Saturday, 3 July 2010

Software Center!

So i never got to UDS Part 2, oh well... :P


Nevertheless, I have been busy in Software Center land and i extremely happy with the progress i have been making!


At UDS i managed to demo a pure GTK version of the lobby screen and I also had a coded mockup of a pure GTK detailsview.  Feedback was mostly positive and over the last few months i have continued working on the bits, seeing numerous prototypes and code rewritten time an again!  About 4 weeks ago mpt provided some nice detailed specs from which i could work from with regards an updated lobby screen, so that is what i set about doing.


Now i am settling on what i think will be the code that makes it into Maverick.  I am really happy that past code i have experimented with has been brought forward, matured and is now forming quite a nice library of classes and methods which i have been working with on and ongoing basis.  Such classes i have separated out from their original files into what I am calling mkit, which holds fairly generic (useful) methods and classes.


So far I have seen my catview_gtk.py file merged into Software Center trunk, along with mkit.py.  Community feedback seems positive, there have been 2 or 3 articles on OMG Ubuntu! and both author and commenteers seem to approve of the implementations.


I am hopeful that my appdetailsview.py Gtk implementation will be merged into trunk in the next few weeks.  I think it is a really beautiful example of what Gtk is capable of given the time and effort.


In the coming weeks i plan to bring a semi rewrite of appview.py up to scratch as i think that looks much nicer than the current incarnation. 


So without further adieu, here are some screenshots of stuff i have been working on lately:


 The Lobby Screen:



The App Details View:


Oh, and pssst!  The latest work is also awesomely Gtk theme friendly!!!  Check out the amazing Dust: