Thomas Wood – Page 8

History Meme

Desktop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 cd 75 ls 49 svn 45 ssh 37 vim 37 make 13 ./test-notes 11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl 11 ./openmoko-messages 11 ./openmoko-dialer
Laptop:
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head 91 vim 53 sh 52 svn 47 cd 40 ls 31 find 21 git 18 ssh 11 su 11 make

More Moko GTK+ Theme

Spurred on by the positive comments in my last little theme experiment for the OpenMoko, I have made a few adjustments based on some of the comments. It’s also now available in OpenMoko svn.

If you have a OpenMoko build set up, you can try it out. Firstly you need to build the package and then rebuild the package index:

bitbake moko-gtk-engine && bitbake package-index

You may have issues if you have built this before, because I did made some changes to the repository that svn can’t handle very cleanly, so if you have problems, wipe your svn checkout and start again.

Then you need to ssh into your neo and run the following commands:

opkg upgrade
opkg install moko-gtk-engine
dbus-launch gconftool-2 –t string -s /desktop/poky/interface/theme “Moko”
/etc/init.d/xserver-nodm restart

Here are some more screenshots of the theme running on the device. There are still some bugs with colours in a few places, so testing would be much appreciated.

I think the GPS icon is green because the GPS chip was on when I took the screenshots. I’ve been testing a couple of the peripherals on my GTA02 lately and I’m happy to report so far Wifi, GPS, accellerometers and the LEDs all seem to be working correctly. I got a fix from the GPS today which according to Google maps, was within 1 meter of my actual location.

Brand New Moko Theme (Idea)

Inspired by ScaredyCat’s discovery that the default GTK+ theme was much faster on the Neo1973 than the current pixbuf based theme (well, no real suprises there…), I set to work stealing his colour scheme and completely redesigning my Moko theme engine. This time totally optimised for speed and simplicity. It’s still a work in progress, but here are some screenshots to give a general idea:

Lines and other visual distractions are kept to a complete minimum. Although it doesn’t look that great on a desktop display, when it is on a 2.8″ 285dpi touch screen, it feels a lot better.

OpenMoko Presentation in London

UKUUG is hosting a talk by Ole Tange about OpenMoko next week in London (9th April). I’m planning to go along and take the latest GTA02 (FreeRunner) prototype if anyone is interested in seeing it in action. I’ll probably stick around afterwards to chat and grab some dinner.

More details here: http://www.ukuug.org/events/openmoko/

OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

I’ve mostly been working on non-ui related components for OpenMoko recently (working on the package management system, opkg and it’s associated packagekit backend), which gave me a chance to step back from the GUI applications and take a look at some of the areas that could be improved. I posted some of my thoughts on the openmoko-devel mailing list (thread here) and got some quite interesting and encouraging responses.

So, I set to work building some patches. Here are some screenshots of progress:

Phone numbers and contact photos in the address book contact list

"Add to contact" in call log
Currently work in progress, implementing “Add to contact” in call log

I’m also hoping to get a few theme tweaks in as well. Here’s another game of spot-the-difference (hint, not anything in the number display). And it actually does make it look a lot smarter on the device’s small screen.
changes to

I need to find an artist to help me improve the GTK+ theme. Firstly the gradients really need to go because not only do they look ugly with the banding from the 16bit display, they also cause significant performance problems. If anyone wants to help me out, please do drop me an e-mail, or discuss on the openmoko-devel list.

art-hub

Well, since no one stepped up to take over maintaining art.gnome.org, I decided I really needed to sort it out. I keep getting requests such as “why hasn’t my background been approved yet” and “please delete this submission”. So I have a new idea, that hopefully isn’t so high maintenance:

Hopefully, it will better serve GNOME artists and help encourage people to get involved in GNOME. If you feel like contributing, sources are in GNOME svn: http://svn.gnome.org/svn/art-web/branches/art-hub/

GNOME Suggestions from 2006

At London LinuxWorld in October 2006, we had a stand promoting and discussing the GNOME project with visitors. As part of that stand, we collected ideas from people about what they liked and disliked about GNOME. While doing a spot of spring cleaning, I came across the dozens of post-it notes that people had written their suggestions on. Shame on me for not getting round to typing up the suggestions until now, but it actually makes for even more interesting reading to see what features and bugs have already been fixed.

Browse mode as default
Desktop search
GNOME Evolution – pressing space bar marks messages as “read”. Button to go to next unread message
Good menus
Good integartion, smooth 🙂
GNOME-VFS is too specific 🙁
Software I can use without thinking about it! Love it!
Need IDE with good debugging support
Centralised location for editing application associations
Better thumbnail cache use. e.g. delete thumbs not used for 30 days
Needs to be more geeky
GConf on NFS-homed rollhout (universtity) between Solaris/GNOME
Good – slick system; Bad – missing certain functions
File save expansion sucks 🙁
Tabs in nautilus
GNOME ROS MY SOX
It’s Free!
Make windows codecs easier to use and install. WMVs, DVDs, & co, should be a single install tickbox
Evolution – autosense IMAP/IMAPv4: who the fsck knows what the server is running, or cares?
Make all desktop configuration scriptable
Evolution: please implement “Reply and file” (to specific mailbox)
Memory consumption
Evolution: (Imap) please replicate locally as the tickbox says!
(Love) Gstreamer integartion
Scaling all desktop icons simulatonsusly
(Love) Inkscape
Does everything I need
F-Spot rules
Keyboard navigation in panel menu
I like GNOME because cute guys work on the stand
Configuration of GNOME 🙁
It actually works! Yay!
So simple my 9 year old neice can use it! Keep it simple
It does things my way
Reset option for panel to restart from scratch
Easy to install RPMs via Centros
“Expose” & Just Works
Why can’t I double click top-left corner to close a window (like Win, KDE, CDE, etc)
Tomboy notes are cool!
I (heart) GNOME ‘cos KDE sucxors!
KDE FTW
Extremely user friendly
More examples in developer documentation, e.g. graphics
Windowing is too chunkey, want more elegenat interface
No alarm clock?
Memory footprint. Library precaching
I like how the menus are organised!
I want to sync a Palm Tunsten T5
DVB/T Freeuen card doesn’t work or is not easily configurable in Totem.
File->open new users want a text field to click in before typing a filename

(Personally, I think number 30 is best)

Opkg and PackageKit

Some good progress on Opkg and it’s PackageKit backend recently. New features such as autoremove and tags have been implemented in Opkg, and PackageKit can now take advantage of them. I’ve also increased the PackageKit method coverage by including description searching and group search, amongst fixing various bugs and improving internal feedback mechanisms.

Opkg now has a mailing list for discussion on future development and current issues.

Here are some screenshots of the GTK+ PackageKit frontend using Opkg as the backend:

Current method coverage shown by pk-backend-status:

Listing packages in a group using the gnome-packagekit frontend:

Searching on the description field and filtering to only view GUI applications:

Slightly off topic, but of interest to OpenMoko/OpenEmbedded developers, is the new Poky SDK, which Rob wrote about. The Anjuta plugin is particularly interesting, because it significantly shortens the development cycle when cross compiling.

Fosdem ’08

I haven’t written about work things for a while, but I’ve been working on a couple of things, including Opkg (a new package manager based on the un-maintained Ipkg), and a PackageKit backend to use it with.

And this weekend (starting at the beer event on Friday night) I will be at Fosdem. See you there if you’re going!