Category: gnome

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.

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! :-)

Shouldn’t we talk?

The number of GNOME-Platform-based user interfaces (or “Desktop environments” if you prefer) for embedded devices is growing. AFAIK, those are the guys in the field:


We have different focuses: OLPC (Sugar) on education, ACCESS on PDAs, Maemo (Hildon Desktop) on Internet Tablets and OpenMoko on cellphones. However, I’m sure we have a lot to share and learn with each other in terms of architecture, UI framework, plugin systems, standards, code, ideas, and so forth.

I saw that (probably) there will be some talks related to those projects in GUADEC. This means that we will all be at the same place, at the same time, It’s a good oportunity for us to get together and talk! So, what do you think?

Update 1: It seems that some very interesting discussion among OLPC, Maemo and OpenEmbedded guys already took place during Bossa Conference. Good to know we’re already talking. :-)
Update 2: Someone commented that I should add LiMo Foundation to the list. Does anyone know if there will be anyone from LiMo at GUADEC?

Google Summer of Code 2007


GNOME is participating in Summer of Code 2007. If you are a student and you want to apply, you can submit your project before March 24th. You can find some ideas for projects on our wiki.

If you want to help us on getting more student projects to GNOME, print the poster in your language and post it at universities of your city. Don’t forget to notify in the university advertisement page to avoid duplicate effort.

Maintainers, there’s still time to add some ideas to the game. Just add it to the “New/not-prioritized” section (see the instructions in the page). I’ve seen some nice potential SoC projects on your plans for 2.20. :-)

Big thanks to Máirín for the beautiful banner and poster!

GNOME 2.18 released!

Yes, Yes, exactly! GNOME 2.18 is released! It’s always nice to see such a nice result of hard work from so many people (have a look at the gnome-about dialog)! Congratulations to everyone who contributed in anyways to this beautiful release!

GNOME 2.18 is 100% translated to brazilian portuguese (2.14 and 2.16 had 98%)! A big thanks to the whole pt_BR team: Leonardo Fontenelle (pt_BR hero!), Og Maciel (pt_BR hero!), Guilherme Pastore, Raphael Higino, Washington Lins, Licio Fonseca, Alexandre de Menezes, Pedro de Medeiros, Afonso Celso Medina, João Bueno Calligaris, André Noel, Raul Pereira, Robson Negreiros, Everson Araujo, Vicente Aguiar, Vinicius Pinheiro, Amadeu Júnior, Lucas Veloso, Claudio André, Franz Gustav Niederheitmann, Luiz Fernando Armesto, Igor Soares, Jonh Wendell and Fábio Nogueira (Sorry if I forgot anyone). I love you guys!

I’m really excited about what’s coming for GNOME 2.20! Let’s start our hard (and super fun) work again! Go Go Go!

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