During 2014 I started to become interested on how GStreamer was used in WebKit to play media content and how it was related to Media Source Extensions (MSE). Along 2015, my company Igalia strenghtened its cooperation with Metrological to enhance the multimedia support in their customized version of WebKitForWayland, the web platform they use for their products for the set-top box market. This was an opportunity to do really interesting things in the multimedia field on a really nice hardware platform: Raspberry Pi.

In the previous posts we learnt how to code and debug Chromium for Android C++ code from Eclipse. In this post I’m going to explain how to open the ChromeShell Java code, so that you will be able to hack on it like you would in a normal Android app project. Remember, you will need to install the ADT plugin in Eclipse  and the full featured adb which comes with the standalone SDK from the official page. Don’t try to reuse the android sdk in “third_party/android_tools/sdk”.

In the previous post, I showed all the references to get the Chromium for Android source code, setup Eclipse and build the ChromeShell app. Today I’m going to explain how to debug that app running in the device.

In the Chromium Developers website has some excellent resources on how to setup an environment to build Chromium for Linux desktop and for Android. There’s also a detailed guide on how to setup Eclipse as your development environment, enabling you to take advantage of code indexing and enjoy features such as type hierarchy, call hierarchy, macro expansion, references and a lot of tools much better than the poor man’s trick of grepping the code.

Over the last months I’ve been working in several projects, switched laptop and reinstalled my main distribution several times. Having to replicate the development environment one time after another and reinstall the compiler, tools, editor and all sorts of dependencies that stain a desktop distribution is a major nuisance. In the worst case, things won’t work as before due to incompatibilities of the new distribution. And what about bringing new developers to a complex project with a lot of dependencies which are difficult to track? The new team member can spend days trying to replicate the development environment of the rest of the team.

This post explains how to compile C source code for Android using the Native Development Kit (NDK) by using autotools to set up the building infrastructure and using androgenizer to convert that autotools infrastructure into Android.mk files understood by the ndk-build tool. I’ll first review some autotools concepts very quickly trough examples and iterate over them.

After months of collaborative work of a multidisciplinary team directed by Rafael Ibáñez and with the participation of Igalia, version 1.0 of Libertexto project is finally out.

Libertexto is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows the user to perform typical text comprehension tasks on electronic documents in the same way they’re performed on printed documents. Such tasks include highlighting, annotation, tagging, multimedia content linking, organization and exporting. The extension comes in two flavours: a lightweight version that only supports HTML pages and a full version that also supports PDF documents.

There aren’t many open source tools able to annotate PDF documents out there, so I’m convinced that Libertexto will satisfy a growing demand for this feature. To accomplish the goal, some customizations have been developed on top of Evince 2.28.0 to make it able to communicate with the Firefox extension and to manage the document annotations both in Windows and in GNU/Linux. Evince is embedded into Firefox by a custom plugin that is responsible for launching it and preparing the environment for the window embedding. For the curious readers, more technical details about the embedding process can be found in a previous post about Libertexto.

With this contribution, we expect all the reader community in the Spanish speaking world (the only language available by now) to have a new and powerful tool for text comprehension and commenting. Enjoy it!

UPDATE 7/3/2011:

At some point all the code sould be put together for proper download, but by now it’s scattered among different locations: The source code of the Firefox extension itself can be got by unzipping the XPI file. The source code of the modifications done over Evince can be got from gitorious and the source code of the PDF plugin can be got from here.

UPDATE 3/6/2011:

The new Libertexto 1.1 version is ready for download at libertexto.org. It corrects some compatibility problems with Firefox 4 in Linux, WinXP, Vista and Win7. If it seems that the install doesn’t work directly from the link, just download the file to the desktop and then drag&drop it to Firefox. An experimental version newer than 1.1 is also available in /dev/libertexto/libertexto.xpi. It fixes a bug that prevents the extension to work when the user account name had more than 8 characters, due to a path length limitation in Firefox on Windows.

I didn’t want to finish the year without devoting some time to Meiga, so I took advantage of Christmas holidays and prepared a new release with some long awaited features that make it a more serious tool:

• Dynamic port change
• SSL support
• Persistent settings storage
• Password protection

Latest information, including the source code, install instructions and previous versions can be found in the project website: http://meiga.igalia.com

Happy new year!

A new minor version of Meiga is out. This time there are no new features, only bugfixes and a more robust building process that now makes possible to publish Meiga from a Ubuntu PPA.

Latest information, including the source code, install instructions and previous versions can be found in the project website: http://meiga.igalia.com

I’ve recalled about my old Shishen Sho game, originally developed for N810 (Maemo4) and I was wondering if it would compile for N900 (Maemo5). Well, after some minor corrections to make it work in a more recent version of Vala, it compiled. You can downloaded it here:

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/7573/shishensho_0.3.1-maemo5_armel.deb

Disclaimer: It’s compiled “as is”, with no adaption for sliding menus, no new hardware keys and no new fancy features. It just works and will let you have a good time while waiting for the bus.