Blog moved

Hi there - If you're still reading this, please update your bookmark to http://chrislord.net/ :)

gtkhtml2 JavaScript?

I handed in my progress report for my dissertation, and one of the sentiments made in it was that the methods I'm using for small-screen-rendering (which is the subject of the dissertation) would likely not work with gtkhtml2 due to its lack of JavaScript support... But like many a coder, as soon as those words were committed to hand-in, I realised it was a challenge that I had to take on :)

And so, the very preliminary results (using spidermonkey):
This html:

JavaScript test:<br />
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write("<b>Hello World!<\/b>");
</script>
<br />
This should appear after the Hello World.

produces this result:

As it should.

At the moment, only document.write is handled, but given that's probably one of the hardest functions to handle, I've got a good start :)

As an aside, also implemented tooltips with gtkhtml2 - I should probably patch liferea for that, it's the only reason I use the mozilla engine in it...

Web, Contacts, Dates, etc.

Been a while since my last update... Lots of work has gone into Contacts since the release - highlights include general bug-fixing, single-instance code, command-line vCard loading and gnome-vfs support. It's quite nice as the default vCard handler, as you can click on a vCard link and have it open in Contacts and optionally imported into your evo address book. 0.2 will be quite a step up from 0.1 in terms of functionality.

Dates has progressed quite a lot too - You can now edit all the important aspects of events (such as summary, time, location, details). There have been fixes to do with timezones and it now supports multiple calendars (although at the moment, there is no UI to pick them - WIP). Hopefully it'll be fully functioning within a month or two and I can make a release to go alongside Contacts (of which 0.2 will probably be coming soon). The drawing code still needs some major work though unfortunately.

Web has received a major overhaul over the past couple of days - I've abstracted all the rendering code and made the rendering engine a plug-in system using g_module. I plan on writing a mozilla plug-in, as seeing as it's related to my dissertation, I need a well-featured stable platform to work with and gtkhtml2 doesn't yet cut it (perhaps I'll have some time to hack on it in the holidays, like I wanted to a while ago).

I'm very busy at the moment with uni work, again... They like to push us at Southampton. What gets me is that none of the work is incredibly hard, it's just there's a lot of it and it's all scheduled to be handed in at the exact same time. Very inconvenient.

Work aside, had a great Christmas and new year, got to catch up with a couple of friends, spend some time with my girlfriend, play some games. Got a Nintendo DS for Christmas and its really revived my love for gaming - it's nice to play something that isn't just the same old recycled crap again (or if it is recycled, it wasn't crap - in the case of Mario 64 :)).

Oh, and looks like I'm quite well suited to Computer Science, according to QuizFarm.com:

You scored as Mathematics. You should be a Math major! Like Pythagoras, you are analytical, rational, and when are always ready to tackle the problem head-on! Mathematics 92% Philosophy 83% Engineering 83% Theater 75% Journalism 75% Psychology 75% Sociology 75% Linguistics 67% English 67% Art 50% Dance 42% Chemistry 42% Anthropology 42% Biology 25% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

Contacts!

I'm very proud to present the first release of Contacts - An evolution-data-server using address book, designed for use on hand-held devices (like the Nokia 770), but also quite useful on the desktop. Although it uses evolution-data-server, there are some incompatabilities with addresses in Evolution (as I try to conform to vCard specification and Evolution handles addresses very oddly). Hopefully you'll enjoy the superior type and category handling though :)

Some screens:






If you want to check it out from subversion, you can do so with the following line:
svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/contacts/trunk contacts

Or you can grab the release tarball.

Web progress

Web is making some pretty quick progress, I plan on making the first release next weekend. New features since last update: Tabbed browsing, simpler toolbar, history, error pages, less bugs. After it becomes usable (i.e. after I finish with bookmarks and the menus), I'll start working on abstracting the backend and providing a gtk-webcore plugin. A gtkmozembed plugin would also be very easy to write, however, I think I may not out of principal (gecko isn't the be-all and end-all of html rendering libraries people!)

Hopefully this browser will spark some interest in gtkhtml2 - I hope to do some work on it myself, it seems like it could do with a new maintainer (bugs with attached patches that haven't been resolved in bugzilla, etc.)... Will see - Anyway, Screenshot

OpenedHand, web, uni

The holiday period has come to and end, as has my contract with OpenedHand unfortunately. I've definitely had a lot of fun working with the guys there and hope to be able to carry on part-time; there's certainly a lot more I want to do. During this short break, I've been working on my web browser. It no longer uses synchronous wget instances to fetch, but asynchronous gnome-vfs calls - I've made a few other improvements too and it's actually starting to become a functional browser (it's good enough to search on google :)). GtkHtml2 has a lot of oddities that I'd like to fix once this browser reaches a state of stability - the biggest being how it changes the top-level window menubar background colour to white... That's a very weird bug. Although the likelihood of it ever happening is just about zero, it would be nice to see GtkHtml2 become a viable alternative to gecko, at least for memory-limited systems (gtkhtml + deps make minimo look monolithic). A couple of screens: Screen 1, Screen 2.

LinuxWorld

LinuxWorld tomorrow, and I'll be there with the rest of the OpenedHand guys - Should be exciting, if I'm awake enough after stupidly staying up late and hacking on this - a web-browser that uses libgtkhtml2 to render and wget to download (yes, horrible, I know...) - libgtkhtml2 does a surprisingly good job of a lot of pages, I'd like to see it developed (the code reads nicely, is written in C and doesn't depend on every library under the sun! huzzah!)