Thursday, December 17, 2009

Xournal

Shaping nicely...

7 comments:

Dov Grobgeld said...

I thought of an idea for the maemo xournal. Currently the row of buttons at the bottom are not enough to choose things like pen width. So the idea is to turn the button into a something that behaves more like a GtkComboBox. When pressing it a secondary row of button is popped up. That row of buttons may either be popped down by clicking on the outside, in which case you use the old value, or be used to choose a new value. The downside is that you need to clicks to e.g. change from a hand to your old pen. I.e. one click on the pen button, and one click to pop down the menu.

Another alternate approach would be to not pop up the menu, unless the button is pressed, e.g. for half a second.

If you want to I could try to hack such a GtkWidget, as I haven't seen anything like it.

Another question I have is what is the relation between Maemo Xournal and the "normal" Xournal. Do you have a separate respository, have your changes been put back into xournal?

Thanks again for your efforts!

Test said...

Hi Dov,

your idea is quite cool and similar to what Xournal should look like in a (not distant, hopefully) future (see: http://picasaweb.google.com/anidel/XournalNextGenUI).

To solve the problem you are addressing (how to give the user access to that many tools) we (at the Maemo-Barcelona Long Weekend) came up with the idea of grouping the tools by use case (pdf annotations, drawing, note taking) and propose the user a toolbar with the most useful tools for that mode (see: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=425570&postcount=221 for more info).

Your idea is indeed useful if it can be turned like this: you select a tool and it behaves normally allowing you to switch tools by simple taps. If you tap the selected tool again than a second row of "options for that tool" may appear and behave like you said.

Feel free to implement such a widget, I was trying to learn how to make my own widgets, but it may take some time.

Regarding the relation with the desktop version of Xournal, mine is a port of it and I am in contact with Denis about pushing my changes back into the main code, but I need sometime to polish my hacks and I want to do it while working to make this new version of the Maemo port work fine on the 770 and N8x0 tablets.

Comments?

Dov Grobgeld said...

H Anidel,

I sent you an email with a proof of concept of radiotoolbuttons with a toolbar popup on a second clic. Did you get it?

Test said...

Hey Dov,

nope I didn't, where and what subject did you use so that I can look for it?

Dov Grobgeld said...

I used the address found at http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anidel/ but perhaps it wasn't you. I can paste the source here if you want, but I think it is easier to use mail. Is there any wiki or bug-request system where I can paste it?

Meanwhile you can get the code, which I wrote in vala, from:

http://imagic.weizmann.ac.il/~dov/icon-menu.vala

Regards,
Dov

Dov Grobgeld said...

Hi Anidel,

Did you get my lastest blog comment?

I wrote that I have put my code on http://imagic.weizmann.ac.il/~dov/icon-menu.vala .

I hope you are Vala literate. :-)

Test said...

Hi Dov,

sorry I just landed back in London after few days with family.

I am not a Vala literate, but I will have a look at it :)

Thank you again :)