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Posts Tagged ‘libchamplain’

Getting Things Gnome 12 weeks after SoC

August 20th, 2009 4 comments
SoC is ending and 12 weeks after I’m very happy with the experience. The first weeks were difficult, I had university assignments and exams to do and it wasn’t easy finding the equilibrium between SoC and the university stuff, some of those weeks were exhaustive. Still it was a great experience, I would do it again! My mentor, Lionel Dricot aka ploum, was always available and helpful during the hole 12 weeks. The GNOME and Getting Things Gnome communities were also very important and contributed in a very positive way to my SoC experience.

My SoC project and the goal was to add Geolocalized tasks (using geoclue and libchamplain) in Getting Things Gnome witch I achieved.

Getting Things Gnome is a task manager and if you don’t know it yet you can read all about it here and see some of the many reasons for why you should use it or try it at least. One of the concepts of the application is the “Work View”. The “Work View” concept will only show tasks that you can do “right now”, it doesn’t display tasks that depend on other tasks, tasks that cannot start before a given date or with tags you have marked as non workable. The main idea of my project is to add a here to the right now, extending the work view concept to “right here and right now”. The extension of the concept is now available if you enable the geolocalized-tasks plugin that packed allong with GTG (only in the current development version that you can get here).
To try it you will need:

  • libchamplain installed with python support
  • Geoclue installed with the main providers
  • my newly created python-geoclue module

I’ll provide the detailed instructions to test it in a few days. I’m currently in contact with Keith Preston so that the python-geoclue module can be integrated in the Geoclue project, so I’ll have some news on that (were you can get it, how to install it, how you can use it, etc) very soon.

During SoC I also added plugin support to GTG and plugins with new features are emerging. It is very satisfactory to see my work being useful. Some of the plugins that already exist are:

  • Geolocalized-tasks plugin (my plugin)
  • Hamster Time Tracker Integration by Kevin Mehall
  • Remember the milk sync plugin by Luca Invernizzi

So if you have any request for a new feature, don’t hesitate to add it to the whish list or just digg in because it’s now easier to add features to GTG.

Categories: gnome, gsoc Tags: , , , , , ,

Google Summer of Code: Week 8

July 21st, 2009 6 comments

This week I worked with libchamplain and added it to the GTG! geolocalized-tasks plugin that I’m making. I have a working version as planned. It’s now possible to add a location to a task or view a task (that has a defined location) on the map. It will have some more features in a few days. Some images of libchamplain + geoclue + GTG! in action:

geoplugin_1
geoplugin_2
geoplugin_3

geoplugin_4
geoplugin_5

A quick explanation (each point corresponds to a image):

  1. The button Set/View location is added to the task editor window;
  2. Viewing the task’s location on the map. This task (as you can see on the first image) has three tags, two of them with location and on of the tags that has a location doesn’t have a color set so that gray is the default color;
  3. A task with a tag named “CGE” with the color attribute defined to pink and with the location defined. Because the task has already a location defined, it only shows the location;
  4. A task that doesn’t have tags (so no location). Using geoclue (pygeoclue) the markers position is set to the current location. It’s also possible to move the marker around to the desired position. There is a gtk.entry to define the tag’s name;
  5. This task has tags but no location is defined. Again, using geoclue the markers position is set to the current location. Now it’s possible to create a new tag to associate with the location or to associate the location to a existing tag;

Some new features will be available in the next days along with a screencast.

Learning libchamplain was a challenge, I had some problems and spent allot of time figuring out how to solve them but the libchamplain team was wonderful and help me thru the problems, many thanks to Victor and Pierre-Luc!

So this week I:

  • added libchamplain to geolocalized-tasks plugin in GTG!
    • learned how clutter/libchamplain works
    • tested and experimented with the python bindings (view, layers and markers mostly)
    • coded an example (demo in python) of how to change a marker’s position on the map. The demo is available here: http://paulocabido.com/soc/libchamplain/move_marker.py
  • fixed several bugs in the plugin-engine

All the code (plugin + plugin-engine) is available at my plugin-engine branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine

Categories: gnome, gsoc Tags: , , , , ,