Eedit, E-app-dev, the future

Hi all,

I'm sorry that the list has been so quiet and there have been so few commits recently, I know Tim is busy with his GSoC work, I've been very busy at work, (http://hyakuhei.blogspot.com/).

I can't tell you much, but I can ask for your help.

As you may or may not be aware my project was a simple EFL based programmers editor.

This was fun for a while and I made some work on what I think would make a pretty good back end for the editor with support for folding and other nice things just about starting to appear. This is a pretty uphill struggle. Freshmeat and Sourceforge are littered with projects like this, abandoned by developers who either got tied up in the hidden details or just ran out of time. This reminded me of the ideas behind the google project, group and blog; it was set up to develop and support others developing applications based on the EFL, these were supposed to be small scale, well designed "starters" where myself and a few developers could quickly crank out basic applications which by design would be easy for other developers to run with and really add some nice features.

So I'm asking for advice, I would like to continue eedit, or eeditr (eedit-rebourn) but this time use an established text editing engine to back it up. Obviously this means that the application wont be a pure EFL production _but_ It will get something nice built, hopefully something that I and others can add functionality to and work on.

If you have suggestions for an engine for eeditr or want to help with eedit then let me know. - Of course, I'm aware of scintilla and the nedit back end, I'm interested in opinions on those and others.

Thanks
-Rob

New Mailing list / Discussion forum

As the more observant of you will have noticed, the links on the right have been updated with a new link "e-app-dev Google Group"
This is a place where you can interact with developers and join in discussions via the mailing list. Please feel free to join.

Thanks
-Rob

eedit "progress"

Hi all,

A couple of people have been asking about eedit, I promise, its in progress. Things are starting to look like they might start working soon! I'm mid way through a small refactor and I'm trying to reduce the code base a little.

At the moment its > 1500 lines. Without proper support for undo/redo, syntax highlighting or the magical code folding I have been bleating about!

I'm doing my best - I hope to have a developer release out by Mid June :-D

Ephoto Screenshots

Ephoto is getting more and more work done to it. It supports several views and does decent editting. The views include an icon view, a list view, and a single image view. The editor allows simple and advanced editing. Ephoto even allows you to view exif data. The save dialog is minimal, but will get stronger, and for what its worth is getting a lot of attention lately. The images included here are the edit view, the list view, and the exif data.

Emixer Update

Just a quick note, emixer now has a menu and mute functions. Capture will follow shortly along with an update to the menu, its all a bit WIP but works. Now that emixer is getting close to a 0.1 testing release Ill be looking into some more ambitions projects to accompany it soon. How ambitions will depend on how much time I have :-)

- Tim

Welcome UnixTitan

e-app-dev has another developer on the books!

UnixTitan is the author of the already accomplished "ephoto" application (see project pages). The source for this is in the enlightenment cvs (e17/apps/ephoto).

I am very pleased to welcome him to this tiny community his knowledge and skill set is a very nice addition to our own.

Cheers
-Rob

eedit progress

Hey all,
eedit is coming along nicely. I haven't had my week off yet but I spent a few hours over the weekend completely re-writing the back end. I'm pleased to say that it appears to work.

Its still massively feature defficient but its clearly making progress :-D

I'm going to do my best at getting the code folding in there now. I know that other things should be done first, like the ability to delete text or save files but I like this feature more!

eedit refactor

Hi All,

I'm doing a major re-working of the eedit code and refactoring the partially built back end _and_ taking a week off. In short, eedit wont compile for about 2 weeks.

On the plus side eedit doesn't really have any functionality yet so I doubt I'll get harassed by annoyed users.

Cheers
-Rob

eedit - pretty picture

As you can see, menu's now work.

Tim can rest easy..... for now!

Enlightenment build scripts

There are many enlightenment build scripts. Non of them appear to fully work.

!! Edit: Apart from easy_e17.sh which looks like a good solution. However I will continue to maintain our current script as it is very easy to read and manipulate even by learners.

We now have a build script that you can grab from our SVN or from the downloads section of our google code project hosting.

The script will be kept up to date and works as of yesterdays e17 as found in SVN.

Cheers
-Rob

More Early Applications, emixer 0.01

emixer 0.01

Well here is another application, this ones called "emixer" and is a basic mixer for ALSA using EWL. Ok so its fairly simple at the moment but it all works. The next update will feature menus to select the ALSA device and to (un)mute the various mixer elements. I just wish the ALSA documentation was as good as EWL's ;-)

You can grab this and other e-apps from our google project site http://code.google.com/p/e-apps

-Tim ( Not dead yet..... )

E-App-Dev using google project hosting.

We have decided to use the project hosting service supplied by google as a repo for our projects. We are also going to use just the one repo for our suite of applications.

We chose google because you don't have to jump through the mountains of pain in the ass hoops and questions that you do with sourceforge and freshmeat.

http://code.google.com/p/e-apps
The site has:
* A wiki (with a page for each sub project)
* An issue tracker (make feature requests here!)
* A downloads section
* A subversion repo

To export a working copy of the collection of apps just run:
"svn checkout http://e-apps.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ e-apps"

(The menu's on Eedit no longer look strange :-D)

Cheers
-Rob

An application *is* born!

"The menus don't look right"
--Tim Kelsey, R.I.P(soon)

After half a day of hacking together examples and throwing in random bits of logic I've produced a little skelleton of a text editor. It compiles against the current e17 SVN and seems to work well enough. Granted thats because it doesn't really do anything magic like open or save text yet... I'm working on that!

There are some details on the project page: http://code.google.com/p/eedit

Including a future features list. (which I'm about to modify!).
If you would like to add something to the features list, the prefered way would be to create an "issue" on the code.google.com link above. If you that doesn't suit you then just leave a comment on the blog :-)

At least its moving somewhere, at the moment of course it has far less functionality than the text editor test in ewl_test.

There is also an issue with newlines at the end of a block not working correctly, I'm going to look into trying to track down this bug. Its a known issue but its not been found yet.

Cheers
-Rob

Tim's Introduction

And so the journey begins, well I'm not going to repeat anything that Rob has already mentioned, suffice to say that we both share a mutual disillusionment with current Linux Desktops.

After looking at Enlightenment 17 Rob and I saw an opportunity to build something that at least we would be happy using. E17 is under heavy development and as of yet has very few applications. It has, however got a collection of functionality rich but lite-weight libraries that combined form the EFL. This application vacuum seemed like the perfect environment to begin our project in.

I've started exploration of the bits and bobs that make up the EFL. EWL is first up, the Enlightenment Widget Library, it provides all those nice shiny buttons and after playing with it for a little bit seams well constructed and easy to use. I'm finding it interesting using a C widget set, it makes a change from all the C++ I usually do, though I'm sure before too long ill be begging for a virtual function ;-)

-Tim

Action!

Tim and I are going to develop a number of applications for enlightenment, as such we would like testers and users!

*Anyone* interested in writing articles, tutorials, how-to's or development notes is welcome to, simply contact me or leave a comment and you will be added as a blog author.

At the moment we are looking for ideas for relatively simple projects that will make the life of an E17 user either easier or prettier!

To start with I'm looking at building a decent - programmer oriented - text editor. In the short term that means an application similar in functionality to Gedit...

We are really interested in any idea's you may have for applications that you would like to have, We're open to any idea's including cloning existing non-EFL applications.

Please leave a comment if you have an idea :-)

-Rob

Introduction

Desktop environments suck.

This can't really be argued with, They have a number of fantastic features and functions but if you way what they really do / provide with their system footprints they are pretty god damned awful.

I think this is in large part down to the hobbyist nature of F/OSS development. Many projects are created using rather low standards of engineering. This can usually be attributed to either a lack of understanding of Software Engineering principles (Yes CompSci's I'm pointing at you) OR more typically an unwillingness to stand on these standards for a number of reasons. Typically a desire to get the project into the open or just plain laziness.

I'd like to point you at an interesting article and video on the subject here: http://lca2007.linux.org.au/talk/101
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2007/video/talks/101.ogg

My good friend Tim [c4llidus] and I have been looking for a decent DE for quite a while, so much so that we had started a few ideas about developing our own using decent software engineering principles (It fits well, I'm a Software Engineer and he's a games programmer). So on we went, looking at options and the design methodologies to be used, trying to find a way to build an extensible framework that could be extended by the hordes of other programmers that must be frustrated by the offerings of KDE, Gnome and others of that ilk.

At this point I stumbled over enlightenment I was aware of its existence and had briefly used e16 at some point in the past. E17 is the new Enlightenment, its under *heavy* development and as such I wouldn't recommend it for all but the most competent of Linux users. However it is fantastic to use, well built, designed and thought out.

"Great!" I thought, "now how can I contribute?"

Direct involvement in the code of E17 seems like a bad idea to me, my work schedule is hectic and I don't want to get into a position where people are waiting to work with / break my code. So I had another chat with Tim, he agrees that E17 is awesome but that it would be nice to see more applications that are based on the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries....

Next Post: What we are going to do to help and how you can too!

-Rob