I've been looking at QML today. Here's a little Christmas present for you all: an adventure game in QML.



This is probably really ugly QML because I'm still learning it. It uses the Gnusto just-in-time compiler as the back end.

You can download this and play with it here (please! play with it and extend it as you see fit): qml-gnusto-0.01.tar.bz2

(And if you like adventure games, you might also like today's poem.)

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Earlier this year, arising out of a conversation at GUADEC, I wrote a nautilus plugin to upload images to imgur.com. (This is useful because imgur doesn't require an account: you can just install, hit "upload", and off you go.)

Here is a copy of the same thing as a MeeGo RPM, suitable for use on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference. Once this is installed, you can select a .jpg image in the file browser, press the menu button, and choose "Post to imgur" from the resulting menu. Equivalently, you can choose the same option from the Edit menu. The image will be uploaded, and the web browser will pop up at the new URL.  Then you can send it to your friends, embed it in a blog post, or whatever you like.

The source is here.

Things I would like to do with this:

• Add a similar menu option to the image viewer (which is currently Eye of GNOME).   I haven't looked into how easy it is to extend eog.
• Add an icon to the launcher which brought up a file chooser.
• Separate out the uploading part to a DBus service.
• Do this as a libsharing plugin for Maemo.  I would do this, but I have broken my scratchbox and have no tuits to fix it.
• Have some app which remembered the images you'd uploaded and helped you find them again.  Especially, if you try to upload the same image twice, it should just take you to the previous copy.

Let me know if you use this, what feedback you have, and whether any of the above would be useful to you.

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Earlier this year, arising out of a conversation at GUADEC, I wrote a nautilus plugin to upload images to imgur.com. (This is useful because imgur doesn't require an account: you can just install, hit "upload", and off you go.)

Here is a copy of the same thing as a MeeGo RPM, suitable for use on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference. Once this is installed, you can select a .jpg image in the file browser, press the menu button, and choose "Post to imgur" from the resulting menu. Equivalently, you can choose the same option from the Edit menu. The image will be uploaded, and the web browser will pop up at the new URL.  Then you can send it to your friends, embed it in a blog post, or whatever you like.

The source is here.

Things I would like to do with this:

• Add a similar menu option to the image viewer (which is currently Eye of GNOME).   I haven't looked into how easy it is to extend eog.
• Add an icon to the launcher which brought up a file chooser.
• Separate out the uploading part to a DBus service.
• Do this as a libsharing plugin for Maemo.  I would do this, but I have broken my scratchbox and have no tuits to fix it.
• Have some app which remembered the images you'd uploaded and helped you find them again.  Especially, if you try to upload the same image twice, it should just take you to the previous copy.

Let me know if you use this, what feedback you have, and whether any of the above would be useful to you.

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Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.

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Further to my previous post:

Here's a live AJAX-based version you can play with. It's not very fast unless the word is cached, and it only takes at most a word of context (unlike the real thing, where the context is everything you've ever typed), but it should serve to demonstrate the principle.

Now to release the code, and to look into patching existing VKB systems.

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Funnily enough, someone was asking about virtual keyboards on gtk-list this morning.

Last week at the MeeGo Conference several people were talking about virtual keyboards, and the idea came up of doing predictive text, either by making more likely letters physically larger, or merely by increasing their sensitivity.

When I came home, I wrote a JavaScript mock-up based on a third-order Markov chain. It's quite fun to play with, especially on a touchscreen.

When I showed this to a few people at Collabora and elsewhere, Rob McQueen suggested avoiding reinventing the wheel by using the rather wonderful Dasher system as a back end. So, after a longish hacking session, here it is:



State of the keyboard after typing "FLO".

Click here to see a video of the keyboard in action

The front end shown here is just a custom GTK widget I threw together; in real life it would use an existing input method. I've exaggerated the differences between letter sizes for demonstration. (As I mentioned above, the physical letter sizes might not change at all.)

There is a wiki page about all this. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping work on this; I'll be releasing the code shortly, and adding a link on the wiki to it. (Odd thought: I wonder how useful another demonstration piece of JavaScript would be, pulling data from Dasher running as a CGI. Let me know.)

There is also an existing roughly similar system for Android, and, I hear, for the iPhone.

Update: An AJAX version you can play with.

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Funnily enough, someone was asking about virtual keyboards on gtk-list this morning.

Last week at the MeeGo Conference several people were talking about virtual keyboards, and the idea came up of doing predictive text, either by making more likely letters physically larger, or merely by increasing their sensitivity.

When I came home, I wrote a JavaScript mock-up based on a third-order Markov chain. It's quite fun to play with, especially on a touchscreen.

When I showed this to a few people at Collabora and elsewhere, Rob McQueen suggested avoiding reinventing the wheel by using the rather wonderful Dasher system as a back end. So, after a longish hacking session, here it is:



State of the keyboard after typing "FLO".

Click here to see a video of the keyboard in action

The front end shown here is just a custom GTK widget I threw together; in real life it would use an existing input method. I've exaggerated the differences between letter sizes for demonstration. (As I mentioned above, the physical letter sizes might not change at all.)

There is a wiki page about all this. Let me know if you'd be interested in helping work on this; I'll be releasing the code shortly, and adding a link on the wiki to it. (Odd thought: I wonder how useful another demonstration piece of JavaScript would be, pulling data from Dasher running as a CGI. Let me know.)

There is also an existing roughly similar system for Android, and, I hear, for the iPhone.

Update: An AJAX version you can play with.

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I'm hereby releasing a public beta of robotfindskitten version 2.0 for MeeGo. I've been sitting on it for far too long. This is a complete rewrite in Qt. It's only designed for the netbook; I haven't tested on the handset. It should work fine on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference.

Links:

• The RPM is here, mirrored here. Install it with rpm -i rfk-2.0.0-1.i586.rpm.
• Screenshots: the launcher, the front screen, a game in progress.
• The source is in git here, mirrored here.
• Doxygen of the source is here, mirrored here.
• If you know nothing about robotfindskitten, see robotfindskitten.org or Wikipedia's article.

If you lot like this, it will go into the Garage.  There are some issues I still need to consider; let me know what you think:

• Is it a good reimplementation of Maemo rfk?  Is it a good implementation of rfk in its own right?
• Is it playable?
• Are dialogue boxes a reasonable implementation of the popup messages?  On Maemo I used banners (thus), which were perhaps less intrusive.
• For those of you who know Qt and C++, I would appreciate some code review.
• On the handset it's still going to vibrate when robotfindskitten.  Do you think it should bleep or something (or miaow) on the netbook?

I think Planet GNOME will be getting this as well because my feed setup doesn't have tags specific enough; I apologise in advance.


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I'm hereby releasing a public beta of robotfindskitten version 2.0 for MeeGo. I've been sitting on it for far too long. This is a complete rewrite in Qt. It's only designed for the netbook; I haven't tested on the handset. It should work fine on the Lenovo machines distributed at the MeeGo conference.

Links:

• The RPM is here, mirrored here. Install it with rpm -i rfk-2.0.0-1.i586.rpm.
• Screenshots: the launcher, the front screen, a game in progress.
• The source is in git here, mirrored here.
• Doxygen of the source is here, mirrored here.
• If you know nothing about robotfindskitten, see robotfindskitten.org or Wikipedia's article.

If you lot like this, it will go into the Garage.  There are some issues I still need to consider; let me know what you think:

• Is it a good reimplementation of Maemo rfk?  Is it a good implementation of rfk in its own right?
• Is it playable?
• Are dialogue boxes a reasonable implementation of the popup messages?  On Maemo I used banners (thus), which were perhaps less intrusive.
• For those of you who know Qt and C++, I would appreciate some code review.
• On the handset it's still going to vibrate when robotfindskitten.  Do you think it should bleep or something (or miaow) on the netbook?

I think Planet GNOME will be getting this as well because my feed setup doesn't have tags specific enough; I apologise in advance.


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The other day, over porter somewhere in Dublin, we were discussing people who run curses-based applications in the X terminal under Maemo, rather than using the GUI. (For example, some people run mutt rather than modest, irssi rather than xchat, and so on.) Sometimes people do this because they want or need to run the client on a remote machine, and they don't want to bother with X forwarding. Sometimes they just prefer the character interface.

The idea was then floated of having an escape sequence which caused the client to pop up a notification, so that even a curses-based application running on a remote server could alert you that you had new mail, or that someone had just said your name in channel.

So on the plane home, I hacked up an example implementation:



You can find the patches here:

• patch to vte
• patch to gnome-terminal
• the Python script used above to demonstrate

Further thoughts:

• it still needs osso-xterm integration, but that should be easy
• patches to mutt, irssi, and so on to produce these sequences would be useful
• we need to work out something to do with terminfo to report that this sequence may be generated
• it uses OSC code 55, which is otherwise unused in gnome-terminal, but I don't know whether anyone else uses it for anything.  (The relevant spec, ECMA-48, says that OSC codes are user-defined, but I'd still rather not tread on anyone's toes.)
• it only allows the sequence to be terminated by BEL; this is traditional, but ECMA-48 actually requires ST instead.  This will be trivial to allow as well.
• I'm not at all sure about min/max versions of libnotify

(Of course, there are also other ways to get the same effect.  But I think this is a good general solution.)

(Edit: naltrexone suggests appropriate Flann O'Brien parody.)

Your thoughts (and patches) are welcome, as always.

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