Back from The Netherlands after an amazing Embedded Linux Conference (ELC-E 2008) at Ede and then some good days at Amsterdam.
I really liked ELC-E, talked with lots of guys, my presentation was good as well (I hope so! let's wait for the videos), you can see the slides at: http://palestras.gustavobarbieri.com.br/efl/elce2008/Rich_GUI_without_pain.pdf
After the main conference we had an extra UPnP/DLNA conference, it was really small, but interesting nonetheless.
Then I traveled to Amsterdam, it was my first time there and I really enjoyed the city, the people, the beer... and the museums, of course. There I could see the awesome piece that shows in this post called "For The Love of God".
Today I finished integrating some cool code into Evas: box and table. These utility smart objects are now in Evas for good, we can stop replicating those in many projects and people who just want to use them and not a full featured toolkit like ETK or EWL are now free. More importantly: we can now expose these in Edje, making all layout elements dependent on theme, not having to rely on SWALLOW slots!
The integrated code is very flexible, it make use of the recently introduced "size hints" and also postpone heavy calculations to pre-render time with calculate smart callback. Table has three modes: regular, homogeneous based on table size and homogeneous based on largest minimum item size. Box, since it just represent a sequence of items, is more extensible and allows you to specify a layout function, we provide some like vertical, horizontal, stack, homogeneous based on box, homogeneous based on the largest minimum item size, etc... but you can easily write your "snake layout" and use it. If you need more option details than "size hints", you can extend the class and implement options_* virtuals.
These code were integrated by me, but not totally written. Gustavo Lima, from ProFUSION, wrote the box for their sequence_box.c (it was relicensed to E's BSD with permission) and Rasterman wrote table for his elementary "toolkit for mobiles" els_table.c.
On the pleasure and work side, I'll fly to The Netherlands next Tuesday so I can attend ELC-E 2008 where I'll present a talk about Rich Graphical User Interfaces on mobile systems, covering Evas, Edje and the new kids on the block Elementary and Guarana.
Last but not least, due trip and other stuff to do I'll not be able to integrate table and box into Edje soon. If you always wanted to help E17 and EFL, now it's your chance! :-) See my mail to the list and start hacking, I can reply to you by mail and IRC (when I'm online). We will also need Python bindings for those, so patches to python-evas and python-edje are also welcome!
