I've been reading the maemo improvements blog recently and wazd has come out and specified how a decent new app launcher could be laid out.

The only way to find out for me was to tie up the graphics capabilities of liqbase with the *current* system menu structure.
So I have spent some time examining the interfaces and have managed to load and display and interact with the current system menu structure.

(I have also made the menu background use the current system one as well, this style improvement follows throughout liqbase currently)

This is by no means finished nor even in a final form yet, but just thought I would post the idea up here to gauge feedback.



I'm thinking of using a variation on the physics view to dynamically resize the icons within the selected menu, but keep everything on screen for those with a stylus and a keen eye.

I'm planning to have a set of icons down the side to allow quick sketching camera media player and contacts/calendar usage

just idle new year thoughts anyway.


As for liqbase itself, I have spent the last month or so cleaning up a lot of libraries and trying to create a single base widget to build from, its not ready yet and I was aching to get back to some visual code.
I just got myself a tabletpc which I have been after for a while and making the released 0.1.5 version work on it reminded me theres a lot still to do

ps, for those interested, here is the evolution:

At this path you will create a parallel desktop...

Have you considered to have a core subset of features around sketch, camera, doc view and graffiti wall only? These are the functions that imvho make liqbase stand out and they still need a lot of user friendly love.

Then the rest of pieces you and others are willing to play with could be additional plugins or separate apps/widgets build on top of the same base.

Like this app launcher. It's sweet but

a) Does the user really need it when what she wants is to draw a skets on top of a picture?

b) Being a launcher it should be available instantly after one click anyway.

Same for sketching, the user wants to be able to sketch right away. liqbase launch, stars and general menu are already in the way.

Gary, looks great!

But... please, don't put this into liqbase... That would be redundant... I want this to be brought up on the desktop!

This menu launcher, rendered quickly and smoothly through liqbase's brilliant programming, should be callable from the desktop instead of the menus we have now.

Thank you very much for putting your effort into this

And... yes... the physics view would be great in the menu, IMO

Yes, I know, I just wanted to see how it would look and feel.
I've wanted to do something with images for a while and needed to test how I improve the look of my standard liqbase controls for all the applications I have written which is much more important than the menu itself.

As you see, I have evolved my bare boring boxes into polished neat looking UI elements, this improvement has gone through the system and was why I spent some time examining how to do it.

Of course, that is my intention and part of the reason why I am building myself a core cleaned up set of classes.

I want it to be easy for me to create visually appealing elements without messing.

liqbase as it stands is large and unwieldy and contains many hacks, but it works, its fast and fluid and it lets me think about ideas.

I would rather have everything as simple standalone apps, and when discussing with people try to talk of liqsketch and liqreader rather than liqbase itself.

I spent a large proportion of this last 2 weeks examining various future proofed options, and have considered clutter and gtk and a whole set of other things to use as a back end.

The one promising path (clutter) would require me to rebuild the core widget and all classes anyway (as well as implement my own custom opengl line rendering functions, clutter knows nothing about lines), and if I dive in too quickly will simply stop all performance benefits I currently have (the current liqbase works flawlessly at 1024*768 in powersave mode 800mhz on my tabletpc).

If I can carefully create a widget and backend library which works well on both current and future hardware then everyone wins

Actually, this menu comes up right at the start of liqbase currently in place of the stars. The icon in the top right goes directly to sketching and I was going to add others to access the camera and contacts/calendar media player etc directly and quickly.

I only wanted to see how a dynamic desktop actually felt.

Nothing released and everything is flexible, and I am happy to talk about and share whats needed in other implementations of the same.

aisu,
for all my brilliant programming I still know little about how to make use of these improvements in other areas.

there is a great deal of uncertainly about how far clutter based rendering will be central to the UI and if I simply carry on using XV alone may end up with a lovely sketch app which is *just* for the n810 and which would not be usable elsewhere.

Until this week I had all but stopped development on the current untidy liqbase and set myself a target of a simple documented library and widget which I could use on my current n810 and on any other device I wanted to create my sketching app and anything else I want.

I'm not going to put this app manager into liqbase itself, but it will become one of the examples in the liqbase library documentation and its an important step towards me improving the general look and feel of my applications.

Gary, if you don't follow the "Competitors" forum, I got news for you boy :-)

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ad.php?t=26248