Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Reflections

After working with GNOME shell for the past few weeks, I feel that I have grown so much as a programmer. From the technical details of algorithmic complexity (which I always tried to take into account when writing the code) to the ability to find code snippets and examples that guide you, I have learned so much. The finished product will be pushed in the next release of GNOME (3.2 release), so as I take this next step in pursuit of improving my programming skills I want to thank you all for the support and I hope you enjoy my contribution to the field.
Remember, if you find any kinks with the work report them to GNOME bugzilla. I'll be posting some more soon on my thoughts about the computer science field, so stay in touch.

Friday, August 5, 2011

So much to do, so little time

Well, my time here with GNOME is coming to a close. This, of course, doesn't mean I won't be contributing to future projects (or maybe even enhancing this one), but it does mean college is on the horizon and my time will be greatly limited by it.
Over the past few weeks, I've been working more on the backbone of the project to write a Gtk module in Vala for the onscreen positioning code. Everyone expects the keyboard to just pop up whenever they click into an input box, and so that's what I've been trying to deliver.
At this point, I've gotten it to where the GdkWindow determines the position of the box and a focus event handler (this one was thanks to Dan) figures out when the focus changes from the entry to a non-entry box. I've also used a global connection within the GNOME shell to tell me when focuses change within the shell.

What does this mean exactly?


Click on the search bar and the keyboard will pop up.


Then just start typing your entry.



Once you're done, click away from the search bar and the keyboard disappears. Well, that's all there is for now.

Until next week,
Nohemi