A developer’s notebook
Yet another a new release of flite for maemo. This release has little improvements in D-BUS service such as better thread support and code cleanup. The next will be support for different voices and long texts.
Flite for maemo: patch for flite-1.3 deb package
Today, I’ve been tinkering with different html engines in order to improve the Bloglines 770’s navigation.
Firstly, I tried out Gtk+ Webcore. That’s a powerful engine but I think is a little outdated. Anyways, I compiled the osb-jscore, osb-nrcore and nrcit without any problem but I had to build libcurl. That’s a problem because I’m already using a modified lightweight libhttp for bloglines and I should integrate nrcit with it. Finally, testing static html files, this engine lasted ages in rendering the bloglines 770 generated HTML files and I would have to look through the code. No time!
Later, I was testing gtkhtml. At first, I tried to build 3.9.x version but it has endless dependencies gail -> libgnomecanvas -> libart -> libgnomeui -> libglade… almost the whole gnome system XD
Finally, I built gtkhtml 2.0.3 with gail. libgnomecanvas and libart (but no more!!) and I could see bloglines 770 running a decent RSS viewer but with no images though. Anyway, I would have to modify gtkhtml code so that I can call osso-browser and so on, but that is a minor issue.
The good news are that maemo 2.0 will include gtkhtml and I only have to drop out this code from my sources.
TO-DO for Bloglines 0.6: images support, port bloglines wrapper to glib, gettext support …
I keep working on Flite for maemo. Today I’ve fixed issues about threading and performance. Also I’ve added speeching from files in FliteWidget.
In addition I’ve patched maemo-gaim from SVN in order to test the Flite D-BUS service. It’s only a proof of concept patch but, it works not so bad You can hear your buddy talking to you now.
You can try all the stuff here:
.patch for flite-maemo 0.2.1 you must have original
flite-1.3-release
.deb for flite-maemo 0.2.1
.patch for gaim-flite you must have current SVN snapshot for maemo-gaim
.deb for gaim-flite
Disclaimer: The .deb for Gaim-flite is, as I said, a proof of concept. I don’t know if you can get access from menu extra and there is no SSL support and no IAP connectivity. You could have to run it by executing /va/lib/install/usr/bin/gaim from a xterm.
I have just finished to clean the code up (it was actually a mess) for flite maemo by adding better thread handling and by fixing some memory leaks and so on. Also, while testing the early release I realized it took a lot of memory for ages. Now, that’s fixed and the D-BUS service dies when not being used. In addition, the desktop file for D-BUS is needed no more.
Regarding FliteWidget, I’ve changed signal names. Now are “play” and “stop”. Indeed, FliteWidget is the part where I have to work on much more.
ASAP I’ll release a .patch with changes from flite’s main tree to not download the whole source code (10 MB uff).
New release:
(flite-1.3-maemo-0.2) .deb package
(flite-1.3-maemo-0.2) source code
I’ve been working on flite these last days and I think it’s time to release a bit of code
Finally, I’ve implemented flite on GObject as a FliteWidget (with signals and so on) in order to ease developers integration with existing GTK code. Also I’ve implemented a D-BUS service (a dummy app) for Maemo. There is also a test app to try it out. The maemo folder contains all the new code.
The .deb contains FliteWidget header and shared-lib, flite headers, d-bus service and test app. The code is not finished and flite is not optimized yet but it basically works.
enjoy!
flite-maemo .deb package
flite-maemo sources