Wednesday 4 July 2012

Ubuntu App Showdown 4

So, five day's of development time left am really feeling the pressure, I have had to defer some features for the time being. I'd like to implement some more, but I have to judge carefully how long it will take to get them done and I just don't think I will manage it.

What I want to get done is Undo and Redo, I wish the Gtk text buffers had the can_undo(), undo(), can_redo() and redo() functions, I know GtkSourceViews have them, but I don't see that text buffers have them. I have all day Friday to get something workable, after that I shall just have to disable the buttons and submit as is.

Working full time and doing a lot of travelling these past couple of weeks has left me very limited time to get done what I want to, but I know I have pushed myself to get done what I have managed to do thus far, so whatever happens I am happy with what I have done.

Since I have been really busy with actually coding, I have not shown a single screenshot since my mock ups. So with nothing more ado, here is the state of LiberEdit as it stands, with the exception of undo/redo, everything works! I hope it's not just me, but I think it looks really nice. Obviously with the way that Ubuntu has the global menu it's not shown in this screen shot but there is a menu bar.




















I should probably aim to have most things done by Friday evening as I have a busy weekend, I need to set up the PPA so that the app can be installed but it's getting late and I have been running on lack of sleep for some time now.

Thanks for reading.
Neil

Sunday 1 July 2012

Ubuntu app showdown 3

So I have installed the Android blogger client onto my phone to see if blogging on the go is easy enough, so please forgive typos or other horrific mistakes.

So its the end of week 2 of the Ubuntu App showdown and my project is almost finished, I have identified 5 things that would be awesome to have finished, that's not to say it is perfect but it is usable.

My one concern is that I will not have had many testers, so I can't say how well it performs with its intended audience despite my efforts to make it as easy to use as possible.
The following 6 features are much for my reference as they are a news update for readers.
1) Implement a nice easy way to add files to a project.
2) Have a file unsaved notification on each tab so the user can see at a glance that files need saving.
3) Create a warning dialog when closing the application if there are unsaved files.
4) Have the application remember which files were open the last time the application was closed and reopen them.
5) Have a standard example project open up with a welcome screen on first run.
6) Only allow one instance of a file open at a time, this is to prevent files clobbering each other.
As you can see these are really quite minor at this point and should take no time at all.
If I get these features done in time I shall even begin working on a bona fide user manual as a bonus and hopefully my friend will have an application logo ready to go by Wednesday.
Good luck to all the others involved in the project!