GSoC Weekly Code Report 2

Heya! I'm back to Internet after 3 days without it, and that was really hard :) I recently watched a movie "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire" and it's awesome - gives a lot of positive thoughts and makes feel that life is good :) This movie won 2 Oscars and some of other international awards, but it just appeared on big screen (actually, only in 1-2 cinemas in St. Petersburg) here in Russia. Tomorrow I will have my first exam in university, so it's time to blog a bit. Anyway I have been worked on my chapters plugin for Totem, and there are some positive results. Well, here they are:

• 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 <img> 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. 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 :)