Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Today I finished integrating some cool code into Evas: box and table. These utility smart objects are now in Evas for good, we can stop replicating those in many projects and people who just want to use them and not a full featured toolkit like ETK or EWL are now free. More importantly: we can now expose these in Edje, making all layout elements dependent on theme, not having to rely on SWALLOW slots!

The integrated code is very flexible, it make use of the recently introduced “size hints” and also postpone heavy calculations to pre-render time with calculate smart callback. Table has three modes: regular, homogeneous based on table size and homogeneous based on largest minimum item size. Box, since it just represent a sequence of items, is more extensible and allows you to specify a layout function, we provide some like vertical, horizontal, stack, homogeneous based on box, homogeneous based on the largest minimum item size, etc… but you can easily write your “snake layout” and use it. If you need more option details than “size hints”, you can extend the class and implement options_* virtuals.

These code were integrated by me, but not totally written. Gustavo Lima, from ProFUSION, wrote the box for their sequence_box.c (it was relicensed to E’s BSD with permission) and Rasterman wrote table for his elementary “toolkit for mobiles” els_table.c.

On the pleasure and work side, I’ll fly to The Netherlands next Tuesday so I can attend ELC-E 2008 where I’ll present a talk about Rich Graphical User Interfaces on mobile systems, covering Evas, Edje and the new kids on the block Elementary and Guarana.

Last but not least, due trip and other stuff to do I’ll not be able to integrate table and box into Edje soon. If you always wanted to help E17 and EFL, now it’s your chance! See my mail to the list and start hacking, I can reply to you by mail and IRC (when I’m online). We will also need Python bindings for those, so patches to python-evas and python-edje are also welcome!

Rasterman’s Gang: Nokia N810, Sharp Zaurus, OpenMoko Freerunner and Palm Treo-650

After Rasterman announced he had “The Gang” running Illume we decided to help him and run it in yet-another platform, the Freescale iMX31:

Some days ago raster already posted video of his virtual keyboard doing correction/prediction and operating on various resolutions, for those that liked my iPhone-like virtual keyboard demo for n800, this one looks better and is for real, check out his videos: 01, 02, 03 and 04

Unlike most would say, x11 does quite well. See our benchmarks comparing X11, FB, DirectFB on a Fresscale imx31. There you can see how x11-16 bitch-slaps everything… that’s even better on n8×0 and that’s why Canola runs fast

ProFUSION is proud to announce the first public release of our Guarana framework and its demo Enjoy.

Guarana is a set of free software libraries to aid embedded application development. It comes with with a remote control access library, module loader, model-view-controller machinery, basic data structures and a fast growing widget set.

Enjoy is a demo music player targeted at embedded touchscreen devices. It uses Guarana’s MVC and widgets and Emotion to play media.

Here’s a video running on the target demo platform, a Freescale imx31 3-stack board. (it will run on N8×0, but will not play music because Emotion’s gstreamer backend uses decodebin, we need to patch it to use DSP decoders/sinks)

More information about Guarana features and an Enjoy screenshot see the original press release.

For those that don’t know, Guarana is a Brazilian plant and also the name of an excellent soft drink. It’s also the base of some energetic drinks. That’s why the demo is called Enjoy… okay, okay, it’s also because it starts with “e” as well

We’re proud to release a new version of LightMediaScanner, the fastest media scanner for your embedded device

This version now adds the direct relationship of audios and artists table, this will allow album-less audios to have an artist as well as have collections audios to display their artists. Yes, Canola will behave better now.

Also new are the often requested single-process scan and progress reporting.

Progress is reported using callbacks. Since it is impossible to know beforehand how many files will be in the directories before walking them, there is no “total” item reporting or percentage, this is up to you if you think it is worth to pay such penalty. Check also does not report so it’s uniform, but number of items to check is easier to discover, just check the database. These callbacks will also report the state of such file, so you can notify user if some files were skipped because they took too much to finish (more than slave_timeout).

Single process scan is now available, but it’s mostly there to aid debugging. While it will speed up scan on single-CPU machines (ie: Nokia N810), it is less safe and if it breaks/hangs (ie: due MMC being removed during parse, or bad FAT filesystem) it will bring down your whole software, so be aware of that before using.

Last but not least, our GIT moved from http://staff.get-e.org/ to http://gitweb.profusion.mobi/ (Gitweb) with repositories being cloned from git clone git://git.profusion.mobi/$PROJECT

Please report any bugs to our project at garage.maemo.org!