Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Android thin client

Is Google Android suitable as a thin client operating system ?
I've been designing and developing thin client OSs during the last 7 years, and I was wondering if we can base a thin client OS on Android.
Let's find out.

Well, we need to change some source code to enable network booting so we have to wait, but watching this crude preview (from an 800x600 screen) perhaps begins our brainstorm...



Comments and suggestions are gladly welcome.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

from Z to A

Or from Zenity to Autoglade.
Gnome bug #412493 has been there for more than a year, it refers to the ability of handling forms with zenity. There are some proposals, but far too way too complex.
And sometimes, simple problems deserves simple solutions...

As usual, create your form in Glade, we will use the same example described in the bug report, a simple login window for a downloader pretending being connected to ftp.bli.org.
This is the running application.
The entry fields are annotated with autoglade as:
  • username:auto:init:env
  • password:auto:init:env
to initialize the values from the corresponding environment variables.

We use this simple script (login.sh) to call autoglade using login.glade

#! /bin/sh
export username=$LOGNAME
${AUTOGLADE:-autoglade} ${0%.sh}.glade

That simple.

Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Lists meet autoglade

The latest autoglade (available from svn repository) now supports lists as a special case of a GtkTreeView widget usng a ListStore model with a single column. Remember, as always, it's a zero programming solution.

As other widgets, lists can be initialized from the environment using autoglade annotation to its name, for example:

treeview1:auto:init:env

will use the environment variable treeview1 to obtain list header and items

export treeview1='("Fruits" "Apples" "Bananas" "Hedge aple" "Kiwifruits" "Melons" "Oranges" "Pineapples" "Strawberries" )'

Using one of the tests also present in the svn repository

$ ./list.sh


and, after selecting one item and pressing OK

treeview1='("Kiwifruits")'
autoargs='$treeview1'

appears in application's stdout.

More information about autoglade can be obtained from http://autoglade.sf.net.

Google Chrome


This is taken from Google Chrome browser presentation.
There was ?

Fell free to interpret.