Introducing: JanaGtkEventList

Another libjana-related blog post… I’ve just finished a bit of work on the event-list widget. Most importantly, I just added a utility in libjana that generates a list of all the durations an event has, split across days (theoretically taking into account recurrences and exceptions, but that’s unimplemented at the moment). Adding support into JanaGtkEventStore was a bit tedious, but now the event viewing widgets can easily show and edit recurring/multiple-day events without any of the nasty special-casing that happens in Dates currently. It’s now very easy to write a nice-looking event-list in approximately 50 lines of C code 🙂 (give or take..) Screenshot:

Screenshot of JanaGtkEventList example

As ever, source is available from subversion: http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/dates/branches/jana/ [view]

Barry White – You See the Trouble With Me
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Event-Flow (Introducing libjana)

I’ve been working the past couple of weeks on libjana, a collection of libraries intended to make working with libecal easy (gasp!). These are going to form the back-end for the new version of Dates, which you’ll see first as part of OpenMoko (although it goes without saying, pimlico and gnome versions are high on my TODO list). Unfortunately, I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on the event viewing widgets yet; most of my time has been spent working on building solid foundations, so things like timezones/daylight savings work correctly and recurring events and alarms won’t be hard to implement in the future. The start of this week has been spent on UI bits, however, and I hacked up a little demo yesterday which I hope demonstrates how easy libjana is to use (feedback welcome):

Video thumbnail
Watch video

164 lines of code, including license header 🙂 Just thought I’d put this out there, before Apple come up with something equally pointless.

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Poor Konami :(

Random blog post follows: Why does every other games company completely and blatantly rip off Konami, and why do Konami let them get away with it? If it were Microsoft, dare I say it, there’s no way they’d let these things slide… Beatmania gets copied by EZ2DJ, Dance Dance Revolution gets copied by Pump It Up (and several others), Guitar Mania gets copied by Guitar Hero, Thrill Drive gets copied by Burnout… And the list probably goes on. These aren’t just influences, these are all cases where someone has gone “Ooh, that looks cool… Let’s do that!” and re-implemented the game. To add insult to injury, some of the plagiarisers have done a lot better than Konami, without adding anything new (Criterion with Burnout, Harmonix with Guitar Hero (and their up-coming band game too..)). Whoever heads Konami must be very understanding and very honourable. Or very oblivious. If this was my work, I wouldn’t be too happy about it..

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