... and then she walked into my office. Great big eyes and legs that went all the way down to her feet. I knew she was trouble from the moment I saw her. She swayed up to my desk and said, in a low husky voice, "I hear you need some help with your application."

Oh man, that's too funny. I'm not sure there's any place to go from there. Maybe it'll be a good test to see if I can regather my self, but more than likely I'll just have to accept my fate.

Blue Highways

I implied earlier that my journey for UI nirvana was all hell. That was somewhat misleading. It's true that I ended up empty handed, but I did see some fascinating stuff along the way. And I just want to make some brief remarks before I get back to the main thread, 'cause as frustrated as it got, I did learn some things.

The set of libraries and API's that make Hildon possible are very decoupled. For instance, Hildon depends on GTK which depends on GDK where both depend on GObject where all depend on glib. But there are no dependencies in the opposite direction, i.e. GObject is only dependent on glib, but glib depends on none of the above. The result is an excellent C-based object-oriented environment. And because of the way it implements and instantiates its class, object and parent hierarchies, it's somewhat trivial to create bindings for popular scripting languages. The result: A powerful tool set, but not always for the meek.

And this is where I found myself, in a complex world of windowless child widgets and stolen input foci. I had seen this place before, but Nokia had left this particular frontier barren, to the point that it was in need of some formidable UI methods. Thankfully, a writer from the high plains was drifting in...

Well, he's promised more, so here's what we have so far.

I like your style
As for getting sidetracked, I've spent the last year wandering around with ideas in my head
Always something new and difficult and challenging to get in my way and never an easy solution.

keep up the story, its enthralling.

Nice job Qole !

/me waits for sith lords

There's 12 minutes between the creation times of these 2 links. This is exactly why I started this yarn in the first place. With the old qole there would have only been 6 minutes. But this new, apathetic qole...

Well, this warped shaggy dog is for you. And for you eiffel, wherever you are. EGBOK

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.

No offense people, it's funny and everything, but could we get back to the topic of this thread now?

Every time I see this thread in the Recent threads list, I'm a little thrilled because somebody might have found a new bit of info about the next-gen tablet...it's a bit of a let-down to see posts like the last few then.