Desktop search hackfest 1st day

First proper day of desktop search hackfest behind. We had good progress on the most important areas already and we are making now similar progress on the second day. The biggest one was that we agreed on the ontology changes that have been raised with variable solution candidates now for a year. The solution is clean and simple. It is future oriented by allowing proper object relations in the ontology, but still retaining the possibility to be efficient on the cases where you are only interested in a lablel-like property of the relationship rather than the actual object in the relation.

Check out mikkels post on the subject

Today we have also been able to extend the query api to reflect this ontological change. We also agreed to add proper support of nested queries that truly makes the search api powerful. Biggest issues remaining currently are in the area of live queries. Here is a very good example of a real world ;) use case. By the way, using Gobby (gnome application) makes document collaboration astonishingly easy.

<!--
Maybe we could try to draft a spec as well? Maybe just some notes?
Because it's still not really clear what everyone up to because everyone is up to slightly different things.
-->

<!--
  Match all documents with keyword "biology" which author comes from the
  same country as any person with name Jim.
-->
<query content="xesam:Document" hitFields="xesam:title, xesam:author/xesam:givenName">

  <and>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:keyword"/>
      <string>biology</string>
    </equals>
    
    <equals>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:country"/>
      <field name="xesam:author/xesam:birthdate"/>
      <query content="xesam:Person" hitFields="xesam:country, xesam:birthdate">
        <and>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:givenName"/>
            <string>Kim</string>
          </equals>
          <equals>
            <field name="xesam:gender"/>
            <string>male</string>
          </equals>
          <greaterThan>
            <field name="xesam:birthdate"/>
            <date>1979-12-24</date>
          </greaterThan>
        </and>
      </query>
    </equals>
  
  </and>

</query>

Cairoclock out

Khertan was kind enough to package the cairoclock and put it to extras repository. Now we can all easily install the magnificent clock on diablo/chinook.

What makes it so great? Well, it's much better looking than the default clock. You can resize it as you see fit. It's simplistic and looks good.

Take a look at the screenshots below.




Also, what is truly great on that is that it's a python applet and has a very nice and clean code to serve as an example to anyone interested in making cairo based applets for the device. I do encourage giving it a go. You'll get good control over the content and cairo seems to be drawing quite fast even on larger surfaces.

As some sort of future update, the clock could be setup to have option to not to include the seconds.

Link to install is at maemo.org downloads

Theme Maker 1.1.7 now with support for icons

Theme maker now includes support for icons. Sure, it used to have the support earlier on as well, but now the support is proper and the icons are actually made into an icon gtk theme and the theme is then referred in the actual theme as the themes icon theme.

Confusing? Well the good thing is that no-one needs to care. Just open theme maker, set your theme name (no spaces), set your name, select bg file, select template file, select icon file, set theme version, top bar height (I recommend 60 - remind myself to put that as default, now it's 45), then set font sizes, font names, add a .ttf font if you want to install new font to the system. Click on the build theme and again on build theme on the next page and POW! You are done. Your own theme with your own font and your own icons. Currently only the home screens four icons are supported, I'll add the rest on later versions. Anyway, you still need to make the theme look your own, but to do that, all you need is photoshop (or any other similar tool) and a little patience. I've myself been especially using the fonts to get some sweet new fonts for my fbreader sessions.

Link to download: Download at garage

As you can see, I forgot to change the version number on the theme maker view. Will be fixed for 1.1.8. ;)

Please note that the icon template seems to be mandatory in this version. Looks like 1.1.8 is coming sooner than I thought! ;)

Tracker and vala goodness

I was just today looking at some examples of tracker use and stumbled on hum-gtk - a gtk music player that combines three very-close-at-heart projects together: gstreamer, vala and tracker. It's a simple app, the picture speaks louder than any description:



But the true greatness comes when you look at the source code of it. I dare you - do take a look at it:

http://hum-gtk.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/

You can see that you can make a decent music player (yeah, it's the 0.1 stage, so no-one is expecting a miracle) with just tiny amount of code.


Oh, by the way, I've published a new version of theme maker that has lot's of good fixes and font support and I'm now working on including icon support to the diablo.

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/?group_id=36
[edit] The screenshot is from the 0.1 version that was written on c. The code is still very neat, but not just vala. http://hum-gtk.googlecode.com/svn/branches/0.1/src/