Tag: fosdem

Another week, another release of Sojourner; this time in glorious 32-bit colour, and featuring its first community contribution!

The eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that, in the favourite talks in the screenshot above, Andrew‘s Django talk sadly clashes with Raúl‘s Folks talk. I hadn’t noticed, until Joaquim Rocha sent patches adding a button that shows which of your favourites clash with the event you’re viewing. Now I have a dilemma on my hands… Joaquim also cleaned up some of my less-beautiful code. Thank you!

The event lists are now easier to skim-read, with subheaders for the day and coloured swatches representing the track the talk is part of. I don’t know if in practice people will actually associate the colours with tracks, but I do think than the pastel stripe at the left-hand side makes the list easier on the eye. I initially wanted to re-use the colours on the official schedule, but didn’t really want to hardcode a massive list of colours (and the schedule XML doesn’t include them), so they’re generated based on a hash of the track name. (Thanks to Sjoerd Simons for the “vary H, fix S and V” tip for generating a palette.)

The package should be available from extras-testing by the time you read this.

Last year, I threw together a primitive FOSDEM schedule application for the N900. A year later—just in time for FOSDEM 2011, which I am attending!—it’s back, with more polish and a catchier name: Sojourner.

New since last time around:

• You can refresh the schedule from within the app;
• It works in portrait mode;
• It generally looks a bit better, with margins and button sizes matching other Fremantle applications more closely;
• It has, yunno, icons and packaging.

Most of those fall firmly into the “well of course it should be like that”. I told you it was primitive the first time around. 🙂 There are a few more screenshots on my Sojourner page, or you can install it from Fremantle Extras. It’s currently in extras-testing; please feel free to leave feedback there or here. The wiki on Gitorious has a laundry list of suggestions for improvements, as well as a few buglets I’m aware of. Of course, if you want to get involved, I’d be delighted. It’s written in Python, using Gtk+ and Hildon. Non-code-wise, the artwork could definitely use some love (I just threw it together in a few minutes in the Gimp) and some more careful thought about the user experience might be nice.