Coming back...

Hi folks!
I felt that I should keep you a little informed about my personal status since there are obviously some open questions that would require my attention.

I have been lousily quiet during the last few _weeks_ and that had a serious reason: I have been seriously sick! At first it kept me at home in bed but after some time I noticed that I needed intense medical treatment and had to visit a hospital. And this is where I still am. After hospital I will go on a short vacation of about one and a half weeks to get some more strength before going back to work.

During the last and coming weeks my internet connectivity is near to none; here in hospital my girl-friend sometimes brings me some things on floppies and I fear during my vacation I will have no connection at all.

Here in hospital I finally have the time to work on some things for GPE but without internet it is a little strange not beeing able to keep you up-to-date. So await a whole bunch of changes to my projects when I am back on track ;)

Concerning the new PIM apps: Folks, THAT'S PLAIN GREAT!
They have their edges but overall they start beeing usable (in fact I started to use especially the todo and calendar!) and that's what was needed in the first place! Again, great, I am very proud of you!

Areas I am currently working, just FYI:
- I started a libgpe which contains the xsi and what was the gnome-exec stuff which mainly gpe-appmgr uses. I think we should also merge libgpewidget into this. I have also started to add functionality for generating sounds (simple sine-wave beeps for alarms, saves storage space for .wav or .au files). I am now finally also working on a RTC-daemon to control the RTC alarm function. I will the needed API functions for it to libgpe too. If noone objects I would say please prepare to change from libgpewidget to plain libgpe when it is released. This is almost finished. My testprogram is (see next item) alarm application.

- A new application for managing alarms. It will present an overview over all registered alarms through the RTC-daemon, i.e. here also alarms by applications like calendar will be visible (but not editable). It will also allow to add/edit/delete simple new alarms like a daily wake-up alarm, a simple reminder or something similar. Those alarms will then use the soundgenerator built into libgpe to ring a bell if wanted. Most of the GUI stuff is done which has now to be integrated with libgpe ;)

- A new setup tool for wireless LAN cards. This is basically a nice editor frontend for the /etc/pcmcia/wireless.opts file. I recognised the need for it after I got a Socket CF WLAN card for testing which requires a lot of special settings before it starts working ;) The GUI for this took me quiet some time and is currently in a major state of turmoil ;) some functionality is also alread there and I expect this to be finished soon.

- Evaluate esd as sound-mixing-daemon. We need something like this since we only have one dsp device and multiple applications accessing it, i.e. media player and alarm sound (and whatever comes later). If esd is usable I will build an appropriate package of it and change the media player and alarm application appropriately. If esd does not fit I was thinking about writing our own gpe sound daemon. I have the sources here but have not yet compiled it.

- I am thinking about writing a GPE GUI style guide since I now have quite some experience we don't have to double effort and redoing the same mistakes twice ;) Apart from this we can maybe achieve a little more consitency in look and feel by this. Status: Idea is here, maybe I can start on it during my vacation.

You see, I am sitting here in my hospital room and have plenty of time ;)

And here finally a small wish list (please take this really a _wish_ list, nothing really serious):

- Please use Glade for the GUI design. This offers an additional abstraction that can become especially useful for future versions of GTK+ and Linux on portable devices. If I am not mistaken GTK+ 2 will offer functions like switching windows between displays and additionally have different GUI designs inside one application which will then be chosen automatically to best fit. Think about your application first running on the PDA and then beeing switched to a desktop screen! This is exactly when X11 can show its full powers.

- Please start using usqld instead of using libsqlite directly. First it should be stable enough to be usable. Second if it isn't it is just about time to find and fix them. An third, last but not least, we all know why uslqd was developed. For better concurrent access, change notification and a big wish from my side to abstract from storage locations. What this means? Ideally I would like to see that all applications store their data in just _one_ database (but different tables of course). A database is a file and a file is located somewhere. This "somewhere" is of no interest for the user. The user is just interested in the data inside. We could profit from this and put a database into each different storage location we want to use: internal RAM disk, internal Flash, external memory cards (CF, MMC, SD) or even networked storage. The application would then perform a select on a table (or several tables) via usqld. Usqld itself could then not only query a single specific database but rather query all databas
es it knows of, collect all results and present those results as one back to the application. This way if you insert a CF card into your iPaq which contains a valid GPE database you instantaniously have access to the additional data from it. One little side problem is how the application could then tell usqld in which database to store data ... but that's for later ;)
Received on Tue Jun 18 23:13:45 2002