Thursday 15 December 2016

Making your own retro keyboard

We're about a week before Christmas, and I'm going to explain how I created a retro keyboard as a gift to my father, who introduced me to computers when he brought back a Thomson TO7 home, all the way back in 1985.

The original idea was to use a Thomson computer to fit in a smaller computer, such as a CHIP or Raspberry Pi, but the software update support would have been difficult, the use limited to the builtin programs, and it would have required a separate screen. So I restricted myself to only making a keyboard. It was a big enough task, as we'll see.

How do keyboards work?

Loads of switches, that's how. I'll point you to Michał Trybus' blog post « How to make a keyboard - the matrix » for details on this works. You'll just need to remember that most of the keyboards present in those older computers have no support for xKRO, and that the micro-controller we'll be using already has the necessary pull-up resistors builtin.

The keyboard hardware

I chose the smallest Thomson computer available for my project, the MO5. I could have used a stand-alone keyboard, but would have lost all the charm of it (it just looks like a PC keyboard), some other computers have much bigger form factors, to include cartridge, cassette or floppy disk readers.

The DCMoto emulator's website includes tons of documentation, including technical documentation explaining the inner workings of each one of the chipsets on the mainboard. In one of those manuals, you'll find this page:



Whoot! The keyboard matrix in details, no need for us to discover it with a multimeter.

That needs a wash in soapy water

After opening up the computer, and eventually giving the internals, and the keyboard especially if it has mechanical keys, a good clean, we'll need to see how the keyboard is connected.

Finicky metal covered plastic

Those keyboards usually are membrane keyboards, with pressure pads, so we'll need to either find replacement connectors at our local electronics store, or desolder the ones on the motherboard. I chose the latter option.

Desoldered connectors

After matching the physical connectors to the rows and columns in the matrix, using a multimeter and a few key presses, we now know which connector pin corresponds to which connector on the matrix. We can start soldering.

The micro-controller

The micro-controller in my case is a Teensy 2.0, an Atmel AVR-based micro-controller with a very useful firmware that makes it very very difficult to brick. You can either press the little button on the board itself to upload new firmware, or wire it to an external momentary switch. The funny thing is that the Atmega32U4 is 16 times faster than the original CPU (yeah, we're getting old).

I chose to wire it to the "Initial. Prog" ("Reset") button on the keyboard, so as to make it easy to upload new firmware. To do this, I needed to cut a few traces coming out of the physical switch on the board, to avoid interferences from components on the board, using a tile cutter. This is completely optional, and if you're only going to use firmware that you already know at least somewhat works, you can set a key combo to go into firmware upload mode in the firmware. We'll get back to that later.

As far as connecting and soldering to the pins, we can use any I/O pins we want, except D6, which is connected to the board's LED. Note that any deviation from the pinout used in your firmware, you'd need to make changes to it. We'll come back to that again in a minute.

The soldering

Colorful tinning

I wanted to keep the external ports full, so it didn't look like there were holes in the case, but there was enough headroom inside the case to fit the original board, the teensy and pins on the board. That makes it easy to rewire in case of error. You could also dremel (yes, used as a verb) a hole in the board.

As always, make sure early that things would fit, especially the cables!

The unnecessary pollution

The firmware

Fairly early on during my research, I found the TMK keyboard firmware, as well as very well written forum post with detailed explanations on how to modify an existing firmware for your own uses.

This is what I used to modify the firmware for the gh60 keyboard for my own use. You can see here a step-by-step example, implementing the modifications in the same order as the forum post.

Once you've followed the steps, you'll need to compile the firmware. Fedora ships with the necessary packages, so it's a simple:


sudo dnf install -y avr-libc avr-binutils avr-gcc

I also compiled and installed in my $PATH the teensy_cli firmware uploader, and fixed up the udev rules. And after a "make teensy" and a button press...

It worked first time! This is a good time to verify that all the keys work, and you don't see doubled-up letters because of short circuits in your setup. I had 2 wires touching, and one column that just didn't work.

I also prepared a stand-alone repository, with a firmware that uses the tmk_core from the tmk firmware, instead of modifying an existing one.

Some advices

This isn't the first time I hacked on hardware, but I'll repeat some old adages, and advices, because I rarely heed those warnings, and I regret...
  • Don't forget the size, length and non-flexibility of cables in your design
  • Plan ahead when you're going to cut or otherwise modify hardware, because you might regret it later
  • Use breadboard cables and pins to connect things, if you have the room
  • Don't hotglue until you've tested and retested and are sure you're not going to make more modifications
That last one explains the slightly funny cabling of my keyboard.

Finishing touches

All Sugru'ed up

To finish things off nicely, I used Sugru to stick the USB cable, out of the machine, in place. And as earlier, it will avoid having an opening onto the internals.

There are a couple more things that I'll need to finish up before delivery. First, the keymap I have chosen in the firmware only works when a US keymap is selected. I'll need to make a keymap for Linux, possibly hard-coding it. I will also need to create a Windows keymap for my father to use (yep, genealogy software on Linux isn't quite up-to-par).

Prototype and final hardware

All this will happen in the aforementioned repository. And if you ever make your own keyboard, I'm happy to merge in changes to this repository with documentation for your Speccy, C64, or Amstrad CPC hacks.

(If somebody wants to buy me a Sega keyboard, I'll gladly work on a non-destructive adapter. Get in touch :)

Tuesday 15 November 2016

Lyon GNOME Bug day #1

Last Friday, both a GNOME bug day and a bank holiday, a few of us got together to squash some bugs, and discuss GNOME and GNOME technologies.

Guillaume, a new comer in our group, tested the captive portal support for NetworkManager and GNOME in Gentoo, and added instructions on how to enable it to their Wiki. He also tested a gateway related configuration problem, the patch for which I merged after a code review. Near the end of the session, he also rebuilt WebKitGTK+ to test why Google Docs was not working for him anymore in Web. And nobody believed that he could build it that quickly. Looks like opinions based on past experiences are quite hard to change.

Mathieu worked on removing jhbuild's .desktop file as nobody seems to use it, and it was creating the Sundry category for him, in gnome-shell. He also spent time looking into the tracker blocker that is Mozilla's Focus, based on disconnectme's block lists. It's not as effective as uBlock when it comes to blocking adverts, but the memory and performance improvements, and the slow churn rate, could make it a good default blocker to have in Web.

Haïkel looked into using Emeus, potentially the new GTK+ 4.0 layout manager, to implement the series properties page for Videos.

Finally, I added Bolso to jhbuild, and struggled to get gnome-online-accounts/gnome-keyring to behave correctly in my installation, as the application just did not want to log in properly to the service. I also discussed Fedora's privacy policy (inappropriate for Fedora Workstation, as it doesn't cover the services used in the default installation), a potential design for Flatpak support of joypads and removable devices in general, as well as the future design of the Network panel.

Monday 31 October 2016

Flatpak cross-compilation support: Epilogue

You might remember my attempts at getting an easy to use cross-compilation for ARM applications on my x86-64 desktop machine.

With Fedora 25 approaching, I'm happy to say that the necessary changes to integrate the feature have now rolled into Fedora 25.

For example, to compile the GNU Hello Flatpak for ARM, you would run:

$ flatpak install gnome org.freedesktop.Platform/arm org.freedesktop.Sdk/arm
Installing: org.freedesktop.Platform/arm/1.4 from gnome
[...]
$ sudo dnf install -y qemu-user-static
[...]
$ TARGET=arm ./build.sh

For other applications, add the --arch=arm argument to the flatpak-builder command-line.

This example also works for 64-bit ARM with the architecture name aarch64.

Wednesday 26 October 2016

Dual-GPU integration in GNOME

Thanks to the work of Hans de Goede and many others, dual-GPU (aka NVidia Optimus or AMD Hybrid Graphics) support works better than ever in Fedora 25.

On my side, I picked up some work I originally did for Fedora 24, but ended up being blocked by hardware support. This brings better integration into GNOME.

The Details Settings panel now shows which video cards you have in your (most likely) laptop.

dual-GPU Graphics

The second feature is what Blender and 3D video games users have been waiting for: a contextual menu item to launch the application on the more powerful GPU in your machine.

Mooo Powaa!

This demonstration uses a slightly modified GtkGLArea example, which shows which of the GPUs is used to render the application in the title bar.

on the integrated GPU

on the discrete GPU

Behind the curtain

Behind those 2 features, we have a simple D-Bus service, which runs automatically on boot, and stays running to offer a single property (HasDualGpu) that system components can use to detect what UI to present. This requires the "switcheroo" driver to work on the machine in question.

Because of the way applications are launched on the discrete GPU, we cannot currently support D-Bus activated applications, but GPU-heavy D-Bus-integrated applications are few and far between right now.

Future plans

There's plenty more to do in this area, to polish the integration. We might want applications to tell us whether they'd prefer being run on the integrated or discrete GPU, as live switching between renderers is still something that's out of the question on Linux.

Wayland dual-GPU support, as well as support for the proprietary NVidia drivers are also things that will be worked on, probably by my colleagues though, as the graphics stack really isn't my field.

And if the hardware becomes more widely available, we'll most certainly want to support hardware with hotpluggable graphics support (whether gaming laptop "power-ups" or workstation docks).

Availability

All the patches necessary to make this work are now available in GNOME git (targeted at GNOME 3.24), and backports are integrated in Fedora 25, due to be released shortly.

Thursday 11 August 2016

Flatpak cross-compilation support

A couple of weeks ago, I hinted at a presentation that I wanted to do during this year's GUADEC, as a Lightning talk.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to finish the work that I set out to do, encountering a couple of bugs that set me back. Hopefully this will get resolved post-GUADEC, so you can expect some announcements later on in the year.

At least one of the tasks I set to do worked out, and was promptly obsoleted by a nicer solution. Let's dive in.

How to compile for a different architecture

There are four possible solutions to compile programs for a different architecture:

  • Native compilation: get a machine of that architecture, install your development packages, and compile. This is nice when you have fast machines with plenty of RAM to compile on, usually developer boards, not so good when you target low-power devices.
  • Cross-compilation: install a version of GCC and friends that runs on your machine's architecture, but produces binaries for your target one. This is usually fast, but you won't be able to run the binaries created, so might end up with some data created from a different set of options, and won't be able to run the generated test suite.
  • Virtual Machine: you'd run a virtual machine for the target architecture, install an OS, and build everything. This is slower than cross-compilation, but avoids the problems you'd see in cross-compilation.
The final option is one that's used more and more, mixing the last 2 solutions: the QEmu user-space emulator.

Using the QEMU user-space emulator

If you want to run just the one command, you'd do something like:

qemu-static-arm myarmbinary

Easy enough, but hardly something you want to try when compiling a whole application, with library dependencies. This is where binfmt support in Linux comes into play. Register the ELF format for your target with that user-space emulator, and you can run myarmbinary without any commands before it.

One thing to note though, is that this won't work as easily if the qemu user-space emulator and the target executable are built as a dynamic executables: QEmu will need to find the libraries for your architecture, usually x86-64, to launch itself, and the emulated binary will also need to find its libraries.

To solve that first problem, there are QEmu static binaries available in a number of distributions (Fedora support is coming). For the second one, the easiest would be if we didn't have to mix native and target libraries on the filesystem, in a chroot, or container for example. Hmm, container you say.

Running QEmu user-space emulator in a container

We have our statically compiled QEmu, and a filesystem with our target binaries, and switched the root filesystem. Well, you try to run anything, and you get a bunch of errors. The problem is that there is a single binfmt configuration for the kernel, whether it's the normal OS, or inside a container or chroot.

The Flatpak hack

This commit for Flatpak works-around the problem. The binary for the emulator needs to have the right path, so it can be found within the chroot'ed environment, and it will need to be copied there so it is accessible too, which is what this patch will do for you.

Follow the instructions in the commit, and test it out with this Flatpak script for GNU Hello.

$ TARGET=arm ./build.sh
[...]
$ ls org.gnu.hello.arm.xdgapp 
918k org.gnu.hello.arm.xdgapp

Ready to install on your device!

The proper way

The above solution was built before it looked like the "proper way" was going to find its way in the upstream kernel. This should hopefully land in the upcoming 4.8 kernel.

Instead of launching a separate binary for each non-native invocation, this patchset allows the kernel to keep the binary opened, so it doesn't need to be copied to the container.

In short

With the work being done on Fedora's static QEmu user-space emulators, and the kernel feature that will land, we should be able to have a nice tickbox in Builder to build for any of the targets supported by QEmu.

Get cross-compiling!

Tuesday 9 August 2016

Blog backlog, Post 4, Headset fixes for Dell machines

At the bottom of the release notes for GNOME 3.20, you might have seen the line:
If you plug in an audio device (such as a headset, headphones or microphone) and it cannot be identified, you will now be asked what kind of device it is. This addresses an issue that prevented headsets and microphones being used on many Dell computers.
Before I start explaining what this does, as a picture is worth a thousand words:


This selection dialogue is one you will get on some laptops and desktop machines when the hardware is not able to detect whether the plugged in device is headphones, a microphone, or a combination of both, probably because it doesn't have an impedance detection circuit to figure that out.

This functionality was integrated into Unity's gnome-settings-daemon version a couple of years ago, written by David Henningsson.

The code that existed for this functionality was completely independent, not using any of the facilities available in the media-keys plugin to volume keys, and it could probably have been split as an external binary with very little effort.

After a bit of to and fro, most of the sound backend functionality was merged into libgnome-volume-control, leaving just 2 entry points, one to signal that something was plugged into the jack, and another to select which type of device was plugged in, in response to the user selection. This means that the functionality should be easily implementable in other desktop environments that use libgnome-volume-control to interact with PulseAudio.

Many thanks to David Henningsson for the original code, and his help integrating the functionality into GNOME, Bednet for providing hardware to test and maintain this functionality, and Allan, Florian and Rui for working on the UI notification part of the functionality, and wiring it all up after I abandoned them to go on holidays ;)

Tuesday 19 July 2016

GUADEC Flatpak contest

I will be presenting a lightning talk during this year's GUADEC, and running a contest related to what I will be presenting.

Contest

To enter the contest, you will need to create a Flatpak for a piece of software that hasn't been flatpak'ed up to now (application, runtime or extension), hosted in a public repository.

You will have to send me an email about the location of that repository.

I will choose a winner amongst the participants, on the eve of the lightning talks, depending on, but not limited to, the difficulty of packaging, the popularity of the software packaged and its redistributability potential.

You can find plenty of examples (and a list of already packaged applications and runtimes) on this Wiki page.

Prize

A piece of hardware that you can use to replicate my presentation (or to replicate my attempts at a presentation, depending ;). You will need to be present during my presentation at GUADEC to claim your prize.

Good luck to one and all!

Tuesday 21 June 2016

AAA game, indie game, card-board-box

Early bird gets eaten by the Nyarlathotep
 
The more adventurous of you can use those (designed as embeddable) Lua scripts to transform your DRM-free GOG.com downloads into Flatpaks.

The long-term goal would obviously be for this not to be needed, and for online games stores to ship ".flatpak" files, with metadata so we know what things are in GNOME Software, which automatically picks up the right voice/subtitle language, and presents its extra music and documents in the respective GNOME applications.
 
But in the meanwhile, and for the sake of the games already out there, there's flatpak-games. Note that lua-archive is still fiddly.
 
Support for a few Humble Bundle formats (some formats already are), grab-all RPMs and Debs, and those old Loki games is also planned.
 
It's late here, I'll be off to do some testing I think :)

PS: Even though I have enough programs that would fail to create bundles in my personal collection to accept "game donations", I'm still looking for original copies of Loki games. Drop me a message if you can spare one!

Wednesday 25 May 2016

Blog backlog, Post 3, DisplayLink-based USB3 graphics support for Fedora

Last year, after DisplayLink released the first version of the supporting tools for their USB3 chipsets, I tried it out on my Dell S2340T.

As I wanted a clean way to test new versions, I took Eric Nothen's RPMs, and updated them along with newer versions, automating the creation of 32- and 64-bit x86 versions.

The RPM contains 3 parts, evdi, a GPLv2 kernel module that creates a virtual display, the LGPL library to access it, and a proprietary service which comes with "firmware" files.

Eric's initial RPMs used the precompiled libevdi.so, and proprietary bits, compiling only the kernel module with dkms when needed. I changed this, compiling the library from the upstream repository, using the minimal amount of pre-compiled binaries.

This package supports quite a few OEM devices, but does not work correctly with Wayland, so you'll need to disable Wayland support in /etc/gdm/custom.conf if you want it to work at the login screen, and without having to restart the displaylink.service systemd service after logging in.


 Plugged in via DisplayPort and USB (but I can only see one at a time)


The source for the RPM are on GitHub. Simply clone and run make in the repository to create 32-bit and 64-bit RPMs. The proprietary parts are redistributable, so if somebody wants to host and maintain those RPMs, I'd be glad to pass this on.

Friday 13 May 2016

Blutella, a Bluetooth speaker receiver

Quite some time ago, I was asked for a way to use the AV amplifier (which has a fair bunch of speakers connected to it) in our living-room that didn't require turning on the TV to choose a source.

I decided to try and solve this problem myself, as an exercise rather than a cost saving measure (there are good-quality Bluetooth receivers available for between 15 and 20€).

Introducing Blutella



I found this pot of Nutella in my travels (in Europe, smaller quantities are usually in a jar that looks like a mustard glass, with straight sides) and thought it would be a perfect receptacle for a CHIP, to allow streaming via Bluetooth to the amp. I wanted to make a nice how-to for you, dear reader, but best laid plans...

First, the materials:
  • a CHIP
  • jar of Nutella, and "Burnt umber" acrylic paint
  • micro-USB to USB-A and jack 3.5mm to RCA cables
  • Some white Sugru, for a nice finish around the cables
  • bit of foam, a Stanley knife, a CD marker

That's around 10€ in parts (cables always seem to be expensive), not including our salvaged Nutella jar, and the CHIP itself (9$ + shipping).

You'll start by painting the whole of the jar, on the inside, with the acrylic paint. Allow a couple of days to dry, it'll be quite thick.

So, the plan that went awry. Turns out that the CHIP, with the cables plugged in, doesn't fit inside this 140g jar of Nutella. I also didn't make the holes exactly in the right place. The CHIP is tiny, but not small enough to rotate inside the jar without hitting the side, and the groove to screw the cap also have only one position.

Anyway, I pierced two holes in the lid for the audio jack and the USB charging cable, stuffed the CHIP inside, and forced the lid on so it clipped on the jar's groove.

I had nice photos with foam I cut to hold the CHIP in place, but the finish isn't quite up to my standards. I guess that means I can attempt this again with a bigger jar ;)

The software

After flashing the CHIP with Debian, I logged in, and launched a script which I put together to avoid either long how-tos, or errors when I tried to reproduce the setup after a firmware update and reset.

The script for setting things up is in the CHIP-bluetooth-speaker repository. There are a few bugs due to drivers, and lack of integration, but this blog is the wrong place to track them, so check out the issues list.

Apart from those driver problems, I found the integration between PulseAudio and BlueZ pretty impressive, though I wish there was a way for the speaker to reconnect to the phone I streamed from when turned on again, as Bluetooth speakers and headsets do, removing one step from playing back audio.

Monday 9 May 2016

Blog backlog, Post 2, xdg-app bundles


I recently worked on creating an xdg-app bundle for GNOME Videos, aka Totem, so it would be built along with other GNOME applications, every night, and made available via the GNOME xdg-app repositories.

There's some functionality that's not working yet though:
  • No support for optical discs
  • The MPRIS plugin doesn't work as we're missing dbus-python (I'm not sure that the plugin will survive anyway, it's more suited to audio players, don't worry though, it's not going to be removed until we have made changes to the sound system in GNOME)
  • No libva/VDPAU hardware acceleration (which would require plugins, and possibly device access of some sort)
However, I created a bundle that extends the freedesktop runtime, that contains gst-libav. We'll need to figure out a way to distribute it in a way that doesn't cause problems for US hosts.

As we also have a recurring problem in Fedora with rpmfusion being out of date, and I sometimes need a third-party movie player to test things out, I put together an mpv manifest, which is the only MPlayer-like with a .desktop and a GUI when launched without any command-line arguments.

Finally, I put together a RetroArch bundle for research into a future project, which uncovered the lack of joystick/joypad support in the xdg-app sandbox.

Hopefully, those few manifests will be useful to other application developers wanting to distribute their applications themselves. There are some other bundles being worked on, and that can be used as examples, linked to in the Wiki.

Wednesday 4 May 2016

Blog backlog, Post 1, Emoji

Short version


dnf copr enable hadess/emoji
dnf update cairo
dnf install eosrei-emojione-fonts 



Long version

A little while ago, I was reading this article, called "Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?", which said, and I reluctantly quote: "[...] and I don’t know what Linux does, but it’s probably black and white and who cares [...]".

Well. I care. And you probably do as well if your pizza slice above is black and white.

So I set out to check on the status of Behdad Esfahbod (or just "Behdad" as we know him)'s patches to add colour font support to cairo, which he presented at GUADEC in Strasbourg Gothenburg. It adds support for the "bitmap in font" as Android does, and as freetype supports.

It kind of worked, and Matthias Clasen reworked the patches a few times, completing the support. This is probably not the code that will be worked on and will land in cairo, but it's a good enough base for people interested in contributing to use.

After that, we needed something to display using that feature. We ended up using the same font recommended in this article, the Emoji One font.


There's still plenty to be done to support emojis, even after the cairo support is merged. We'd need a way to input emojis (maybe Lalo Martins is listening), and support in a lot of toolkits other than GNOME (Firefox only supports the SVG-in-OTF format, WebKit, Chrome, LibreOffice don't seem to know about colour fonts either).

You can find more information about design interests in GNOME around Emoji on the Wiki.

Update: Behdad's presentation was in Gothenburg, not Strasbourg. You can also see the video on YouTube.

Monday 29 February 2016

Relatório da Hackatona de Design

Durante semana, no mês de janeiro, eu estive no Brasil, no Rio de Janeiro para uma hackatona de design, com os designers de Endless e do projeto GNOME.

Que é o produto de Endless?

O maior produto de Endless é um sistema operativo para mini computadores que eles fazem, o Endless Mini e o Endless (Maxi?). O sistema operativo usa Linux e uma versão de GNOME com algumas changes (mudanças). O uso principal desses computadores é de ter muitas informações sem acesso à Internet. Por exemplo, tem muitos aplicativos sobre viagens, animais e etc que são diretamente dentro do computador, usando Wikipedia como fonte, e uma outra aplicação de receitas, com uma outra terceira fonte.

A hackatona em si

Os dois primeiros dias foram para viajar e visitar os usuários “beta” do Endless computadores, um dia na Rocinha, uma favela do Rio. E um outro dia em Magé, uma cidade rural do estado do Rio.
Os três últimos dias foram para discussões no escritório de Endless.

Observações

É uma coisa para fazer testes de usabilidade nos EUA e na Europa, e uma outra coisa de fazer isso num país sem habitude de usar “computadores pessoais” com Windows o MacOS X, mas muita mais habitude com celulares.

Por exemplo:
- Se se tem um mouse, vão dar dublo clique. Não é um problema com teclados sensíveis.
- Dividir a tela para ter um aplicativo ao lado de uma outra é difícil também.
- Se não se tem um acesso à Internet, não vão tentar instalar o acessar outros aplicativos que estão já no computador.
- Não estão acostumados a fechar aplicativos que não usam mais. Um sistema operativo de celular vai fechar os aplicativos antigos de maneira transparente.

Conclusões

Muitas coisas que o Endless ou GNOME podem mudar ou melhorar.

- GNOME tem alguns vídeos para explicar o “overview”. Um jogo ou tutorial podem ser melhor para explicar e ter certeza de que os usuários entendem.
- GNOME precisa melhorar a integração de modems celulares. ModemManager tem as funções que GNOME não usa.
- “Web” precisa de integração com detecção de malware, que ele não tem agora, mas foi uma ideia para o Summer Of Code dos anos precedentes.
- GNOME pode melhorar a primeira tela de todos os aplicativos e do sistema também, especialmente se o usuário não tem Internet para baixar conteúdo.

Muito obrigado a fundação GNOME pelas minhas passagens. Obrigado ao Endless e o Allan Day pela a organizacão. Obrigado ao meu empregador Red Hat pela oportunidade. E, enfim, obrigado à Caro pela correcção!



Sunday 10 January 2016

Support for "Airplane mode" keys

As we were working on audio jack notifications, and were wondering whether the type of notification we'd pop up in this case could be reused in other cases, I encountered a feature request that could now be solved easily with the rfkill D-Bus service we added to gnome-settings-daemon for the 3.10 release.

If you have keyboard buttons on your laptop to enable or disable Bluetooth, or Airplane mode, you can now use them. Note that the "UWB" toggle key will toggle the whole airplane mode mainly because no in-kernel driver uses it, and nobody remembers what UWB is.

Note that the labels and icons used are still subject to changes. In particular as you can see that the labels are too long for lower resolutions.






Saturday 9 January 2016

gom is now usable from JavaScript/gjs

Prodded by me while I snoozed on his sofa and with his cat warming me up, a day before the Content Applications hackfest, Florian Müllner started working on fixing a long-standing gjs bug that made it impossible to use gom in GNOME/JavaScript applications. The result of that initial research came a few days later, and is now part of the latest gjs release.

This also fixes using GtkBuilder and json-glib when the libraries create new objects for the benefit of the JavaScript code.

We can finally use gom to store user data in applications like Bolso. Thanks Florian!