Salasaga

Saturday, 29th September 2007

Broke out the functions from the remaining source code files (gui-functions.c/h and flame-edit.c), and updated the Makefile to work with all the newly separated out function files. All in CVS. Compiles perfectly on my Gentoo Linux system.

Friday, 28th September 2007

Continued breaking up the source code files into their component functions. It was the turn of "callbacks.c" today. Changes have been committed to CVS. Haven't adjusted the Makefile(s), so if you try compiling source from CVS, in something other than Eclipse, it isn't going to work just yet.

Thursday, 27th September 2007

Started breaking up the source code files into their component functions, one function per new source code file in a new "functions" subdirectory. Should make it a bit easier/faster to work with. Have broken up "backend.c" for the moment, and committed the changes to CVS.

Wednesday, 26th September 2007

Updated the Gentoo ebuild script to use the latest source tarball:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=542308 

If you're running Gentoo (like me), then Flame works pretty well on it. :) Much better integrated than windows. Heh.

Monday, 24th September 2007

Well, I'm back to using Eclipse (version 3.3 now), as Sun Studio 12 decided to "just stop working". Gave me a "java lang" error of some variety, about a not found string or something, and didn't get better. Had seen it occasionally before (intermittently), and a restart of Sun Studio would work, but not this time. Tried jvm's 1.4 through 1.6, and then tried applying patches. No luck. Ugh. Oh well, at least Eclipse works. :)

Fixed a small bug with the ordering of includes in one source file, and updated the "uninstall" makefile target to remove the .desktop file.

Also pushed out a new tarball with all the latest changes. Targeted for non-windows systems, as I haven't worked in the flame-keycapture module to the Makefile system yet:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=541790 

Friday, 21st September 2007

Heh. Just noticed that Flame is rated 2nd highest on GnomeFiles. (As of the time of typing this anyway). That'll learn me for voting for myself. :) Now I'd better make things actually work better (i.e. timeline, drawing area, flash output) before anyone notices.

Thursday, 20th September 2007

Important milestone reached! Screen capturing now works fine on Windows. Yay! (that took a lot of effort). It's in CVS, and the ready-to-go package for it is here:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=540850 

Don't forget, all this needs is a working GTK+ environment already installed on your windows desktop.

I've updated mine to use this release of GTK, so if yours isn't happy, try this one:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?groupname=gimp-win&filename=gtk%2B-2.10.13-setup.exe 

Also added the NSIS packaging script for windows to CVS. It's in the "packaging-scripts" module for those that are interested.

To do screen captures:

1. After loading Flame, click the "Capture" toolbar icon.
2. In the dialog that opens, choose the area of screen to capture (i.e. starting point, width, height).
3. Screen captures can now be done by pressing Control-Printscreen.
   • Flame does not need to be in the foreground, so feel free to minimise it and do screen captures of whatever applications and stuff you want.
   • You might see the mouse pause briefly each time you do a screen capture. They will automatically be save in your screen capture area, ready for Flame to Import.
4. Click the "Import" toolbar icon to have the screencaptures you've done loaded into the present project.

Once turned on, screen capturing is turned off by quitting out of Flame. (Haven't made a "stop capturing" button yet, as it might not really be needed? Feedback encouraged)

Wednesday, 19th September 2007

Added a new CVS module, flame-keycapture, purely for the win32 .dll file that's used for capturing the Control Printscreen combination on windows. Also added initial working code to call it, and unhook it at program exit. The .dll now fairly accurately captures the Control Printscreen key combination (on WinXP at least). Next it needs the code to kick off the flame-capture programm, to do the actual screen capture. After that I think screen capturing on Windows will be working properly. Might need a dialog box to disable screen capturing afterwards again or something, but I reckon we should see what the workflow is like first. :)

Tuesday, 18th September 2007

Learning how to have the Control-Printscreen key on windows trigger the flame-capture screenshot. Not an easy process. Have had to learn how to create dll's, load them into a calling program, set global hooks, and more. Got the global hook bit working, but still needs a bit more work. Not in CVS yet, as there's still a lot of hard coded paths and very ugly debugging code that needs cleaning up first.

Monday, 17th September 2007

After a lot of debugging, the PNG image saving code for screen captures on windows now works. On my system at least. It's in CVS, but I still need to update flame-capture to be called from the Control-Printscreen key properly, before making a new windows platform release.

Sunday, 16th September 2007

Wow. Trying to get the windows screencapture code to write out png images, using the libpng library that comes with GTK. Wow. The libpng documentation has to be some of the worst written documentation for developers I've seen in a long time. (meandering, focusing on the wrong areas, completely obtuse and unclear, etc). No wonder the uptake of png was so slow.

I must remember when Flame becomes usable, not to use that set of docs as a benchmark. :)

The code written thus far is in CVS, and compiles, but doesn't screenshot correctly. I think there's something wrong with the way it's handling memory copying or something. If anyone feels like a challenge, please be my guest to fix this so I don't have to. :)

Tuesday. 11th September 2007

Started writing the code to do screen shots in windows. Mostly in place, but still not quite functional. (Seems to be having a problem converting the captured bitmap into a gdk pixbuf for saving.)

Monday, 3rd September 2007

Sorry for the delay. Work has been extremely busy (working both weekends and long hours), so not much spare time recently.

On a positive note, found some time to make a source tarball release of the latest source code (29th July):

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=536837 

AND... big news... Yohan Fidzri contributed a Gentoo ebuild which works. Updated it to use the newly released package from today, and put that on SF.net too:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=536835