Notices

Fettuccine should be able to work with any of the classic "one image every few seconds" types of webcam. The more modern "live video" webcams seem to either be using flash, or some proprietary video format; I'm not sure whether I'd be able to come up with a client for those.

Anyway, if you've got a link to a website with a webcam you'd like to see in Fettuccine, I can throw together some Fettuccine XML for it...

I think I could do that; from what I've seen so far, Fettuccine doesn't use much memory and almost no CPU. (Well, except when displaying an animated GIF file. I don't yet know why it runs the CPU so hard when on an animated GIF...)

But I'd think that shrinking these webcam images down even further would make things a bit hard to see. The widget would probably have to take up a lot of space to be useful, wouldn't it? (I suppose it'd be possible to vary the size...)

Hi all,
I installed the app, and it works fine.

I added a new line to the xml file on first post:

The image loads fine as expected but I have a notification popup saying:

But It's not a bad issue, the application is just great.

I see that you've set the refresh rate to 2 seconds; I've been noticing that when I set the refresh rate that low, Fettuccine seems to start having trouble retrieving images.

Testing from a browser on my desktop, it looks as though the ulaval.ca webcam does update that quickly (although even Chrome starts glitching if I keep hitting "refresh" fast enough ). I'll take a look to see if there's anything I can improve in the image retrieval code, but for now, Fettuccine might work better with a slower refresh rate (maybe 5 seconds or so)...

Ah, but if it's hooked up to a 40" TV it's a different matter...

Alright, I've finally managed to create a Maemo homescreen widget. Version 0.9.0 of Fettuccine is now making its way up to Extras-Devel, and should hopefully allow you to run it as a widget; at least, it is working for me.



Some notes: (a) While Fettuccine uses very little CPU, it does take up a bit of memory (top reports a bit less than 10% for most of my testing). So, it wouldn't take too many desktop widget instances to eat up all your ram. (It may be possible to drive multiple views from a single Fettuccine executable, but it doesn't look pretty; Maemo seems to favor the "one widget, one view" policy...)

(b) This is my first ever Maemo homescreen widget, so I'm absolutely positive there will be bugs. Please be patient with me!

(c) I don't really use widgets for, well, anything on my N900s. I'm sure there are general conventions on usage and UI design that I'm missing. Right now, each widget can be modified via a dialog box that comes up when you hit the little "wrench" icon that comes up after a long-press on the screen (or, I guess, double-click the screen and then click the gear icon that drops down). From this dialog box you can access most of the same controls that are available on the Fettuccine menu, as well as change the size of the widget. Hopefully, this will be sufficient for playing around with the widget for now...

Some implementation notes: the "qt4-homescreen-loader" package makes widget generation very easy. In fact, it makes it easy to create an app that doubles as a widget, which is what I have in fact done with Fettuccine. If you pass it the command-line argument "--runAsApp", Fettuccine will start up as a normal app; otherwise, it will attempt to start running as a widget. (As it turns out, I couldn't use the argument "--runAsWidget", because there appears to be no way to pass arguments to a widget...) There are some annoying stumbling blocks as well; all of the standard Maemo widgets set the attribute "X-Multiple-Instances=false" in their .desktop files. Since I wanted to allow multiple instances, I set that attribute to true in my .desktop file. This was completely useless, as it turns out actual attribute is just "X-Multiple"; so, that line in all the standard widgets is just a no-op. I spent a few frustrating hours trying to figure out that one... Another subtle issue is that if your widget brings up a dialog box (such as for the settings), you must not give that dialog box a parent pointer. If you set the widget as the dialog's parent, mouse events will get scattered among the various objects on the screen rather than being focussed on the dialog box. (This is apparently a side effect of the technique that "qt4-homescreen-loader" uses to communicate with the Hildon desktop.)

So, anyway, hopefully this will be a useful and enjoyable addition to the Fettuccine app.

EDIT: A little youtube video with a quick overview of Fettuccine:

http://youtu.be/0URUZZ50s7o

looks awsome though i do not find any use for your app

Indeed! But I do sometimes enjoy creating apps that don't seem very useful.

@nokiabot: what about surveillance camera in your home, office or celebrity you chose to stalk ?

dont worry i will find some use as this app must be something awsome as it comes from copernicuss