conny | # 1 | 2009-08-18, 14:00 | Report

Yes, I want my application (Conboy) to be ready for Fremantle, but no, Nokias marketing arm didn't offer any help yet

As I'm doing this only in my free time I'm looking for people who are interested in contributing a bit of their precious time to this small project to make it a success on Fremantle, but also of course on our beloved Diablo and Chinook.

Here are some good reasons why you should contribute to Conboy:

• It's a small project, so you'll find your way around quickly
• You can have SVN access if you want
• You'll get karma
• The code is crap - So you'll always feel good about the elegant work you just did
• Do something fun while waiting for the next device
• I'll help where I can
• I could go on

Currently I'm working on online synchronization with a REST web service called Snowy. Also I'm working together with Piotras on a plugin mechanism.
I guess this will keep me busy for about the next 4 weeks. However there are many more things that could be done. If you're interested, have a look at the feature requests and the wiki page.


Currently most wanted

For now my most wanted feature is a proper user interface for the settings window. We need a UI for Diablo and one for Fremantle both should look better then the current version (which shouldn't too be hard).
I would be happy to receive paper drawings, gimp/photoshop mockups , glade files or code. Code would be the best though

Here are some screenshots how it looks now:


This dialog opens when the user selects "settings" from the menu. It's already mostly adapted to Fremantle, but the color buttons look ugly there.


This dialog pops up when clicking "Synchronization". I didn't spend any time on it yet. The app is using OAuth, so the auth process should be like this:
1) The user enters the URL
2) The user clicks "Authenticate"
3) The browser opens and shows a login to some sync web application.
3.5) In the meantime Conboy shows a message about what's going on.
4) The user authenticates with the website and grants Conboy access to the websites data.
5) Conboy gets a signal that the user is done and is shown again. It shows the user that everything is properly setup.
6) Authenticate button and url field are insensitive.

The "clean" button is there to delete the saved auth information. That's all for the sync I think...


This dialog is shown when the user clicks "Plugins". It shows all available plugins and let the user select which should be used. The "About Plugin" button should show stuff like author, copyright, etc. of the selected plugin. The "Configure Plugin" button should popup a dialog with plugin specific settings.

It would really be nice to have the number of popup dialog drastically reduced and to not use them with Fremantle at all.

If you are interested in helping out somehow please let me know. It's not only code that we need, but a small website would be great, a new icon would be awesome and more translations are of course welcome as well.

Thanks for reading to the end If you have questions, please ask!

Attached Images

   

timsamoff | # 2 | 2009-08-18, 14:51 | Report

Hi,

Some (not all) of the UI circumstances within Fremantle should be "fixed" by just adhering to the Maemo 5 HIG. This will clean up a LOT of the "ugly" UI stuff. As for Diablo/Mer... Well, I'm not so sure.

But, if you'd like, I can offer some wireframes of a cleaner UI (low-fidelity, not high-fideltity). Is this what you're looking for?

Thanks!
Tim

conny | # 3 | 2009-08-18, 15:12 | Report

Thanks Tim,

that would be really great But you're already doing so much around here that I would feel a bit bad giving you even more work

Maybe we wait a bit and see if there are other volunteers around?! Of course, if you're eager on doing it, it would be great. Just don't feel pushed

lcuk | # 4 | 2009-08-18, 15:29 | Report

conny,
obviously I'm v busy myself, but just a quick one - try to make that plugins dialog fullwidth/wider.
having so much wasted space and so many ... is bad and feels poky.

we should talk more often, our apps have a lot of similar parallel functionality, its days like this I regret the path I chose

all the best

conny | # 5 | 2009-08-18, 15:41 | Report

Thanks for the suggestion. That dialog was riped out of gedit and not adapted at all yet. And yes, it should be bigger I know I would somehow find a way to make it look good/acceptable but I know it'll take me too much time. So I'm hoping someone will step up with a complete redesign of those dialogs which look nice, use the complete display, make sense, etc... I thinks it's a good possibility for someone interested in making a contribution without being too big/difficult. Could even be interesting for a newcomer.

Maybe we'll see at the summit - we could talk and even have a beer together. Now that would be something

Thanks for stopping by!

nwerneck | # 6 | 2009-08-18, 18:54 | Report

I like conboy a lot, but I still haven't set up a proper development environment for me. But I can help with non-programming tasks for now.

conny | # 7 | 2009-08-18, 19:26 | Report

That would be very cool Is there anything you're especially interested or skilled with?

nwerneck | # 8 | 2009-08-18, 19:41 | Report

That would be the programming. Until then, just show me a list of non-programming related tasks. You said something about icons?... I haven't much experience, but might try out something. Documentation? Translation?...

conny | # 9 | 2009-08-18, 20:02 | Report

Programming sounds very good and is actually the most needed one As for the rest the following things come to my mind:

Icon: Currently we use the Tomboy icon which is not so nice because there is actually a Tomboy package for the tablets which also uses this icon. I personally like the icon, but it would be great if it could be changed to make it somehow distinguishable from Tomboys icon.

Translations: We have: en, de, it, fr, pl, pt_BR. Everything else is still needed.

Website: It would be nice to have a small website at http://conboy.garage.maemo.org which shows some screenshots, lists the features and gives some basic usage information. E.g. there have been users who have been unaware that links are automatically created while typing.

Testing: Testing is always needed, but it's relatively easy to find testers, so I wouldn't give that a very high priority for now...

Pick something if you like or if you have own suggestions, just let me know. What do you think when will your development environment be set up?

qwerty12 | # 10 | 2009-08-21, 21:07 | Report

conny, your "Using Fremantle Widgets" wiki page really helped me a lot and to say thank you, I wanted to implement one of the things on your wishlist, namely: the "Send note by bluetooth" function (sorry, I was coding with the N810 and the e-mail would've worn me out ):



http://slexy.org/view/s20zZ5UJui

Some notes:
- I only added the option to the Diablo menu. I didn't do the Fremantle one because its AppMenus (like most things) are not my forte.
- You may wish to think of a nicer filename instead of a GUID if you're sending a file.
- The menuitem has the GTK stock icon for indenting.

Oh, Build-Depends should have "libcomapp-dev" appended to it.

Thanks again for Conboy and your wiki page.

Oh, I must be high or something... the request only said e-mail... In Diablo, at least, a "send via bluetooth" option can be found where an e-mail one is to be found.

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Last edited by qwerty12; 2009-08-21 at 21:51.