Random Thoughts again..
The Thinkpad X40 is no longer my WinXP email and calendar computer, but has ubuntu now. Nice. The T41 was sentenced to de*cough* enterprise groupware use as it has less memory and is slower. And the X40 is a lot nicer to carry around in my bag..
So hey. I want to write a tutorial on how to port an existing Gtk application to Maemo, from the user interface perspective, as I think we don’t quite have that yet. I was thinking of something simple like Leafpad maybe? (Of course there’s the included text editor in the 770 already) - another idea would be to port the gPodder podcast aggregator, as it is using python-gtk already and we apparently have python bindings.
Yet another idea would be to take a commandline tool, like castget, and do a nice schoolbook example of how to give it an user interface with gazpacho.. not sure yet. But something like that would be nice. Other ideas?
Why? Because I need to learn how the user interface design process works inside the company, and I want to help the community to be more “in line” with the styleguides and such people have internally. In other words, to make free software that works better in the handheld and hopefully continue the work we started in betterdesktop.org - to see if we can work on user interfaces in the open source community. It’ll be interesting to see if that works out, and if so, how it will look like in practice.
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February 22nd, 2006 at 17:37
Oh, please please pretty please port leafpad!
The current maemo notes app just can’t handle any document larger than a couple of hundred characters, and maemo desperately needs a good and simple text editor!
February 22nd, 2006 at 18:02
Woot, then it wasnt such a bad idea
Leafpad is quite nice, cute little app that might indeed make a good example.
Another thing now, that I got a 1 GB memory card for the 770, is podcasting and videos - I want to convert a bunch of the old documentaries from archive.org to a format the video player can handle. I wonder if any of those offered actually works out of the box? Need to investigate.
February 22nd, 2006 at 18:53
How about Contacts? http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/Contacts/ (or, on the same website, Web or Dates? :))
p.s. Your captcha is far too hard to pass!
February 22nd, 2006 at 18:55
What about Tomboy? Although that would probably require more than just a straightforward port, if you want to synchronize your notes with your laptop/desktop.
February 22nd, 2006 at 23:50
I wonder how mono would like about life in a small handheld device?
February 23rd, 2006 at 00:08
If not Leafpad, then any editor with a GUI, please!
February 23rd, 2006 at 00:51
On a somewhat related note, I built a Maemo development environment, based on the Browser Appliance that VMWare hosts & loading up the Maemo stuff via their tutorial instructions (it’s the 1.0 stuff, but I can do 1.1 this weekend). Is this useful for any of you dev types?
I’m a 770 owner and a sysadmin, so I built this to poke at the tutorial, but I figured it might be useful for others. Just needs VMware Player. It’s quite big (1.2G), but I have at least one report that it works OK. http://www.ritcey.com/Maemo-Development.tar.gz
If it’s useful, any idea who to contact to Maemo to see if there’s interest in hosting it? I fear if it’s popular my bandwidth will get hammered (which is why I’ve been a bit reluctant to post to the maemo-developers list with this). The fact you mentioned writing a Maemo tutorial reminded me to do something with this. Thanks.