Heartburn, Indigestion, Upset Stomach, Nausea, Diarrhea…
11.13.08 - 04:23pm
My living room
Windows Mobile Update: Freetype
11.03.08 - 03:05pm
I’ve implemented a freetype font back end for Windows and Windows CE that we’ll be using for Fennec. This will allow Fennec to render international fonts we were previously incapable of handling.
There’s still plenty of work to do, but I can’t wait until we can benefit from Madhava’s upcoming small screen UI
Also, for any of you who attempted to build in the last 10 days, we did a pretty major rearchitecting that broke the build for a while. That has been resolved now and you should have more luck building.
Windows Mobile Update 3: Fonts
10.11.08 - 12:12pm
I found (and fixed) one of our bugs in the Windows Mobile font code. This makes things much better
88/100, not bad
Also note that I’m running this on an actual device, using Remote Zoomin to get the screen shot.
Windows Mobile Update 2
10.11.08 - 10:47am
Just to update Doug’s post we’ve got the problem with web content not painting fixed.
Still have problems with fonts though.
Windows Mobile Progress Update
10.10.08 - 04:21pm
Windows…. we got windows!
Its reasonably fast on the device too (just harder to get a screen shot). Some obvious font issues though. Stuart, tag… you’re it.
Windows Mobile Emulator Help
10.02.08 - 11:26pm
I want to run a debug build of fennec on my windows mobile emulator. I have been able to do this by “mounting” my object directory as a shared folder. Unfortunitely I’m seeing IO errors which I’ve read could be due to the way the emulator maps in the “storage card.”
So now I’m trying to deploy fennec and xulrunner to the Program Files folder through visual studio. Unfortunitely the emulator images provided by microsoft only have 10-20mb (depending on how you launch them) of free storage space, so the deploy fails.
I’m hoping some one out there has a work around. One option would be to edit the emulator configuration in some seemingly undocumented way. Another could be to download different images. Most actual consumer devices have more than enough internal storage (the HTC Touch Pro has 512Mb), and I seem to remember seeing device specific images at some point. Any help would be apreciated though.
App store rant
09.25.08 - 03:16pm
Note: fixed link
Ryan Block, one of the Engadget editors, posted this editorial about Apple’s App Store.
As a developer who has downloaded the SDK and become frustrated, “Amen.” As an iPhone user frustrated by the lack of truely useful 3rd software available, “Please…pretty please. Don’t make me switch to T-mobile and buy an Android phone.”
Fennec on e-paper
09.24.08 - 03:54pm
I spoke with Jaya Kumar today about his e-paper device and running fennec on it. He recently presented his work at the linux plumbers conference. Essentially this is an gumstix device with an e-paper display.
The device he showed me had to be controled remotely with a mouse. In his bag he had a new display witha touch screen and a better refresh rate. I’m really excited to see fennec running on that.
The next step is to really think about how to combat the limitations of an e-paper display. With today’s technology those are primarily the slow refresh rate and the gray scale graphics. Can we do something more intelligent with mapping of colors to greyscale than a simple translation of brightness. Perhaps all of the colors on a given page could be mapped out along a scale of contrast. Perhaps you just need to consider the colors of adjacent elements, is this simply a map coloring problem?
And when it comes to the refresh rate, can the browser make certain adjustments to accommodate the device automatically? Or do we just punt and some how give a hint to the web server during the request?
Madhava, Aza…. I’m looking at you
Camera input tag
09.23.08 - 02:15pm
Earlier this month I spent some time working on exposing camera functionality to content in fennec and firefox. First, I built upon Chris Double’s implementation of a GStreamer back end for the video tag and extended it to support a “camera://” protocol. When the video tag encounters this, it creates a GStreamer pipeline starting from a video for linux 2 source (v4l2).
This currently works on desktop linux that have a v4l2 supported camera (such as iSight) and the n800/n810. It will need to be implemented on mac and windows and configurations will need to be stored in preferences (in case you have multiple cameras or your camera uses a difference interface).
Next I wrapped a video tag, image and a few buttons in xbl and bound it to <input type=”camera” />. When a user hits a website using this tag, he or she currently will see a live video preview and a “take photo” button. When the user clicks the button, the photo is grabbed from the camera and shown to the user in the image element. The image element and video element are in a deck element so only one is shown at a time. After the photo is taken, there is a button that reads “Take another photo,” in case the user doesn’t like the one they just took. Once the user is satisfied, this element works like any other form element and the file can be uploaded to a web service.
After talking to a few people this should acutally be bound to <input type=”file” accept=”image/png”/>. Also, it needs some UI design both for what it looks like in content and for a configuration dialog. Finally, we’ll need to think about security and make sure no one can snap a photo of you when you’re not looking your best. Speaking of which, I might as well share:
I’ve notice quite a few iPhone apps that allow users to take a photo and upload it with out leaving the application. Absent the ability to do this from the web, these otherwise web centric services have been forced to write a native application to accomplish their goal. Hopefully this will eventually help web services stay on the web.
