Pal Szasz’s blog… or something like that…

Well, in the weekend I was working on Pixie, and there is significant progress: the pen tool is working But no loading/saving yet.

The most interesting part is the development process: I created a stub application in FLTK and worked on it in FLTK using some simple abstract interface. The just implemented the interface in Symbian, and recompiled it. Of course it didn’t work at first…neither the second time… abut after a few hours it worked:-)

For the main view I created my own Widget class (the screen components are pretty simple anyway). I also created a simple Graphics class, which has implementation for FLTK and for Symbian as well. Using those it was pretty easy to make a first version of the game (of course some other classes were needed as well, like Event, etc).

But I’m afraid I have to think of a new solution for dialogs, since the program will need some extra views/dialogs as well.

One of the possibility is to use some new classes, with dual implementation.

The other is to use the same Widgets as I use in the main screen.

I think the second option will be easier (and faster and easier to debug), but won’t have the native look and feel…

Btw, it would be really interesting to implement the control framework using FLTK

Well, I found out how to make an app start automatically at boot, hence TABU 0.4 is released:

• now it  starts at boot
• now it starts animation automatically (ie. no need to select More->Start)
• now it automatically hides himself on start (you can still see it in the task list, hence you can bring it forward or kill it)

So it’s ready to be installed (secretely) on your friend’s phone and just wait his reactions (photos are welcome )

Oh, I almost forgot the download link: tabu_0_4_uiq3.sis

Well, it’s about another new UIQ3 prgogram… Well, not quite new, I want to rewrite PIXIE for UIQ3, but with a better design.

Since I don’t have too much time for coding, I want to do the design part well. So, let’s take it step by step

Step 1) What will be Pixie?

Pixie will be a pixel-art oriented image editor. Ie. you will be able to create and edit indexed/palettized raster images (mainly PNG format). So it should support at least load/save, zoom, paint tool and palette editing. Optionally it should support copy/paste with different selection shapes, fill/line/circle/ellips tool, palette loading/saving, layers, etc.

Step 2) How would it look like?

Well, I made a quick concept image:

Some explanations:

• Top status bar should remain, it occupies really small place and it’s good if people can see the battery state, can switch tasks easily, etc.
• The bottom softkey bar is also need to access the menu. The “UNDO” function should be at a very easily accessible place
• The application title area is removed, no need for that, occupies too much space
• In the top left is the 1:1 zoom area
• Next to it (to the right) are the customizable controlls: the toolbar, the palette bar and info bar.
• The rest is the X:1 zoom area (with optional grid)

I was thinking that the 1:1 zoom area should be resizable, the right edge should be able to moved left/right, the controll area will be resized as well. So users can choose between more controlls or bigger preview area. Also it should be resized vertically, by turning the infobar off, or increasing the number of lines of the palettebar.

The toolbuttons should be totally customizable: a long press of them would allow the user to change them (ie. to select from the full list, or to select an empty tool). In fact they would be allowed to select one of the tool_commands.

The keys should be remapped as well, to any key any command could be mapped. Commands are tool_commands + some additional command. Ie users could map to any key any tool command or some special commands, like: select next tool, select previous tool, select next color, select previous color. For example if somebody uses most often the pen and pick tool, he sets as his first (maybe only) tools in the toolbar these tools, and assigns the jog up/down to next/previous tool. Thus he can change quikly to pick and pen by the jog dial.

The palette bar should be customized. It doesn’t neccessarily match the image palette. It could be a sub region or a totally random subset. Ie. it can be for example colors “0 to 10″, or “12 to 23″, or colors “1, 34, 2, 5, …”.

One click selects the color, double click changes the color to another one from the palette. Long press changes the color’s RGB components.

Well, that’s if for today, more ideas will follow soon

Well, I sorted out some of the problems, but there are still some problems ahead… but I think the program is already usefull.

First of all: the floating widnow wierdness was my bug (there was an iPosition both in TPointerEvent and in CCoeControll, and some DrawDeferred calls were missing).

Still no pointer events while the main window is not visible

But I finally sorted out the memory problems (thanks to the UIQ and SE dev forums). Just for the record, elf2e32’s -heap option can take two arguments, and the second one is the maxium heap. (I was setting the minimum to 2MB, and let the maximum at 2MB… hihi…)

Anyway, the program is partly functional, can be downloaded here: UIQ3 binary: theopenscreencapture_0_2.sis, source code: tosc_0_2_src.tar.gz

Features:

• floating icon which shows the download counter (and which is hidden when the screenshot is made)
• saves to PNG format (less file size then BMP files) on the memory card
• users can choose between 0sec, 10sec and 30sec timeout.

And some screenshots:

Well, that’s it for now, more to come later.

Today I finally decied I need a good and free screen capture utility, so I started to work on a new project called TOSC - The Open Screen Capture. Prety lame name, I know… but it’s good enough for me… temporary.

Anyway, as the name sais, it will be a completely free and even opensource program… when it will be ready, but right now I have some problems with it

First of all the floating window I created doesn’t seem to get any pointer event if the main view is not visible.

Second: it behaves pretty strangly when the main view is visible as well. But hopefully I will sort out these errors ASAP.