In The Light

And if you feel that you can't go on. And your will's sinkin' low
Just believe and you can't go wrong.
In the light you will find the road. You will find the road
-- Jones/Page/Plant

So what was going on here? We had a few statusbar applets in need of some Nokia/Hildon look-and-feel. Why all the problems? The best answer to date, it seems, is that Nokia wanted to keep brand recognition. By cloaking statusbar UI code from the community? Sounded silly to me. But no matter, 'cause jott would solve the puzzle and put these questions to bed.

Who was this jott guy anyway? I had been reading the forums for over 6 months and I didn't remember any contributions from this obviously solid developer. But I also had never visited the IRC #maemo channel. While working with the AB guys I was encouraged to continue our discussions there, so I accepted the invitation and made an appearence. Here everybody was; itT in real-time! And it turned out that some Nokia tablet people, like jott, only existed at the #maemo channel. The community was also a network.

Prior to jott's arrival, I had considered changing my itT handle to Flounder; I was feeling fat, drunk, and particularly stupid. I went from objdumping sound.so and display.so, to studying Hildon volume-slider source code. And though they didn't reveal all their secrets, I did notice a subtlety: Nokia's own Display and Sound statusbar applets handled input focus differently. Was Nokia not even sharing code with themselves? So as satisfying as this network-community roller coaster was turning out to be, I couldn't help to think that plenty of time had been waisted.

Anyway, the Advanced Backlight statusbar control was now Nokia/Hildonesque and it continues to sit proudly up on my statusbar mantel. But the success of this project wasn't just the snapping-in of a final piece. It was more like a potluck dinner: rm_you unfolded a grand table for his famous BBQ, GA arrived with the silverware, Benson put the forks on the left, qwerty12 (and fanoush?) rotated some stuff to make room for a salad, I unwrapped a jello thing, and jott brought the New York style cheese cake. Good times. But it had gotten very late, and I needed to get back. And even though I was now armed with a properly-lit UI, there was still much to do...

...like fighting Sith Lords and smoke monsters.