Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Just enabled keyboard shortcuts in Gmail and realized they’re VI-compatible. Take that you Emacs fanboys! 🙂

Now, where’s the shortcut for ‘Delete’…?

Riding home in light rain and knowing I might need to drop by the office on Monday. Is that a hint of things to come? Yesterday at the beach was much more like summer, fortunately.

I hacked together a small script which reads the Packages.gz files from a configured set of repositories and generates a catalog page showing all packages, grouped by sections. Maybe someone finds this useful.

There’s an example page and the script source. One thing you may notice is that there’s little consistency between packages currently.

Personally I think any application catalog should be able to handle and collect the mandatory information (sections, name, version, description) automatically so that the data is taken straight from the packages where it has to be anyway. That should encourage using repositories instead of links to files as well as increase package metadata quality. Would just need a way nice way to integrate the package data with screenshots, comments, etc. Maybe Debian or Ubuntu already have one, I don’t know.

Of course once you crawl multiple repositories like this you could even mirror all the packages in one repository and save the user the trouble of configuring several of them in the application installer.

Added my slides to GNOME wiki. I meant to add some notes to elaborate some points, but oh well.. Now if only the streams archives were available.

Hmm, I should be paying more attention to the GNOME Summer of Code 2006.

I just noticed “Long Running Task Manager” which is very, very, similar to our “Transfer Manager” Jakub was presenting in GUADEC. As the name implies the focus is on file transfers, but the messaging is all about progress, basically. Hope that Jakub soon gets to publish the code and documentation he was promising…

This is a brief overview of changes done to the maemo-modified gtk+ between maemo1.x and maemo2.0.

Baseline is now gtk+ 2.6.10 with associated bugs and fixes. See release announcements:
GTK+ 2.6.10, GTK+ 2.6.9,
GTK+ 2.6.8,
GTK+ 2.6.7,
GTK+ 2.6.6,
GTK+ 2.6.5

UI Changes

GtkTreeView branches collapse only when tapping on already focused branch. Previously the branch was collapsed even when selecting the branch for the first time, which made using File Manager more complicated in some cases.

GtkComboBox is now themed in “appears-as-list” mode which gives it a scrollbar which is nicer to use than menu arrows.

Changed APIs

GtkIMContext extensions have been redesigned. The old API is still available, but it is recommended that applications use the new API instead, see Maemo 2.0 Porting HOWTO. The old API will probably disappear in the future.

New APIs

GtkEntryCompletion is adapted to work in Maemo environment. It is currently used in the Browser location entry. It can be used with any GtkEntry but other uses have not been as widely tested and there may be some issues. Feedback (and patches) appreciated.

GtkExpander and GtkHPaned
are themed to match the rest of the UI.

GtkWindow::urgency-hint was backported from gtk+ 2.8. This can be used to make your application icon blink in the Task Navigator.

gtk_tree_store_insert_with_values() was introduced as more efficient way to insert values into GtkTreeStore. See also gtk_list_store_insert_with-values()

Memory and performance

Avoid doing UTF-8 <-> ISO-8859-1 conversions and needlessly loading iconv. There’s a minor API change related.^[*]

g_slice_*() was backported to replace GMemChunks.

Packaging

Debian packages can be built from trunk directly. No longer having the code in one place and debian/rules in another. It was a nice idea, but just didn’t work out.

Static libraries are not built. Due to various dynamically loadable modules you can not really get completely static gtk+ anyway. Besides, there is really no point in statically linking gtk+ in a Maemo application.

Localised messages have been removed to save space. Most visible result from this is that gtk+ stock items do not display translated labels.

Obsolete/broken APIs removed

gtk_window_{get,set}_prev_focus_widget() were intended only for special cases in focus handling. It never really worked and everything works just fine without them. The functions are still there, but do nothing. If you’re using these, please stop now.

GtkLabel::translate, gtk_label_{get,set}_translate(), gtk_label_retranslate() were never really implemented nor documented. They were part of an attempted solution that isn’t feasible in the end.

[*] Legacy window manager hints (WM_NAME, …) are not set, only the newer EWMH counterparts (_NET_WM_NAME, …) are. If you’re affected by this, please join us in this century.

Update: *sigh* why does planet maemo get all messed up so easily?

Q: How do you know I’ve been playing football?

A: I’m bleeding from my knees, elbows, or like today, both.

Jakub was looking for some player yesterday and since I signed up for playing at the GnuFIFA Football Championship at GUADEC (not to be confused with that minor event in Germany) of course I wanted to join. The game was on a sand field (ouch) for 2×20 minutes and we had two substitutes. I survived, but with probably 20℃ hotter at GUADEC I’m so going to be dead after two games in two hours.

Umm.. When we decided to remove all *.la files from -dev packages, I suppose the idea wasn’t to move them in the main library package. Like, umm, I don’t know, libgtk2.0-0?

Natalia, please don’t kill me. I’ll fix it first thing in the morning.

Mario – Live – so funny

Allergies don’t mix that well with exercising. I just remembered that again coming back from rollerblading after dropping off my bike for repairs. Spent the next ten minutes sneezing and will probably have my eyes itching the rest of the night. Fun fun fun. Trying again tomorrow anyway =)

I also signed up for the GUADEC football match. I’ll be the one out of breath.

wrt the title, who’d want to live forever anyway?