[Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

Greetings everyone,

• Have you ever wondered how some developers can make awesome-looking apps so quickly?
• Have you ever thought about what widgets or dialogs you should use for quick color or font selection?
• Have you ever wanted to make the menu of a cluttered app to look good?
• Have you ever planned to create a nice-looking about dialog for your app but you couldn't find the time?

If your answer to any of the above questions is yes, Hildon-Extras has come to save you!

Hildon-Extras is a library that contains community-contributed widgets and dialogs that are plain easy to use in Maemo applications. It is very easy to use and integrate into your app, and it provides you some touch-friendly dialogs and widgets.

Most of them are for Gtk-based software, but some of them also has Qt bindings!

Conny, the founder asked me to announce the project in here. For the full list of credits, check the Credits section in this post.

Dialogs

The dialogs can also be used from Qt-based apps!
Check out QtHeWrapper!

• HeAboutDialog
  http://wiki.maemo.org/images/e/ef/HeAboutDialog.png
  Provides a convenient about dialog. You just provide it with the stuff that you want it to display and it displays it. No extra coding needed.
• HeColorDialog
  http://wiki.maemo.org/images/b/b1/HeColorDialog.png
  Absolutely finger-friendly color dialog! Use this if you want your user to easily select an arbitrary color.
  You just call a method and it returns a color for you!
• HeSimpleColorDialog
  http://wiki.maemo.org/images/1/12/He...olorDialog.png
  This is even better!
  It has a set of very nice colours that the user can choose from. There is also an option to display an advanced button which lets users fine-tune the color they selected.
  You just call a method and it returns a color for you!
• HeFontDialog
  http://wiki.maemo.org/images/4/41/HeFontDialog.png
  An awesome font selection dialog that also allows your users to choose bold and italic versions of fonts.
  As with the others, it requires you only a single method call.

Menu View

Before and after:
http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:He-menu-...-and-after.png

This is the nice menu used in Pidgin for Maemo. It is recommended for applications with very cluttered menus to use this instead of the default Hildon menu.

Widgets

• HeCheckButton
  http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:HeCheckButton.png
  A nice check button which can have a description on it.
• HeFullscreenButton
  http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:HeFullscreenButton.png
  Button for leaving fullscreen mode.
• HeColorButton
  http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:HeColorButton.png
  Color selector button.
• HeFontButton
  http://wiki.maemo.org/Image:HeFontButton.png
  Font selector button.

... and even more!

HeHelper allows you to easily use common functions related to the N900.
It provides easy access to the vibrator, led, accelerometer, and the mouse cursor. It can also help with "tap and hold" setup.

Credits

The following idividuals are behind the making of Hildon-Extras:

• Cornelius Hald (Conny) - the founder
• Andrew Olmsted (Fiferboy)
• Faheem Pervez (qwerty12)
• Thomas Perl (thp)
• Gabriel Schulhof (Nix_nix)
• Timur Kristóf (Venemo)

Is it awesome?

Yes, it is pure awesomeness.
Check out who are using it!

If you are interested, see the wiki page and the documentation.

If you would like to contribute, see the Garage page and talk to Conny if you'd like to collaborate.

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

That's a really nice idea !

Unfortunately (for me), only one of these has been ported to Python, and it uses GTK.

I'd really like to see a similar toolkit, but Qt-based (as this seems to be the way to the future), and with Python bindings...

As a side note, I'm trying to determine how some people do these UIs with buttons at the top and a list, table or tree beneath, and the buttons scroll up off the screen when the list/table/tree is scrolled down ? Like on the Evernote client main screen, that's neat and beats toolbars...

if anyone knows (especially in PyQt) I'm all ears :-)

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

Finally some sort of a standard on which developers can rely

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

As I said, all of the dialogs have a Qt wrapper. So if you're developing a Qt app, it should be this simple:

This requires a single method call. It should be fairly easy to call it from Python, too.

They put the entire content into a scrollable area. (HildonPannableArea or QScrollAre, whatever.)

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

Thanks to all the devs!
This has really helped me a lot with MRAWViewer: next version (which will hit extras-devel Really Soon (tm)) will depend on libhildon-extras1!

Thanks again,

--
Luca Donaggio

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

We're happy we could help you!

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

fpp: HildonPannableArea is a GtkBin (which can just have one child), so if your want to put more in it, put a vbox in the pannable area and the other stuff into the vbox.

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

Looking at FMMS code, I found it uses HeAboutDialog.
As you can see from the following image, buttons on the about box are too thin for italian translations:
http://static.pixelpipe.com/0d5ebf8b...9bd5d7dc_m.jpg

Is it possible to make them wider? Looking at the doc looks there's no way to do it.
Thanks

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

As far as I know, the width of dialog buttons cannot be changed. Therefore the translation needs to be changed.

Re: [Announce] Hildon-Extras eases the life of developers
 

Yes, i digged through the code and found it's not possible.
I'm looking at transifex and proposing a better translation.
Thanks.