I took a quick crack at seeing if I would have any scrolling issues with the GtkTable approach I was suggesting. None. I don't have markup yet 'cause GtkBuilder doesn't actually let you have markup inside UI files, and I was too lazy to produce a corresponding JSON file. That goes double for adding timestamps. Maybe tomorrow, but my proof-of-concept has just about run its course.

Also, adding bubble background pixbufs wouldn't be that difficult, and shouldn't cause any performance issues.

Anyway, no scrolling issues, and this is Python. Here's a screen shot of a 105 message conversation:

It's great to have tmo members like you that are willing to do these kinds of things.
It looks good so far. Perhaps a new thread could be created for this so that we don't hijack the current thread since this stuff is a bit off-topic.

Thanks for the efforts so far!

@byte_76:

I appreciate the kind words, but I'm afraid I've misled you, and I apologize for that. You probably have heard this cliche before, but I'm just scratching an itch, and I have many that need my attention. But I am here to help as well as learn, so if you do find someone to champion your cause, I'm happy to answer any technical questions that I can.

After what qole wrote, and then seeing your post in the conversations thread, I was disturbed. I have a running conversation with my young son; we have great fun sending messages back and forth to each other from an iPod touch to my n900. I hadn't given it much notice, but sure enough, even using the conversations app default settings, scrolling is jerky and painful. That's why I did what I did.

Again, sorry, I'm not the goto guy on this one, but I did want to inspire someone else to pick up the ball. In my opinion, Nokia used a hammer where a screwdriver would do, but the promise of this environment is that the right community can fix such things. I see myself as just one cog here at tmo, but for my own selfish reasons I choose not to be a single point of success or failure. I tend to be a FOSS purest, so when it comes to anything software, my motto is simply: "Love it or leave it." That's where the best stuff comes from, and believe it or not, that quote is a paraphrase of something Steve Jobs believes. But he just seems to want to keep all the love for himself. Good luck!

P.S. Not to tease you further, but I'm not sure I've finished scratching this particular itch, so don't be surprised if I continue to post updates here. Considering that we know Harmattan will have a WRT front end, and kind of knowing the spirit of the OP's intent, I consider what I've been doing mildly relevant to this thread.

Granted, a very ugly first attempt at balloons, but it scrolls nice and I added some markup. Copy-and-paste is going to be the tricky part. I either have to create a lite version of GtkTextView, or just expand GtkLabel.

I just came up with one of my best algorithms in about 2 years. The speedup and memory savings are possibly optimal. I should have a demo early this week, but I'm so excited that I just had to share. It's basically 5 mem copies per label background. The one-and-only, per-person background pixbuf grows to max-width and max-height as necessary. Since the corners never change, there's just four border copies and one middle section copy. No scaling, no Cairo, no extra memory, and no unnecessary memory creation/destruction. Just pixel-pushin' speed. And I get copy-and-paste for free. After that, it will be time to see about creating an entire read-only GtkTextView/GtkTextBuffer that could be exported as a document of a user's chosen format.

daperl: package it and they will come...

@qole:

I'm just hackin' around, but I think I did what I came to do.

At last: someone else that finds this a scarey possibility! I got told by qgil that I was being paranoid and the only one!

All I can figure is that it must have something to do with advertising. There's already a well established ad infrastructure built-in to the web. Otherwise, I can't make much sense out of it. It's a 180° from where I want to be going; the Web is a desktop technology, but relatively speaking, tcp and udp are lean-and-mean communication technologies.

I want to be running my own light weight walwart push server that is my instantly-connected proxy workhorse. It can filter and ping the crap out of other poorly implemented services for me. I want more fine-grain control of how I use my battery and CPU. I can't see WRT being that answer. But I can see the big players, Nokia included, wanting their own piece of push services. How much longer can the cellcos get away with being a messaging mafia?

Wow, I can't seem to stop this tangential ranting. Time for bed.

Web Runtime is for offline apps as well! The main point is "easy and fast to develop with a technology familiar to most web developers", not online push or something.

About security, I keep saying that security experts are confident about the Web Runtime so if you have concrete arguments please just expose them. Blunt conclusions based on the use of Javascript leave little space for constructive discussion. fwiw