[OLPC-devel] Weekly work summary [6/12]

[Manu Cornet]

Hi all !

Here is my weekly update for the "GTK+ Toolkit" project. For a detailed
status, see the wiki page :

	http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GTK_for_OLPC

Done this week :

* Finished coding the "Crash test" part of the theme torturer, with all
of the gtk_paint_* functions, and all combinations of unusual
parameters. Made it a bit more HIG-compliant (still needs a little
tweaking though).

* Made the first few tests with the torturer. Simple high contrast
themes perform very well, as well as Clearlooks, but Human (Ubuntu
Dapper) is much slower. All themes crash on a particular parameter set
(see the wiki).

* Mirrored the project in my git tree (thanks to Ivan for his help and
patience ^^). I will try to keep it up-to-date, commit early and often.

* Discussed with Matthew Allum and Jim Gettys about simulating the
laptop's display. Xephyr would be the best choice (by far) to hack into,
but it is not likely to get color swizzling to work in real time.
Therefore, I will concentrate on the GTK theme from now, use still
images for previewing (Federico already implemented a quick swizzler, I
will probably add the anti-aliasing part, plus grayscale), and leave the
real time simulation for later.

* Discussed with Marco Pesenti Gritti and Dan Williams about the theme.
There is already an "artwork" project, but it's only a start and might
use a rewriting. Moreover, hardware constraints (high dpi value --
beware of thin lines, small fonts --, color swizzling, greyscale mode,
etc.) don't seem to have been taken into account yet. The goal is to try
matching [Diana's mockups http://people.redhat.com/dfong/olpc/] as well
as possible, while keeping a light/fast theme.


Plans for next week and later :

* Get a very good understanding of how GTK themes/engines work. Many
themes/engines are written in a hurry, it is not an easy thing, and we
certainly don't want a "half-good" theme for OLPC. 

* Start working on the GTK theme aiming towards Diana's mockups.

* Integrate the torturer with Federico's widget profiler to get precise
time measures.

* Enhance the swizzler for still images (anti-aliasing ? grayscale ?) to
get good (though not moving) previews.

* When a good version of the theme has been reached, investigate on how
to aim towards real time simulation of the display.

See you next sunday !

Cheers,
Manu