Notices

thp, thank you for opening this up!
{i only just found out}
do you accept donations? {paypal email is unfortunately the only convenient way for me to donate}

im currently replacing LpsMagic with BB, as the markup language is MUCH more expressive. {i was in the middle of coding markup-as-the-result-of-a-script in LPSM when i found out BB was GPL'd}

i just got started using it. so far, i have three problems {that may have nice solutions i cant figure out}:
1) i have not found a good way to trigger a render programmatically from a script. im currently setting the gconf text twice, i.e.:
text=`gconftool -g /apps/bb/text`; gconftool -s "$text "; gconftool -s "$text"
this is stupid and expensive.

i use this to update after my custom email client updates, and when my custom music player changes songs. if theres a way to add custom context-changed signals, thats what i would like to do instead.

2) BB does not re-render on lock. my current plan is to write a daemon that listens for tklock_mode_ind and simply run my cmdline re-render. {is there a context somewhere for screen locked?}

{re-rendering on lock is cheap, as it only happens a few dozen times a day max, takes less than a second, and current spikes at ~100mA. 30s of use at 100mA => 0.8mAh daily}

there are some things i put there that change often but are not important enough to trigger an update, like uptime and battery-milliamps {i often check this after plugging my phone in to make sure its not a 500mA charger}.
locking is the perfect time to update these. plus, its a reliable way to know that the LPS is accurate in case of bugs in my external apps.

3) theres no way to configure update interval without a recompile. i used to run LPSM every 30s. this is not necessary, assuming i can get a good way to trigger re-renders on custom events. it would be GREAT as an interim solution, tho, if there was a way to override the sysaligned min/max intervals in gconf.


if these are in fact features that dont exist in BB, and if they make sense living inside BB instead of locally in scripts, ill send a pull req later

You could implement e.g. a SIGUSR1 handler in Billboard and have it refresh that way, then you just need to send that signal to have it reload.

No need to write a external tool, you could just implement it similar to the volume support:

https://github.com/thp/billboard/blo...umeinterface.h

You could even make it so that there's e.g. {tklock-mode} as property that you can bind to, and then use {tklock-mode?} to bind Billboard's text to update whenever tklock-mode updated.

Ideally the update interval wouldn't need to be changed, as everything should update event-driven (only when something changes), instead of regularly (that's the whole point of Billboard compared to other, periodic solutions). However, I could imagine the interval to be configurable via GConf with a good (enforced) upper and lower bound (so people don't accidentally misconfigure their Billboard installation to update every minute.

Yes, send a pull request and we can get it integrated if it's good

awesome, thanks!

about the gconf setting, i never really agree with the whole 'not giving users rope to hang themselves' argument. im for having a sane default and letting the user do whatever ridiculous thing they want.
for instance, i can imagine setting it to every 10s to monitor power usage and then extrapolate, in order to test out changes in something else.

and about that donations thing...

tklock: https://github.com/thp/billboard/pull/1
dbus trigger will follow when i get another day off

Amy possibilty to have Billboard ported to Sailfish? I think it could be great with the LPM.

I had some prototype somewhere, but never finished it. Basically due to the fact that you can actually just output QML on the lock screen (and have it display in LPM), that makes things simpler compared to doing it via rendering images. Let's see if I find time to dig out that code.. (it's a QML plugin, so you basically don't have a daemon running anymore, but if you instantiate a Billboard QML element, it will show the Billboard content in your app / lock screen).

and sneak peek period is too short for showing a lot of data, it's not same with N9...

This is customizable, though:

https://github.com/nemomobile/mce/bl...display.h#L234

https://github.com/nemomobile/mce/bl...display.h#L136

sure, but you know, sneak peek is not officially enabled, maybe it just waiting for billboard

qdbus --system io.thp.billboard / render

https://github.com/thp/billboard/pull/2