Mon, 12 Jun 2006

First report

During the last eleven days I have started the project, set up a suitable development environment, prototyped a trivial communications mechanism, had a closer look at Compiz code, and created a stub Compiz plugin. Nothing earth-shaking, but I'm within the schedule and it has been good to lay proper foundations, think things through etc. Now I've got more concrete ideas on how to proceed on the development process.

I'm following several related communication channels:

This takes about an hour a day. I wonder what I'm still missing. The third-party community also has web forums and a wiki, but I hope I hear about the developments on the mailing list or on the blog.

I used about six hours to set up my web server and wiki. On the other hand, I've put over 10 hours to install, understand and configure pyblosxom for this blog, and I'm not satisfied with it: web design is not my specialty, and I would've wanted commenting and wiki markup plugins to work. The default installation is incomplete, documentation is lacking, there are no (up-to-date) deployment examples... But I hope you can read this and leave comments, so I can forget this for now.

Some of my experiences and plans are already available in the wiki. I should write more about how to create a new Compiz plugin, and about this project in general.

I looked at the differences in the scale plugin between the offical version and the third-party community version. I think I'll start my plugin as a copy of the current official version: change layout to have the focused window big in the middle, add some criterion for "relatedness", make clicking re-layout instead of exiting the mode. This should be most of the user interface for starters.

I haven't found good documentation on the ideas of the model in the X Window System: windows and their properties. I made a trivial prototype of a communications system ( property_listener.py and property_notifier.py) mostly to gain some understanding on what I could try to understand. I'll try to get some comments from the experienced X hackers.

Posted at: 02:47 | Permanent link | Comment page

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