Notices

I'll take a whack at it. I always wanted to get some skinning done (heh) but themes need packaging so I was thinking start small.

Just do a default skin and send it to me. I'm guessing a bunch of PNGs?

just started using this and MAN has this removed that MAJOR IRRITATION of waiting for app manager while it consumes a large chunk of CPU cycles with the apt-worker background task.

thank you thank you!

It's actually a text file (where you can have references to PNG files, too):
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/stylesheet.html

And it appears they can already be loaded from the command line by default (thanks Qt! ) Start with I'll make a default one at some point but right now it's not high priority... And as the main screen already uses an internal stylesheet I don't think it can be overridden from the command line... I'll change that.

Hey hqh,

I think this is a great initiative, but can I have a question?
I don't want to insult you, but... Instead of creating a separate app, why not commit the necessary changes to Hildon's default app manager?

I wanted to create something with Qt, and this seemed like a nice little project... I've learned a lot.

I'm sure about that. That's why I said I don't wanna insult you.

Usually the preferred way of doing things in the open source world is that you grab the already existing project (if there is one that does what you want) and make your changes to that.

Here is the code of the app manager:
http://maemo.gitorious.org/hildon-application-manager

Can the stuff that makes your app faster be applied to it?

Just asking because if it could, all N900 users would benefit from your changes when they update to the next PR without the need of installing a redundant app.
(Also, we could make a community edition of it before the next PR like some people already did with Modest.)

Yeah, but in that case I would have had to spend time learning GTK, not Qt. There are quite a lot of redundant apps on desktop Linux too, especially if you consider the GTK vs. Qt environments... And that's what I like about Maemo and open source in general, too - This is not that certain fruit store

Some of it, possibly, if it's converted from Qt to using GTK and whatever else libraries are required. But calling apt-get binary directly vs. using apt-worker would require a major rewrite anyway, I'd expect.

I tried with the update applet already present, writing crude implementations of the D-Bus methods called by it in fapman but I ran into problems. It directly spawns apt-worker first and only if that fails and the Application Manager is open (its name is registered to D-Bus), it then calls the updating method provided by HAM itself.
I couldn't get the orange exclamation icon to go away (I think it checks the catalogues themselves to determine whether an update's been looked at) and apt-worker would still be running so fapman would fail whenever it was started...

It's still possible, I guess, due to the applet being open source but I guess it'd take a while for somebody to work through as it's rather heavily dependent on apt-worker/HAM.

Anyway, as a part of my failed effort, I did manage to get your program to use the X-Osso-Service stuff, instead. This was required because the applet called methods on the session bus. (I'm in awe of how easy it is to implement D-Bus methods in Qt [I'm used to DBus-GLib]...) This, I guess, is a foundation for implementing your own methods.

P.S. The top_application() handler is broken; I don't know Qt's equivalent of gtk_window_present().

Nice, applied the patch and hopefully fixed the top_application method for the next release.

Hopefully this d-bus stuff can be put to use by someone in the future

Small bug found:

When editing catalogs, and editing name, should the (name at least) edit box become empty, the "enabled" checkbox goes clear. While a nice touch, it doesn't go back when a name is added, meaning that with no explicit user input the repository might become disabled.