Fri, 07 Jul 2006

Third report - first month past

The first month and a third of the total work is past now. It has been mostly like I expected: learning to hack a new project, studying its composition, and making tests to verify understanding. I have been obsessed with the Compiz code so that I did not look at Firefox extensions yet. The month has also reminded me that many people are against anything new.

The previous week went into more work with the Compiz plugin. I learned how to draw anti-aliased lines in OpenGL, implemented some communication code, fixed a bug in sloppy focus in scale and keyboard navigation in whirl. With respect to project milestones, I'm now able to composite windows of one app next to one another, and employ (fake) metadata. I haven't published this code yet. Compiz at freedesktop.org has been moved from CVS over to Git, and I should do the same for my Darcs repository.

The preliminary list of use cases for the plugin is in the wiki, and the line-drawing was a test for rendering connections between windows. One wild idea is using a window as a texture for connections, but I don't have a good way to implement connections in OpenGL yet.

I was thinking that there are several Firefox extensions that can template the needed extension. Gnowsis has one, Beagle has one, and Gimmie is going to have one. Actually it seems like they don't deal with tabs yet, though. I'll first look into these previous implementations and after that try to see whether Firefox has interfaces suitable for other kinds of implementations.

Posted at: 00:36 | Permanent link | Comment page

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