A thought experiment: A software developer decides to write an open-source GNOME desktop application that interacts with any number of Internet services, such as Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, and so forth. It’s not specific to any one service, however. The app…
Blog Archives
The Garden of the Forking Paths
Tagged with: gnome online accounts, goa, ubuntu, ubuntu online accounts, uoa
Posted in Geary, GNOME, Hacking, Shotwell
Posted in Geary, GNOME, Hacking, Shotwell
Gedit class browser for Vala
Here at Yorba most of us do our development work in Vala using Gedit. Out of the box, Gedit doesn’t seem like much of an IDE. But with a few plugins it starts to approach the feature set of a…
Avoiding the association by hash map anti-pattern with GObject
There’s a common anti-pattern in software design that I call “association by hash map.” Rather than explain this in words, let me illustrate it in Vala: HashMap<MyClass, string> name_map = new HashMap<MyClass, string>(); name_map.set(an_object, “Foo”); name_map.set(another_object, “Bar”); stdout.printf(“an_object’s name is…
The 100,000 line question
Clinton Rogers (Yorba developer and all-pro Telestrations master) pointed out something interesting yesterday. Ohloh now lists Shotwell as having achieved an odd milestone just ten days shy of its third birthday: Shotwell has reached 100,000 lines of code. That number…
Tagged with: colossal cave, duff's device, line count, ohloh, telestrations, vala
Posted in Hacking, Shotwell
Posted in Hacking, Shotwell
A few of my favorite Vala things: interfaces
In my prior post on Vala’s language features, I discussed enums and how I appreciated Vala’s implementation of them. I feel that Vala’s enums straddle an interesting line of utility and pragmatism. It took me a while to learn about…
PirateBox at Yorba
The strangest item on my desk — at the moment — is a PirateBox. What is a PirateBox, you may ask? At first glance it appears to be a Jolly Roger lunch box plugged into the wall. But it’s more…
Computer problems
I was having trouble with my computer — it didn’t want to boot. So I opened it up, and look what was inside! Not sure where the little guy came from, but in any event we’ll have to keep him…
A few of my favorite Vala things: enums
Working with Vala for over two years now, I’ve come to admire more and more of its language features. Some of them were quite surprising when I discovered them, making me wonder why exactly they were implemented this way or…
Bruno Girin on D-Bus and Vala
Shotwell contributor and all-around great guy Bruno Girin recently posted a discussion on how to get started with D-Bus, GDBus, and Vala. Compare his code to a sample GDBus server written in C! Bruno’s work could be the foundation for…
Vala delegates under the hood
On the Vala mailing list someone wondered if delegates are merely function pointers, not some higher-level concept. This was in the context of a blog post earlier this year speculating (accusing?) Vala of infringing on Microsoft patents. I won’t step…
