News

January 5, 2009 by j3thomas

Well, today we released EWL 0.5.3, as its been 13 months since the last release.  According to my best estimates, 53241 lines of code were changed, and that isn’t including the massive formatting change that dj2 committed.  In addition, there were 85 bugs fixed.  Here is the release announcement:

I'm pleased to announce the release of EWL version 0.5.3. This release
has some extensive changes, including the following highlights:
       * Version 0.5.3:
         - Fixed compile warnings on 64-bit systems
         - Improved entry selection and cursor handling
         - A variety of bug fixes and type corrections
         - Formatting improvements
         - Normalized widget realize/unrealize and show/hide
         - Cleaned out private headers to reduce build times
         - Rewrite of paned widget
         - Addition of constructor unit tests
         - 'Create Directory' button added to filepicker
         - Kinetic scrolling added to the scrollpane
         - Stop building unneeded static libraries to reduce build time
         - The ewl_password widget is now part of ewl_entry to reduce code duplication
         - Various feature additions to the filepicker family of widgets
         - Better robustness of ewl_progressbar widget
         - Split flags into attributes of the ewl_object and ewl_widget objects
         - Internal XDND support
         - Improved MVC selection handling
         - Addition of a SHRINKABLE fill policy
         - Improved container behaviour
         - Keybinding support for the ewl_text widget
         - Addition of an ewl_icondialog widget
         - Improvement of model terminology
         - Add an UNMANAGED flag to improve container behaviour
         - EWL is now Evilized!
         - Addition of a alpha channel slider to the ewl_colorpicker widget
         - Autofoo improvements
         - Expanded support for config key removal
         - General window management hint improvements
         - Improved robustness of the ewl_grid widget
         - Improved widget signal handling
         - Use merged software X11 engine
         - Various code cleanups thanks to LLVM static analysis
         - Removal of original ewl_tree, rename ewl_tree2 to ewl_tree
         - Moved tutorials from the test files to seperate directory
         - Creation of coverage report with gcov and lcov is now supported
         - Addition of ewl_freebox_mvc widget
         - ewl_embed now inherits from ewl_cell instead of ewl_overlay
         - Expanding of the ewl_tree widget API
         - Various fixes and feature additions for the ewl_text widget
         - Allow the ewl_label widget to be trunctated with '...'
         - Improved the cosmetics of the debugging macros
         - Revamped ewl_combo MVC API and implementation
         - Split widget tests into GUI and unit test cases
         - Fixed widget reparenting

Thank you to the following contributors for making this release possible:

        Peter Wehrfritz
        Jaime Thomas
        Teodor Petrov
        Dan Sinclair
        Vincent Torri
        Stephen Houston

This release can be checked out from:
        http://svn.enlightenment.org/svn/e/tags/ewl/ewl-0.5.3/

Of course, Nathan Ingersoll should also get some credit for this release, seeing as he is the main author and did the actual releasing.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve just finished moving into my house in Kanata.  I’ll be starting work tomorrow, but getting to work is a bit of a pain with the transit strike.  I’ll take a cab tomorrow morning, and hope that someone there is nice enough to offer me a ride home.  I guess I’ll see how that goes.

Exam Time

December 10, 2008 by j3thomas

Being close to Christmas break, its time for exams.  Unfortunately, Starcraft and ECDB keep me distracted and take up all of my time, so there is very little studying occurring.  Over the past two days I’ve been putting a lot of work into ECDB, and now have image burning working pretty well.  I’ve made a video to show what it can do.  Don’t mind the random percent jumps, I cut off the boring middle stuff to speed things up.

I quite like the editable textblock raster added to edje, it makes life so much easier.  With all of the time before heading off to Ottawa for co-op, I should be able to finish off data and audio disc creation.  The only issue at the moment is an old EWL bug that will cause problems with multiple embeds.  After that, I’ll start adding some configuration options and polish, then maybe someday a release.

http://vimeo.com/2477921

Update

November 12, 2008 by j3thomas

Its been a while, since I’ve written on here, so I guess its time for an update.  First off, I finally got a co-op job for this winter, at COM DEV International as a software developer.  I’ll be working on control systems for some parts of the James Webb Space Telescope (replacement for the Hubble Telescope), which is the best job I could hope for (although the ones for Xandros looked pretty cool as well).  I even need security clearance for it!  Anyways, I’ll be moving to Ottawa in a while for the co-op, and although its not Europe its still somewhere more interesting than here.

On an unrelated note, I’ve very slowly been working on ECDB.  I think that I have the erasing part working the way I’m happy with, although I haven’t tested it yet (don’t have an eraseable disc).  I need to ask pygi about how to simulate this.  Anyways, heres a screenshot (there is actually no EWL being used in this picture – all edje and embryo):

ecdb

ECDB Update

October 5, 2008 by j3thomas

I had some requests on IRC for a recent screenshot of ECDB, so here’s a screencast instead:

Procrastination at Job Time

October 3, 2008 by j3thomas

The past week was pretty terrible.  My computer crashed over the weekend, so I was trying to get that working again, and then I ended up procrastinating way too much with my homework.  I ended up doing calculus until 1 in the morning a couple days in a row, and then was up late again last night with a communications report.  Anyways, I guess thats over now.

One of the highly touted aspects of my university is the co-op program, and its job application time.  I’m sure its a great system for later-year students, but for us 4-stream first years its a pain.  Since we have only two months schooling by the time applications roll around (with absolutely nothing practical), we are reduced to jobs like Assistant Computer Administrator, where one of our main tasks is to compile “a repository of documentation”.  While the vast majority really suck, I did apply for some interesting jobs.  AMD had a position for working on the Linux drivers for ATI cards, but I’ve already been turned down for that (it was a senior position).  Most of the other jobs I applied to were more in the computer science category, but whatever.

On a somewhat related topic, I’ve joined the robotics team.  The first project for all first years is to fabricate a mini-sumo bot, which is apparently pretty easy.  I’ve also joined a more advanced project that plans to build a mars rover to compete in competitions somewhere around Ontario.  In conclusion, I have to hand in a report now.

More ECDB work

September 20, 2008 by j3thomas

So I’ve been doing some more work on ECDB.  It is now pretty much at the same point that it was before when I was using entirely EWL widgets.  At the moment, only the filelist widget is from EWL, all the rest is Edje.  An added bonus of using mostly edje are cool things like a typebuf for the filelist.  At the moment it now allows for changing directories and setting the filelist filters, and it’ll get more commands as I feel the need.

Second Week

September 13, 2008 by j3thomas

So I’ve managed to survive not only frosh week, but also the first week of school.  Frosh was great fun, with junkyard wars and scavenger hunts.  We even built a reasonably complicated Rube Goldberg machine involving (among other things) a smashed vacuum cleaner, a giant tire, and a mop.

The first week of school was OK, although there are a lot of hours spent in a classroom (30 a week).  We’ve already been assigned more work than pretty much an entire month in high school, but that was expected.  So far its all easy, but practicing my engineering lettering seems like a waste of time.  I think the worst thing so far is the need to run a virtual machine of Windows XP for programming assignments and to access the course websites (it freezes Firefox and Opera, and Konqueror just shows a big black box).  Oh well.  All in all, it looks like an alright time (just need to find some stuff to do in Waterloo).

Frist Post

August 23, 2008 by j3thomas

First post with my spiffy new XPS m1530.  I’ve just gotten E up and running, and it looks quite nice.  Anyways, I’ve got just under a week to get ready and packed before I head off to start university.

code_swarm EFL

August 9, 2008 by j3thomas

Heres another, with all of the EFL in HD glory,  so its hopefully better quality.  Its more of a time-waster than anything, although I suppose for people newer to the project it shows in nicely animated fashion whos worked on what and for how long.

code_swarm

August 9, 2008 by j3thomas

Noticed this a couple days ago, decided to give it a try.  It results in a pretty neat video, and shows how many people really have commited to EWL.  Music from here, and you can find more about code_swarm here.

Update: Switched video to Vimeo, as it is better quality.  Full-sized video.