[maemo-developers] GUI Flasher

[From: Florian Boor]

Hi,

pancake schrieb:
> I'm pleased to announce the first version of the GUI for the Free Nokia Internet Flasher
> (the 0xFFFF). I named it 'goxf' (yeah looks as weird as the other) ;)
> 
> I just spend two funny nights playing with Gtkaml, Vala, Unix IPC and the flasher
> internals to get an initial working version:
> 
>   http://news.nopcode.org/goxf.gif
>   http://news.nopcode.org/goxf2.gif

Looks really good apart from the "misuse" of some stock icons :)

 > My main idea is to keep the frontend independent to the flasher, so, being
able to
> use the same frontend for flashing a Neo1973 or an HTC phone (both flasher sources
> are available).

That's a very good idea - the best would be to have a kind of plugin API that
makes is easier to add support for additional custom flashers.

> Do you think D-Bus is better solution for async communication between process of
> different user levels? I'm not very familiar to dbus yet. But I can change the IPC
> interface easily. 

Yes I think so. It should be quite easy to use with Vala and would be a good
choice to do the communication between GUI and a privileged background process.
This is a short example how to use DBus with Vala here:
http://live.gnome.org/Vala/DBusSample

> I understand that a GUI for flashing should be as cleaner and simpler as possible, trying
> to avoid stupid confusions to the user and avoiding errors, so, I'm opened to
> proposals, ideas, etc..

Yes I share this opinion: The GUI should stay as simple as possible. Dealing
with multiple different devices/flashers makes things more complicated but you
can hide a lot of this with a clever application. Automatic detection of
available target devices would be one thing, another might be to save the
configuration/file selection for a specific device type automatically. Some
simple checks if the selected files are valid for the assigned device and
partition would rock. Another nice improvement would be adding support for
automatic backups before writing to a device.

Greetings

Florian

-- 
The dream of yesterday                  Florian Boor
is the hope of today                    Tel: +49 271-771091-15
and the reality of tomorrow.            Fax: +49 271-771091-19
[Robert Hutchings Goddard, 1904]        florian.boor at kernelconcepts.de

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