Improve Shotwell Slideshow - Weekly Report #4

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

This week I finished the Clutter toolbar, so now there is a nice looking toolbar in the slideshow. It takes the icons from the Gtk theme, which is good for fitting the desktop, but is not so good looking depending on the theme you are using. It will be ok for now, but maybe I can have some custom made graphics which would look nicer.

I implemented two effects as separate classes and realized I have a lot of issues to solve if I want to implement more advanced effects. My idea for now is to implement effects as an interface with signals and methods. The thing is that advanced effects would need more control over a lot of things that are managed by the slideshow page for now. So things like the timer and how to get the next image will need to be accessed by the effect class.

I like the idea of using Clutter and it's animation framework, so I can move more funcionality into effects while not increasing the complexity of the current code, because Clutter can handle a lot of what I need. 

Another thing I did this week is that I completely changed the settings dialog, now it includes tabs for Themes, Music and Settings. 
Themes is not working currently. For some reason I can't embed more the one Clutter stage in Shotwell, but it works fine outside Shotwell. Showing live previews of the effects would probably be too slow, but I don't want still previews provided by the effects since we would need to change all

of them if we changed the dialog. So I'm thinking about drawing them in a offscreen texture and showing that in the dialog.
Music is a list of songs to play in the background, all the UI actions are working. It still needs to save the settings and I need to implement the actual player.

Settings is the old settings controls, which right now only includes the time to show each photo. The transition delay won't exist anymore, it will depend on the theme.
I had some issues with the open source driver for my Radeon (Unity can't login more then half the time) and switched to the proprietary driver, but then I got even worse results with the slideshow. A lot of the textures don't load correctly and after a while I was getting a blank window as the Clutter stage. So I need to investigate this and check if it's anything I can improve in the code.

For next week I want to implement background music and some advanced effects.

Alexandre Rosenfeld