Last Friday I gave an introduction to Python as class in Master in Free Software.
In this session I tried to cover Python from the very basics to decorators, properties and PDB. All covered only as an overview, not in deep detail.
After the introduction we did a simple PyGTK application to list the files from a folder the user gives it; it will hopefully come in handy when they start to develop their project’s UI.
So I’m sharing here the presentation I created for it. If you’re thinking of learning Python or have started learning it recently it might be helpful for you.
This version has no big improvements and exists mainly to introduce the fix of a bug that prevented using the algorithm for recognizing documents automatically.
The copyright was updated to include the proper copyright and license notices of ODFPy, which ships with OCRFeeder.
It also features some improvements to Debian related files (thanks to Alberto Garcia, who is creating the official deb package for Debian) and a few translation updates.
Okay, the shortcuts to accept prediction candidates or scroll through them can be changed into some that are quickly accessible.
With the changes I did to Caribou, one can even easily provide a special button, such as “ACCEPT”, like the screenshot below shows:
The changes I’m talking about and that you see in the video and the QWERTY keyboard layout I used can be found in Caribou’s bug #613229.
I wrote these changes because the current way of writing layouts for Caribou doesn’t seem very flexible nor appropriate for non programmers, in my opinion.
These changes drop the current usage of Python files with tuples as a way to configure Caribou’s layouts. Instead, json files should be used and more functionality that wasn’t implemented before is also possible with the mentioned patch.
Basically, instead of having either character keys or symbol, label pairs that Caribou understands, each key should be a set of attributes that define it, which Caribou then interprets accordingly.
For a basic key, all one needs to have is the value attribute, which can receive a string (for example a character) or the name of a key in GDK (you can easily figure them out from the GDK key syms file).
So:
{”value”: “a”} will create a key labeled a that inputs the character a {”value”: “BackSpace”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “BackSpace”
You can override the label of a key using the attribute “label”, as:
{”value”: “BackSpace”,
“label”: “⌫”} will create a backspace key but labeled with “⌫”
Labels can use Pango Markup to change its text style, for example: {”label”: “<small><b>Small Bold Text Key</b></small>”, …}
A width attribute is also introduced and means the width relative to a usual key’s width. A width of 3 will generate a key that fills the space of 3 keys whereas 0.25 fills a quarter of a regular key’s space.
A key can be of a given type which indicates how it behaviors. There is 5 types of keys: normal, layout_switcher, preferences, mask and dummy.
A normal key type indicates it is a regular “you-press-you-input” key and is the default type, which is why it wasn’t specified in the examples above.
A layout_switcher key, when pressed, will change the keyboard sublayout to the one given by the value attribute (and must exist in the layout file), so, if we are in the “lowercase” layout and we want a key labeled “UP” to change to the “uppercase” layout: {”label”: “UP”, “key_type”: “layout_switcher”, “value”: “uppercase”}
The preferences key type brings up the preferences menu.
A mask key means that you set a mask indicated by the value attribute when you press it. For the Alt key: {”label”: “Alt”, “key_type”: “mask”, “value”: “mod1″} again, the “mod1″ is the mask name from GDK.
Finally, there’s the dummy key type which is used basically to set spacer keys and allow to separate some keys from others in order to improve visual grouping. Rows that don’t have the number of keys in any row (including dummy keys) will be centered horizontally.
These let you play with keyboards’ layouts and design any kind of layout in a flexible and easy way.
At the moment, the patch is still pending review. Let’s hope it gets a green light and is applied.
For those who didn’t notice, last week SeriesFinale finally got promoted to Extras which are very good news and now SeriesFinale 0.5 has been just released!
Why is this edition so special? Because it will from now on retrieve images for the shows and its seasons.
This morning I finally took the time to check how to retrieve those and I really like the way SeriesFinale looks like now. Of course, this means that the next shows update you do will start retrieving all the images for your shows and seasons which might take, let’s say, a while. Still, don’t worry because once it gets the images, next time you update, only the general information will be retrieved.
I’ve also fixed the slowness when panning the different content views. Panning should now be much more fluid.
Another good thing in this edition is that the tiny episodes’ checkbox still looks tiny but it’s in fact larger and this means you can much more easily tap on it to mark episodes.
Juan, the maintainer of the Diablo version and a colleague of mine at Igalia, sent patches for including the season number together with the episode number, so it shows like “2×05″ which is more useful than just the episode’s number.
He also pointed a bug when adding a show manually, which got fixed for this release as well.
Here are a couple of screenshots showing what you’ll see soon (I just finished sending the packages to the server) in your favorite mobile phone:
SeriesFinale with shows' art
SeriesFinale with seasons' art
(I didn’t have time to update or integrate any translations in this version but I’m planning to have it done for the next one so I apologize for any inconvenience.)
* Importing PDF files is now faster
* The OCR engines manager dialog now allows to detect and choose to use system-wide OCR engines (this action is also used when the application is started with no engines configured)
* Multiple content areas in OCRFeeder’s canvas can now be selected using Shift+Click
* Introduces Ctrl+a shortcut to select all content areas in OCRFeeder’s canvas
* The Tools menu now has the new action “Recognize Selected Areas” which will perform the automatic recognition on selected content areas of OCRFeeder’s canvas
Also, a few bugs were fixed:
* Removed PDF files’ extension from the images generated from them
* Sorts images when adding them from a folder
* Selection areas are now getting selected after creating them
* Fixed problem when quitting the application
