Totem Chapters Plugin - Weekly Report 2

[Alexander Saprykin <xelfium gmail com>]

Hey all,

Here is my second weekly report (see text version below):
http://axsaprykin.blogspot.com/2010/06/gsoc-weekly-code-report-2.html

I've also created my portfolio page:
http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/AlexanderSaprykin_Totem

== git repository & log ==

git repository: git://gitorious.org/totem-chapters/master.git

log for the last week:

commit 8cafc3269ac7b14dac9404db1f8ae1ca3a650e62
Author: Alexander Saprykin <xelfium gmail com>
Date:   Wed Jun 2 17:39:57 2010 +0400

    Add thumbnails save support, migrate to GtkBuilder and some fixes

    Add support for saving chapters' thumbnails: write them directly into the CM
    Migrate to GtkBuilder in plugin UI (totem-chapters.c) and chapter-edit dialo
    Refactor code a bit to remove messy and useless things
    Add G_LIKELY/G_UNLICKLY optimizations
    Add g_warning() print-outs on non-usual situations
    Fix bugs found

== Text version of the report ==

I was preparing for the exam on June 5, but the work was not stopped:

    * wrote a small patch for Totem to fix duplicate signal and to
remove some stuff in open-location dialog;

    * implemented thunbnails saving directly in cmml file. That's a
long story to go.. It will may be changed, but for now thumbnails are
stored in cmml file with chapters info. Of course, they are resized.
One thumbnail is about 10-15 KB, so I think it's pretty well. I have
contacted with Silvia Pfeiffer (one of the authors of cmml
specification, and it was a great pleasure to talk with her, I want to
say "thanks" her again) about the better way to do with thumbnails,
and she said that cmml is not widely used for now, so I can slightly
extend this specification (or create my own format) if I really need
to do it. I put image data (base64 encoded) into the "src" attribute
of the tag. And it works well. Now you can save all changes you've
made in chapters plugin and on the next Totem's launch you will see
all your chapters again. For me it sounds cool :) Let's test whether
this approach fine or I need to find another one;

    * moved all GUIs (chapters list and add/edit dialogs) to
GtkBuilder instead of doing it in code manually, so I read some
docs/blogs about GtkBuilder and how to use Glade editor, and that's
rather useful thing for GUI building;

    * removed some messy things from the code, refactored it a bit
(yeah, again, maybe I'm an idealist, don't know :), but I want all is
to be perfect), fixed some bugs, added G_LIKELY/G_UNLIKELY
optimizations;

    * was reading some docs for libtool, gtk+ and XML for better understanding.


Sorry for no pictures today, guys, but I'll try to make a screencast
next time to show. This week I did all I had in my plans, so I think
the week was successful. As for the next week, I have an idea to drop
dependency of libcmml for some reasons. First one is that this library
is orphaned in some mainline distributions (e.g. Debian) due to lack
of updates. The second one is that I need only a few features of it.
So, I think that it would be more easier to use (and to build)
chapters plugin without libcmml dependency. That's why I want to write
my own tiny cmml parser based on libxml2. Well, let's try :)