Wubble

Today, I contined my porting of GWeather to Maemo. I don’t have a happy bundled package to throw up right now, but I’m happy with today’s progress.

The first thing I did was put together a libgweather from the backend code. It was originally rather tangled up with the backend requiring knowledge of the applet object and gconf. After refactoring that, I now have a functional library. Using this I was able to define simple homepage applet that currently queries the infamous Pittsburgh default location. I plan to refactor the gconf code out into another library and then use it from the home applet to query the right location.

In other areas, I attempted to set up a script to run the application with support for internet auto-connection. Unfortunately, nothing gets triggered. I believe this is because the auto-connection library isn’t interposing itself in the path that gnome-vfs uses. This seems rather surprising but it’s all I can think of right now. On the size front, I changed the Locations.xml rule to skip the translations which brings the file size down to a more manageable 1.3mb – it now only takes 20 seconds to bring up preferences. Small favours eh? 🙂

Questions that I still have:

• Why doesn’t the home page wrap a HildonHomeApplet container around user supplied home applets? The lack of this causes them to look inconsistent as the screenshot below illustrates.
• If a home-applet depends on a library (my libgweather in this case) that is installed in /var/lib/install, can it be found? My experience in scratchbox is that it cannot, and you have to symlink the library into /usr/lib, which seems wrong.
• What’s the right way to install icons into the icon-theme? Just put them in /var/lib/install/usr/share/icons/? The hello-world example does this and fails miserably.
• What should a HildonApp based application do in response to a “top_application” event? If the window is currently hidden and you get one of these events, it seems that nothing happens automatically.

Anyway, it’s been a great learning experience doing this. I hope to have another drop tomorrow.