hennevogel

Hackweek IV Summary

Guess what, even i was allowed a week of hacking last week. So let me tell you what i did. My initial plan for the week was to spend half of it on freevo bug hunting and the other half on the osc factory plugin i started some weeks ago.  Python all the way… So i started on Monday on freevo and hunted a bug down that was nagging me. After a couple of minutes it turned out it was a timing problem in an OSD function. To understand it i had to learn about the new OSD dialog plugin Adam hacked up to style freevo on screen dialogs. He said on the freevo-users lists a couple of weeks ago:

“The overlay display stuff is still pretty much in development and needs someone with some artistic ability (ie. not me :-)) to design a nicer display for the seeking/pause display.”

So i thought what the heck let me see if i can come up with something. My artistic skills are limited but i think i understand what about the freevo user interface attracts me and others so much. It’s the right mixture of Text and Graphics. Usually media center developers try to impress you with glowing, transparent 3D graphics that turn, slide, flip and flow. You have to memorize what each of those animations means and that makes it pretty complicated in my eyes. Freevo on the other hand uses Text a lot.

Freevo showing a Directory and some Files

A directory for instance is no fancy folder icon, a file is neither, they are represented as Text. A directory with square brackets and a file without.  But of course there is also an area for things like a cover or descriptions.

Freevo showing a cover and description

The fancy stuff is good to have but navigation and general usage have to work without it. Graphics should support Text – thats what i like about the user interface  of Freevo. What did not have this right mixture in Freevo was the OSD.

So i tried to come up with an OSD that follows these principles. Here is what i ended up with after many tries.

So i fixed some bugs, had to add a couple fo features to the dialogs core and styled this OSD theme. I was done by Friday so no osc factory plugin. Luckily i hack a lot on my normal worktime too so you don’t have to wait too long for it ;-)

Update: The code is in the Freevo tracker…

Talk is Expensive

This week there will be once again LinuxTag. It will be strange for me because this will be the first show in a long time for me without Martin. I think the last one without Martin was LinuxTag back in 2002 in Karlsruhe, so we all will terrible miss him. As a consequence Michl and me have to run the booth and keep the flock together this time. Lets see how that goes…

Wannahave: A.L.F. Painting

If you have a couple of bucks to spare i would suggest you go head to you local (LA, SF) Idiot Box gallery. They are celebrating their 5th year anniversary and have a lot of new paintings and other art available. I hear artwork is a great investment these days, right after Sun stock. My favorite:

We Can Has A.L.F.?

But i also would not mind the Laura Palmer presentbox.

I’d buy that for a dollar!

FOSDEM Preparations

Fruits. Never!

Shit Happens

So hennevogel.de died last saturday. It choose to make this act very prophetic. I was cleaning up some drawer at home and actually found a bunch of old invoices. Among them was one for my parents first desktop computer bought from  Aldi in ‘94. Believe it of not this was hennevogel.de (housed by some good friend of mine). So for now Peter is playing backup mx and the webpages are served from my dnsdns.org acccount. I hope i can resolve this before FOSDEM. BTW: