the basic code for a Python plugin running in Hildon Desktop, I’d like to demonstrate something more useful and cool. I did this screencast presenting how to write a plugin which randomly shows images from your “Images” directory in your Home area. Cool hun?


Click on the image to watch/download the screencast (10 minutes, 8 MB).

Some (obvious) improvements for this plugin would be:

  • A configuration dialog where you can define the images directory and the delay for image switching.
  • Disable image switching when the device idle or when the Home area is not visible
  • Switch to next random image when clicking on the plugin.
  • What else do you want? :-P

Enjoy!

——–

Sidenote 1: yes, the screencast shows Hildon Desktop running on a 800×600 resolution. :-)
Sidenote 2: some people have been asking if Hildon Desktop is available in N800 already. The answer is no. Hildon Desktop is a major rewrite of maemo-af-desktop and will be shipped in the next major releases of Maemo. Of course you could run it on your N800 at your own risk. :-P

Building Hildon Desktop outside Maemo/Scratchbox environment

I wrote a step-by-step guide to have Hildon Desktop running outside the Maemo/Scratchbox environment. Our major goal here is to make it easy for distributons to package Hildon Desktop so that developers can have a quick-to-setup environment for the development of plugins which doesn’t need to be built against ARM such as Python plugins. For now, this guide only applies to Ubuntu (If you can point out the changes needed to work on another distribution, please let me know). This is a call for testers and brave developers to follow the guide and report the missing/problematic bits.

  http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HildonDesktopPortability

There are some issues that still block us from getting Hildon Desktop in a distribution but we’re working on that.

Writing a "Hello World" Python plugin for Hildon Desktop

As I told you before, Hildon Desktop now has a new plugin system and one of the cool things about it is the Python support. Just for the sake of demonstration, I recorded a screencast with the step by step process of writing a “Hello World” Python plugin for the Home area of Hildon Desktop.


Yes, it’s really simple. Of course, this is a useless plugin but I just wanted to demonstrate how easy and simple is to have the basic infrastruture done.

Enjoy!

Update 1: the GIF image is too heavy and people are having problems to watch the screencast. I’ll upload a new (and better) file tomorrow as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience. :-/
Update 2: I removed the link to the screencast for now just to avoid other people to have the same problem and complain about the same thing.
Update 3 The link is updated with a new/more-complete version of the screencast.

New SoC deadline

Good news! The deadline for student application in Google Summer of Code was postponed! This means that you, students, have more time to submit your project proposals! The new deadline is March 26.

eog-ng becomes trunk


You’ve seen some cool development news in my blog about eog-ng branch, right? The good news is that last weekend I merged eog-ng in trunk as part of the GNOME 2.19/2.20 development cycle. This means that we have a solid, faster and more stable code in EOG from now on. Some highlights:

  • Feels faster and more stable (the application core has been totally rewritten and optimized in several ways. This means you will feel that EOG startup is much faster, it uses less memory and crashes much less)
  • New image collection pane (cleaned up to make it look nicer with a one-row view. By setting “hidden” gconf keys you can place the collection pane on any window side – top, bottom, left, right – and it can be resizable or not)
  • Toolbar in fullscreen
  • Image property dialog
  • “Open with” support to quickly images on other applications

Many/Special thanks to Claudio Saavedra and Felix Riemann for the important contributions to this new code. You rock my world guys!

Plans for 2.20

  • Editable toolbar
  • Printing for multiple images
  • Plugin system
  • Support for IPTC and XMP
  • General UI polishing, mostly in
    • Image collection pane
    • Image properties dialog
    • Preferences dialog
    • Error/warning feedback
  • More code refactoring
  • Bug fixing, bug fixing, bug fixing, …

Get Involved

You can find a list of bugs/tasks here (follow the instructions there):

  http://live.gnome.org/EyeOfGnome/RoadMap

As I always say: contributions are always welcome! Give some love to EOG today and have a better GNOME image viewer tomorrow! Let’s make EOG rock our world! :-)

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0.