The Adventures of Joshua Judson Rosen
(action man)

[ sections: VisualIDs | art | movies | everything ]


Sun, 12 Apr 2009
[@]

00:23: Learning Etk... and why I can't sleep

So, I want to add VisualIDs to my FreeRunner. I've actually already built the base code and run-tested it on-device, and verified that it'll be plenty fast enough even without going through a round of optimisations (even the prototype real-time editor GUI seems sufficiently snappy), so I'm on to actually adding a UI-feature to the existing applications--similarly to how the desktop goal was getting VisualIDs implemented in Nautilus.

I've been running mainly SHR, and it looks like the best path to take is to hack on their libframeworkd-phonegui-efl package, which provides Etk-based GUIs for openmoko-dialer3, openmoko-contacts3, etc.; the alternative seems to be hacking on Zhone, which is a self-acknowledged nightmare and... more on that later..., maybe.

After having spent a day or so (spread out over the past week following receipt of my new, at-least-mostly buzzfixed FreeRunner) wrapping my head around how contacts-listing elements in a a GLib GHashTable could possibly be picked-up by something that appeared to be a native Enlightenment routine, I spent the bulk of today figuring out how to get an image from an image-file into the EtkTree contacts-list--what exactly an Etk_Tree_Model was, what the `image' variant was, and how the latter affected the requirements for arguments passed to etk_tree_row_append(). I think that I've got a grasp on all of this, now (add an Etk_Tree_Model_Image to the tree as a column-model with etk_tree_col_model_add(), and then argument the column-object with the image-file path and also NULL when calling etk_tree_row_append()--because the API really wants a theme-file with a follow-up `key' argument that selects the specific named image in the theme, but it will also accept a `NORMAL' image-file along with a NULL key and figure out that it can create an Etk_Image directly from the image-file. I guess this should actually be obvious from the arguments to etk_image_new_from_file()....

Now that it's late enough that it's not even `today' anymore, I think I've got enough of a grip on things to actually write code and verify my understanding..., but it's most definitely time for bed.

I always have my doubts about my ability to, after waking from a good night's sleep, remember what the hell I was doing before I went to sleep....

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