Monday, August 16, 2010

GSoC: Canola update

The deadline for Summer of Code projects is coming in a few hours, so it's time for an update on my project.
During the last weeks I have been working on switching Canola from etk to elementary. Etk is the old toolkit used in the Enlightenment world, it is now deprecated being replaced by elementary. Etk in Canola was used mainly to create the settings dialogs and panels. Part of this switch I have replaced the etk buttons, lists, entries, labels, etc.. with their elementary corespondent. The more difficult part was to adapt the theme/style of the new elementary widgets to match Canola's design. Finally it looks pretty good, although I have some problems with the alignment of some buttons. I am not sure if there is a problem with my code or a bug in the efl libraries. I have asked for some help on e-develop mailing list and I'm still waiting for their response.

Some of the old Canola plugins will probably have to be updated ( if they use custom panel/dialog that were created using  etk) . I have already updated the Picasa plugin I have developed last year so it's ready to be used with the new version of Canola.

As soon as the efl packages are updated (Eduardo Lima is taking care of this)  the new version of Canola will be available in extras-devel/testing.

A summary of the things that I've done as part of the project (more details are available on wiki page):
  • fixed the annoying segmentation faults 
  • fix system properties for Maemo 5 (battery, wireless and signal level)
  • fix the keyboard input bug
  • use ethumb to generate thumbnails
  • integrate Canola with the Connection Manager
  • integrate Canola with Tracker
  • use elementary instead of the etk widgets

4 comments:

  1. Sounds great. I'll try it out as it hits extras devel! Is mafw used by canola for playing now?

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  2. no prob, ill be waiting for it. although is the theme issue fixed?

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  3. @ali: As far as I know, the theme issue falls under "annoying segmentation faults."

    (You can try it; run Canola in Terminal, and try to change the theme; it'll tell you "segmentation fault.")

    Great work on this. I'm sure a lot of N8x0 users appreciate it greatly.

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  4. @jukey: no, we're not using mafw
    @ali: are you talking about the segmentation fault that xommified mentioned?

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