Notices

Is it easy to add a search engine? I live in Sweden and it is a site called (http://www.prisjakt.nu/) that is very popular.

Yes, that is fairly easy. Just scan a barcode, click Search the Web, click on the window title menu, select Add Custom Provider, type in Prisjakt as name, and http://www.prisjakt.nu/search.php?query=%s as the Address. If barcodes are supported over at Prisjakt it should work.

dragly, dude I'm pretty sure you missed my post! It was on the previous page at the bottom :P

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=210

Actually, I didn't miss it, but I figured I wouldn't get the time to respond earlier today And that gave me some time to think about your suggestion as well.

First of all I must say that it looks really sexy! The design is neat and clean, yet prettier than the default Maemo look. However, a few things come to mind when I see it, which needs to be discussed:

1. Should the scanner show up in full screen or in a small widget (like your design and the current)? Some other scanners seem to use full screen with overlayed icons, which looks pretty, but I'm not sure about how it affects the user experience. Others do it the same way as we do. Any thoughts?
2. I believe the options like "Search Froogle" etc. should show up in a new window like they do now. This makes it easier to maintain a longer list as we get more plugins and choices. The design of the list could use some freshening up, though.
3. Cramping everything into one window makes it harder to read the text and hit the buttons. I think it is better for the user experience if we divide the process into a few more windows instead.
4. If we implement a major design change like you have suggested, we'll have to think about how we can make it integrate well with the default Maemo design. This is because I believe most plugin developers don't want to use a lot of time to integrate their plugins into a different mBarcode design. In other words; we should ensure that when we change the GUI-design of the application itself, the plugin developers won't have to make any changes to their code at all.

I've considered to move the options like "Open Image", "Scan" and maybe some other stuff like "History" and "About" to a startup screen. Somewhat like they do in Shop Savvy:

Do you think this would be a good idea?

Anyways, nice work and thanks for the suggestion! I would really like to have you on the team for some design work. Do you design icons as well?

Hey, sorry, I jumped the gun! I saw you respond to another post and figured you missed mine since it was on a previous page.

My thoughts:

1. I feel that fullscreen apps take away from the Maemo experience of multitasking if done improperly. When I'm in a fullscreen app with no multitasking button, if I need to switch to another program I need to press the power button, tap 'phone' and then get to the main UI through the phone interface (like in Brain Party). However, if done right, then it's great, like in Maps, where it still retains the time, back and close, so the user isn't "trapped" in your app.

2. I didn't even notice that search options show up in a different list that's a great idea! haha

3. This goes with #2. I agree completely, which also goes back to having a main menu screen like you suggested, which I think is a better way to engage the user and add future options easily, and not tie yourself into "just" scanning barcodes.

I have no experience coding for Maemo, so I design a "dream" interface not knowing if its feasible. But I'd love to help you out where ever I can, just let me know! I do not design icons persay, but I do have a vast collection of free icons that I use in my websites and designs.

@dragly Don't want to threaten your exams, but just in case you do a rebuild, you could switch to building against the Qt 4.6.2 from PR 1.2 instead of the libqt4-maemo5-* packages. Currently makes it necessary to have 4.6.2 installed twice.

@tvogel: That's quickly done and the packages are actually already prepared, so no worries about the exams there

For the moment I've already uploaded the PR1.2 version of mbarcode, but I didn't get time to build and upload the plugins. I believe I'll get time to do that tonight or tomorrow.

I'd really like to get the Python stuff in and working so we can open up the app for more plugin developers.

I'll take another look at how we might be able to get it up and running this evening.

The other option was to broadcast DBUS messages when a barcode is found, this was pretty simple in GTK+, not sure about Qt.

I'll have a look at this - I originally set the framerate to be quite low as every frame is passed to the decoders. It might be a better bet to drop frames if the decoders are busy (must check and see if I did this!)

The new packages that are built against libqt4 in PR1.2 are on their way through the autobuilder now. If everything works as expected they should be ready for download from extras-devel in 10 minutes.

Sounds good! I have been looking at PythonQt a bit myself and it seems reasonable that we should be able to make a framework for plugins on top of it. About DBUS messages I think it should be fairly easy to work with those in Qt as well. There is some info about them here: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6//intro-to-dbus.html

But I suggest we go for PythonQt first and DBUS second. With PythonQt we should more easily be able to integrate plugins in the main app.

You've talked about it earlier, but I don't remember if you implemented it. Thanks for having a look at it You know that pipeline stuff a lot better than I do