While being at WWDC I took a Monday off just after Keynote and drove to Googleplex in Mountain View. I had a pleasure to visit Google and meet with Leslie Hawthorn Project Manager for Google Summer of Code :-) I had a really great time there. Thank You for that opportunity. After a tour and lunch I had a Tech Talk: Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch. Projects I was talking about are both my Google Summer of Code projects: MacLibre GSoC 2006 & OpenTouch GSoC 2007. After tech talk I was interviewed by Leslie for Google Summer of Code podcast :-) Here are some photos that I took at Googleplex :-)

Post about my Tech Talk and Podcast Interview at Google Summer of Code blog

My Tech Talk: Introduction to MacLibre and OpenTouch at Google Video

Direct link to podcast interview in mp3 format

My presentation in pdf format at Google Summer of Code discuss group

Sounds strange, but I did forget about my photos from last year Google Hamburg visit. So today I decided to finally send them to Flickr. After Google Summer of Code 2006, Google was organizing “after GSoC meetings” at Google offices around the world. The nearest one from Wrocław was Hamburg and I decided to go (long drive by car , about 700 km) . It was really nice to have office tour and meet other GSoC students and Google software engineers. We also had a delicious dinner at Indian restaurant. I think it was Indian, but who knows :-) . If anyone is interested photos are available here.

Yesterday I was doing some research about dmg format and all day was full of graphic work just to bring a nice looking disk image icon and folder view.

I have always been curious how to make dmg images. Well it’s not so hard, you can use Disk Utility the simpler way or hdiutil the harder way. Anyway it’s simple. But I wanted I nice dmg disk image icon and folder view with background too and it’s not so simple anymore :D

The background image goes in .background directory inside disk image,then the image icon goes in .VolumeIcon.icns file and we have to remember to set a special “Custom icon” bit for image folder with this command: /Developers/Tools/SetFile -a C path_to_volume

Graphic work:

• MacLibre disk image icon (png and icns formats)

• background for disk image folder view

• MacLibre logo in svg format

You can find everything on SVN in /bin/Graphics folder

MacLibre dmg image generator:

I have added a Makefile for dmg image generation (in /src/DmgBuilder folder). Now everything you have to do to build a result MacLibre disk image is to type: make in the above folder. All the graphic stuff( icon, background) of disk image is placed in template image compressed with bzip. Makefile script make use of it and it generates the image just like showed on the above screenshot (with MacLibre.app folder copied from /src/dist directory).

Today it was a blog posting day, I never thought that runing my own blog is so time-consuming :-)

I made some GUI improvements.

Support for applications logos:

There is a new <Image> tag in the xml file for each package that has logo (ex: “<Image id=”logo”>Firefox.png</Image>“). All the applications logos images should be placed in /bin/AppsLogos folder. That’s where MacLibre’s parser looks for them.

Here’s a little flash demo how it really looks like. (Thanks to PJ for putting it on his blog)

I have also added Image size field in package information panel. It’s nice to know the size of the disc image that we gonna download :-) you can see that on flash demo.

I moved the password field entry after Package Chooser Wizard page. Why not just launch MacLibre and see what packages we can install, we don’t need password for that :-) But after moving this entry field to the new Selection Confirmation wizard page, the first page was so empty that I’ve added a nice background to it.

Future GUI plans:

• add packages summary at the end of wizard (just after installation) to let you know which packages have been installed correctly and which not,
• add list of selected packages in wizard page after Package Chooser (the page with password entry field) and label with information about how many packages we have selected and how many megabytes we have to download (ex. “Need to download 33.3 MB in 4 packages”),
• divide progress bar in Installation progress wizard page into two separate one, one for overall progress and one for current package progress

There’s a lot going on in MacLibre coding world since my last post :-)

I will start with bug fix mentioned in my last post:

• AbiWord is now up to date (2.4.4 version) and DmgContainer has been extended to handle dmg.gz archives like AbiWord’s one,
• after talking with my mentor Pierre-Jean Coundert we decided that we will remove Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 from MacLibre, leaving only the newest 1.5 version,
• now if you have no internet connection the application will show the YES/NO window asking if you want to try reconnect,
• i did some research about Cocoa/PyObjC window for asking user’s password and I decided that I will stick to wxPython, because I don’t want to mix it with GUI from Interface Builder and another library so that the .app would be bigger (it’s big enough with wxPython 2.6),
• now even when you select DECLINE in Software License Agreement window of the application installation process continue without installing declined one,
• added Status tag in xml file for some applications that are unstable/testing/beta (ex. Colloquy 2.1)

Other svn commits news:

• added getResourcesPath() function to tools.py, it’s return path depends whether you’re using .app or just sources files from svn,
• some words changes ( Applications/Action instead of MacLibre/TODO for package chooser tree columns names and Installation progress instead of Progression in wizard page title,
• extended darwinList in MacLibre.py with new Mac OS X version that haven’t been added yet,
• replaced vulnerable for symlink attacks os.tempnam() function with mkstemp() from tempfile module,
• added .app build script (setup.py), now to build .app all you have to do is type: python setup.py py2app and you will get MacLibre.app in dist directory,
• bug fix in Downloader.py, download progress label was going out of file size (ex. “8.79 MB on 8.69 MB”), changed “on” to “of”

Stay tuned for more updates informations like GUI improvements and my MacLibre dmg disk image research and work…