Caribou with Text Predictor Input Mode from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

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.

(SeriesFinale together with some of the community apps I use)

So, in the middle of last week I uploaded the version 0.1 to extras devel repository after solving the Debian package generation within the Scratchbox (Lizardo, from PyMaemo, helped me on this and wrote a helpful FAQ entry to the PyMaemo website). Still, the repository builder kept using Python 2.3 to build the package just like the problem I had on Scratchbox… tried again to push some changes and build it and still: fail! In the end I just gave up using CDBS for the package generation and edited the template of dh_make directly. Luckily, having a working Python setup script cuts part of the work (I like writing software, not packaging it!) and about the failed attempts, that’s what extras devel are for anyway…

Now version 0.2.1 is the one you can install and not call me ugly names afterwards
This version should have been available since last week but apparently there was some kind of problem in the Extras Devel repository and some apps weren’t made available until yesterday.

What does version 0.2.1 brings apart from working out of the Application Manager?

* Added mark all/none menus to the episode list view (suggested by Paco Zafra on the comments to my last post)
* The configurations folder is now stored under /home/user/.osso . My co-worker Calvaris suggested this to me since it will include the folder when you backup the device. And don’t worry with the current configurations you have now because I added a script to move the old folder automatically to the new location after this package is installed.
* Code improvements, among them, corrected local paths inclusion in sys path (for developing and running)

For the next version I plan to enhance the visual of things a bit (how or what lies in my brain currently) and to introduce translation files.

Add your suggestions as comments to this post or sent them by email to me.

Have a nice weekend!

I’m also giving a talk about Porting GNOME Applications to Maemo Fremantle where I’ll talk about some common practices and decisions regarding the adaptation to Fremantle of applications that were designed to be used in the GNOME desktop. For these, I’ll use the experience of porting EOG and OCRFeeder to Fremantle.
I hope that it will help developers who are thinking on porting they’re favorite desktop applications.

If you want to discuss matters like “how do I adapt this behavior to Fremantle”, OCR, EOG or OCRFeeder for Maemo, just let me know and I’ll be glad to talk about these topics.

Hope to see you there!

When I posted about how I made OCRFeeder run in Fremantle I said I wasn’t thinking of porting the application but in later talks with some people, it was clear that OCRFeeder might come in handy for some people.
One of the use cases that we have talked about was to be able to create a contact in the address book by recognizing the contact fields from a business card.

So, for some days in these last weeks, I’ve been porting OCRFeeder to Fremantle!
(The card-to-contact feature is still to come as I wanted to have OCRFeeder “fremantelized” before)

New Respository

I had been using git-svn to develop OCRFeeder and while this was okay when there was just a branch (trunk), with the Maemo version it was clear that Google Code’s SVN repository wasn’t enough. (Yes, I know they have mercurial but I’m git user)
So, yesterday I relocated OCRFeeder’s development to Gitorious where you’ll find the branch “maemo” besides the “master” one: http://gitorious.org/ocrfeeder

Development Notes

I must say that although I had for a long time used PyGTK for my UI code, on Hildon, I am more experienced in using C. While from the theory part this is the same, on the practical side, the PyMaemo bindings had some issues that delayed the development a bit (mainly undocumented functions that differ from the direct and expected usage, as well as some bugs I found).
I must thank Lizardo and other PyMaemo folks who were kind enough to help me every time I bugged them with questions and suggestions.

I think OCRFeeder for Maemo represents another example of how a desktop targetted application can be ported to Fremantle, specially from the design point of view. The chats I had with my friend and colleague Felipe (who, by the way, has just become a Master degree student in a in User-Centered Interactive Technologies) surelly helped in this matter.

Trying OCRFeeder for Maemo

Now, you can try to use OCRFeeder but you’ll have to first compile and install pygoocanvas and Tesseract or another OCR engine like I wrote here. I hope I have time to create deb packages for both pygoocanvas and Tesseract as they’re also very useful apps to have.

As a final note, I must say that although everything was working fine on Maemo 5.0 SDK beta 2, today the final SDK was released and I tested OCRFeeder on it… and not everything works well as before. The problems are mainly related to GtkTreeViews (Hildon style) which, from the C side seem to be working okay, but from the PyMaemo side seems not to obey the selection mode I assign to it.

Some Eye Candy…

OCRFeeder for Maemo preview from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Preferences dialog

Recognized page

Renewed looks, introduced docs and much more for you to dive/continue to swim into Fremantle’s world and do nice interfaces for mobile devices.

The introduction of docs, that I and my friend Iván Gomez maintain, are very important to the development of Hildon applications in my opinion.
Two docs are introduced, the Hildon Tutorial, targeting developers and making your hands dirty with a pratical approach; and the Hildon Interface Guidelines, less technical, that will give you some guidelines about how to develop a usable application for mobile devices.
The docs are very beta-ish but we’re working on that and will continue to improve them. Please give us your contribution and let us know about any bugs you find or suggestions you may have.

Happy mobile developing!