Pfff...

I finally finished writing the last remaining things for my system, integrated everything, and could generate the data for the paper just in time... That was a hell of a week, but at least this deadline is over now ! I'll sleep a bit :-P

I will also try to resume a minimum my gnustep's activity next week (been more than a couple of months it's on hold) -- I have a couple of things to do that shouldn't take much time from me and that would be rather welcomed :-P

UDP ...

Well, I'm not working much on anything related to GNUstep/étoilé lately -- I have my thesis to write for december, which also means I need to finish properly my visualisation system soon...

I changed completely the communication stack -- exit XMLRPC/TCP, welcome lossy UDP communication -- good things, it enables broadcast and low latency, bad things... well, using broadcast as an asset, you need to change quite a lot the way you think your program. But it's worth it: not only the end result (the visualization) can be broadcasted, which is nice, but moreover, the rendering process itself can take advantage of broadcasting to be more efficient. Anyway. Here is a screenshot showing a broadcasted MIP visualization of the CThead dataset:

The rendering itself is done on a cluster connected to these 3 machines through a simple udp tunnel. Works quite well..

Flow, State and Persistence

I gave a talk today discussing state and persistence in your work environment, for the No Grownups Seminar Series.. Here is a flash version of the talk, and here is the pdf one. Have a look !

RTFD

Well, I was idly thinking that I could move the HTML parsing code of HelpViewer in a GNUstep TextConverter bundle (so that *any* application using text would be automagically able to load html... or at leas the particular HelpViewer brand ;-), so I looked into the RTF TextConverter to see how that worked. It's fairly simple in fact :-)

But reading the code, I also realized that adding RTFD support (RTFD are basically RTF documents + Images) would be trivial. I am actually fairly surprised nobody did that before, particularly as I remember numerous complaint about its non-existence :-/

So, I modified the RTF parser to deal with the \NeXTGraphic tag, and it seem to work well -- at least reading RTFD documents that come from Mac OS X. Though, the actual grammar I used for dealing with it is pretty crude, so I wouldn't be surprised if some documents do not work (likely old NeXT documents... OS X documents produced by TextEdit seem fairly consistent with what I did). Anyway now the basic support is done, tweaking the grammar won't be difficult if it's needed.

Here is a screenshot showing two documents opened in Ink.app (and obviously no modifications were needed in Ink.app...):

It's committed on the gnustep repository, so you can try it by updating and reinstalling the RTF TextConverter bundle.

I'm thinking I'll perhaps commit my actual HelpViewer version (as it can use rtf files) without waiting for the html parser to be finished... plus "commit early commit often" is a good idea ;-) (which I don't follow enough...)

We could write a simple Text editor dealing with links, etc. as well. Oh well we'll see.. :-)

It doesn't hurt...

Things move quickly with etoile, so here's another screenshot... note that the shadows are ok now with xcompmgr and Azalea+EtoileMenu, that the menu items aren't displaced anymore, and that the info panel was updated (yeah, yeah, it doesn't improve the experience, but it's nice to have ^_^). Saso even added a small animation when you click on the etoile logo in the middle... pfff! ;-)

Anyway, time to work on helpviewer.

Etoile screenshot

Just for fun.. Here is a current screenshot of etoile, showing the EtoileMenuServer, Azalea (the windowmanager), Nesedah (the theme) and HelpViewer... Things start to work together ;-) [note that the shadow should not/will not appear under the helpviewer menu item...]