libecal documentation

I’ve started work designing a new calendar application using libecal. I’ve always wondered why more GNOME apps don’t use evolution-data-server/libebook/libecal. Given that it’s part of GNOME and PIM is quite an integral part of a desktop, you’d think that people would be jumping to use them, especially given the API is quite nice to use… Today I find out why: libecal has a serious lack of documentation :/ I don’t think I’d have the courage to do this if I hadn’t ported the calendar side of eds earlier this year. Working at OpenedHand has been great πŸ™‚

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Finished!

I couldn’t resist working on ecal today. Now that its committed to OpenedHand’s svn server, it’s shameful that it doesn’t work properly – But it does now! As far as I can tell, all show-stopping bugs have now been fixed πŸ™‚ The last two major ones, which have been plaguing me for a good 2 weeks were caused by one missing line ‘priv->type = type;’. An uninitialised variable. Hours of debugging and picking up the smallest of bugs and typos, and I miss an uninitialised variable… Typical! Will see if I can get that committed, along with my ‘let things build against it’ changes on Monday πŸ™‚

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Taking DBus

Well, work on all other things has stopped as I join the guys at OpenedHand for the summer πŸ™‚ I’ve been working on porting the evolution calendar back-end to DBus, based on the address-book back-end already completed by Ross Burton (an eployee at OpenedHand). Progress is going well – I’ve learnt more in this last two weeks than I have in the past 2 years (nb: exaggeration), and its been lots of fun so far. I’ve finally made some head-way and the back-end is very close to being functional (with a little faffing, you can view calendars and events in evolution). I hope to make it feature-complete and not *too* buggy this coming week, and hopefully it’ll get committed to the OH svn, and eventually, perhaps, up-stream. It feels good to be working on my first major contribution to open-source, even if it is heavily derivative of someone else’s work πŸ™‚ Punnet did make a fair bit of progress before I started working, however. I don’t feel like releasing the source just yet, there just isn’t enough there… But I ported all the drawing code from gdk to OpenGL (using GtkGLExt) and added support for the 3rd dimension and keyboard input, along with lots of smaller features. I don’t know when I’ll have the time to work on it again, but if I see it dying, I’ll stick the source-code up. On a personal note, I haven’t had the time to catch up with all the people I meant to yet, I must get round to it soon… Also, no regrets about turning down IBM. I’ll probably apply again next year though, the experience was worth it πŸ™‚

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