Notices

the problem right now is that maemo (especially 4) is a very small platform target.

if it had the target of say x86 in general, the chance of picking up new people with knowhow to help will greatly increase.

but the handheld devices area have for most of its time been about "complete" devices. That is, when its ships nothing more is done. This have changed in recent years with various smartphone platforms, but they are still much smaller, and much more fragmented, then the PC. Heck, its like watching the micro computers back in the 80s all over again.

Hi all

I'm the author of tear-improvements package. Let me clarify what is tear-improvements package, why it was developed and what it adds to tear on diablo.

First of all, i want to appreciate Bundyo for his great browser -- it still #1 application on my tablet for last 1.5 years. Thanks, great job! I was pleased to see every new Tear release. But eventually with release of N900 and Maemo5 author's priorities was changed and it was a big disappointment for all of us that Tear lost its compatibility with Diablo and diablo version was dropped without any updates.

Thats why some day i checked out the last svn revision of Tear that successfully compiles under Diablo (rev 55) and started to add some things i was dreamed about. Then i found that many people at biggest russian maemo forum at http://n8xx.com were interested in same tear modifications. So, i packed my additions as tear-improvement package and placed in my repository at http://skriblovsky.net/maemo/ . I was not sure that i will continue development and i was too lazy to host the source code anywhere I just released several packages with only the binary replacement to tear. I'm going to correct this and publish the source code. Here is it: http://skriblovsky.net/maemo/tear-im...0.1.8.2.tar.gz

Of course, because i was a guest at tear's sources, some features may be implemented ugly, chaotically and illogically, but Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes.

The list of modifications in tear-improvements v0.1.8.2:

• Position indicator on left side. Appears while you scroll the page
• Bold font in address suggestion list for better recognition
• Link will not be activated when you drag the page and accidentally tap on link
• SWF files are opened inside Tear (page with <object> tag is dynamically generated)
• New dragging method. There is 100px active area on the right side of page. If you put finger on it and then drag your finger up/down, the page will be scrolled up/down. This can be illustrated by picture in this post: http://n8xx.com/post44952.html#p44952 .The speed of scrolling depends on movement of your finger.
• Scrolling page-down and page-up with Space and Shift+Space, just like in all desktop browsers and MicroB
• Opening link in new window with Menu+Click
• Detecting RSS feeds in page (almost backported from newer Tear revisions)
• Reload button removed. Its functionality was transfered to Go button. Stop button will appear instead of Go while page is loading.

You may diff the sources against tear rev 55 to get the patch

BTW, there was another package called tear-mod. This is my first package and it was packaged as replacement to original tear and marked as conflicting with original tear. If somebody have installed it, please remove it, and install tear-improvements, since tear-mod is obsoleted.

Thanks Mitrandir, I have "hated" Tear for a long time due to how buggy it is - and, yes I'm vain, how incredibly ugly the speed dial screen is with "blue on blue".

Your improvements to Tear has made me go back and give it another try. Start screen is still fugly but these improvement does make it a MUCH better browser.

Thanks to both of you! (Bundyo and Mitrandir).

Thank you Mitrandir for the improvements you've added, they are great indeed. If you want I can give you access to the garage project and SVN so you can integrate your patches.

Thanks, i would appreciate access to SVN. I could create branch for diablo code and integrate my changes to it. This will also give me a chance to rework my code and make it more consistent with main sources, because now i'm much more familiar with Tear's code than when i started to work on my patches.
Anyway, my local repository is not good place indeed for the code of GNU-licensed project

I still have many ideas of improvements for Tear and i will be happy if i will have time to continue to work on them.
Of course, if there will be enough interest to Tear from the community after today's release of Opera Mobile

Okay, then you will need to register in Garage (if you didn't already) and request to join the project.

Thanks, i have sent the request

I think it some of my changes can be integrated to Fremantle code, but i have no N900, so i wont be able to test them. I think if any of patches are interesting for Fremantle, developers who have N900 can review my patches and port them to fremantle trunk

Well, I'm the only currently "active" developer AFAIK So, I'll check them out, thanks

Ahh, i see. I just saw that five people more in developers

Yup, but the check-ins were scarce lately (mine too