As per the plan for v0.2, I am ready with a working implementation of inkface. I also made few more design decisions after my last design post. Here are the highlights:
1. All code is in python
2. For X11 surfaces, pygame is used.
I found that pygame (python bindings for SDL) is a mature library for drawing on X11 surfaces. It also has some optimizations which help in 2D animations. There is also OpenGL support, but I do not plan to use it inside inkface library. It is also well supported on Maemo.
I have written my favorite twitter client app with the new inkface-pygame library. The following video demo shows, how I could quickly code 2D scrolling animation with the help of pygame.
The v0.2.0 is delivered as a tarball. I have also updated the inkface wiki with some getting-started tips.
Planet maemo: category "feed:0d3ed10193588edfe41285c9c902da78"
Preview of what's coming out later in the week. A v0.2 drop of inkface-pygame package for maemo and others should be ready in coming few days.
Finally it is ready. Actually it has been ready for more than couple of weeks now, but I wanted to make sure the bugs in my demo app were not due to problems in core library.
The demo app is a client I wrote for the Twitter service. The intention was to demonstrate how an intuitive GUI can be designed using an Image editor. With the GUI designed using Inkscape and an off-the-shelf python library to talk to Twitter service (Thanks to DeWitt for python-twitter), I only had to write simple glue code to get the whole app working. Check out the video.
Good news is I have setup a debian repo to host packages for this app.
In the Maemo Application Manager, add following Catalog:
Name: Altcanvas
Web Address: http://repo.altcanvas.com
Distribution: testing
Components: main
Refresh the application list. You should see 'twitter-inkface' app in the list. All the dependencies will be automatically pulled from the repo.
Since the repository implementation is currently experimental (No it's not a standard web server! I will save it for a separate post), you may face a problem while installing or I may have to take it offline for modifications. In that case, you can download following four packages and install them with dpkg ("dpkg -i *.deb")
libaltsvg,inkface-python, inklib, twitter-inkface.
For more info on Inkface project, visit the project page.
The demo app is a client I wrote for the Twitter service. The intention was to demonstrate how an intuitive GUI can be designed using an Image editor. With the GUI designed using Inkscape and an off-the-shelf python library to talk to Twitter service (Thanks to DeWitt for python-twitter), I only had to write simple glue code to get the whole app working. Check out the video.
Good news is I have setup a debian repo to host packages for this app.
In the Maemo Application Manager, add following Catalog:
Name: Altcanvas
Web Address: http://repo.altcanvas.com
Distribution: testing
Components: main
Refresh the application list. You should see 'twitter-inkface' app in the list. All the dependencies will be automatically pulled from the repo.
Since the repository implementation is currently experimental (No it's not a standard web server! I will save it for a separate post), you may face a problem while installing or I may have to take it offline for modifications. In that case, you can download following four packages and install them with dpkg ("dpkg -i *.deb")
libaltsvg,inkface-python, inklib, twitter-inkface.
For more info on Inkface project, visit the project page.
I have always wondered why are there so many advanced technologies to learn to create the GUI for a software application. GUI is what we see, then if we want to design or customize it, then it should be as simple as editing an image in an Image editor. This becomes more important with the next-gen handheld devices, where the GUIs will be handled more intuitively - by fingers - rather than keyboards or mice. However the problem and its solution wasn't very apparent to me.