Ecere Blogging

I realize it has already been two weeks since the last blog entry. I’ve previously mentioned I would resume the work on the Acovel Media Player as well as improving the IDE’s code editor (Undo is still a blatantly missing feature…). These things are still high in priority, but I started working on a new project which should turn out very valuable. Thus those goodies will not be ready in 2007 as I would have hoped, but they’re still coming sometime soon in the new year.

About the new project, despite the abundance of good samples, I believe the lack of documentation is a major reason for people hesitating to jump on using eC and the Ecere SDK. Filling up the API documentation reference would certainly be helpful, but I think an in depth guide on how to use these various technologies available in the SDK would be even more useful. That is why I decided to start writing a book.

The Ecere Tao of Programming will teach programming from the ground up, making use of all the tools making up the Ecere SDK. I haven’t totally decided yet on the distribution method, but I would like to print and publish hard cover editions. You can take a look at an excerpt from the first chapters as well as an overview of the table of the contents for the book here. The intent is for the book to be a thorough Programmer’s Guide for the SDK, while at the same time it should be able to teach basic programming using C and eC to previously non programmers. It will also cover advanced programming concepts such as 3D graphics, multithreading, networking and much more.

I would like to wish everybody very happy holidays, and a wonderful year 2008. Also, special thanks to every current and future Ecere SDK users for their support

The Ecere SDK now supports multi monitor display setups on Windows.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Windows

I’m pleased to announce the first preview of the Acovel Media Player for Linux. Acovel is currently limited to playing albums: bring up the Media Library, and click on the import button in upper right corner. Choose a folder containing music albums to import, and enjoy an intelligent algorithm which will analyze both ID3 tags and filenames to fill up its music collection database. Acovel’s search feature is amazingly fast (We tested against iTunes search and the results were very impressive). It makes use of the Ecere Database engine (EDB), an extremely light and simple database solution under development.

Acovel has been on hold for a while as I was attending to Linux & Unicode support in the SDK, but now that I’m back on it you can expect a lot more improvements to come in the next few weeks.

Download Acovel 0.01 for Linux

Download Acovel 0.01 for Windows

Some extra calls to XSync which were used for debugging purposes mistakenly got slipped into the last release.

This is mainly a patch release to correct the performance issue.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Linux

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.11 for Mac OS X

Here is the first attempt at supporting Mac OS X. For now the interface & graphics driver run on X11. Support for a more native solution such as Carbon is planned for the future, but it is not a priority for the moment. This should allow Mac folks to give the Ecere SDK a try, and hopefully attract contributors who would like to improve Mac support.

There are a few glitches with Ecere on X on Mac. To get anywhere you will most likely need the X.org server rather than the old XFree86. X.org comes by default with Leopard, but for those still on Tiger, here is where you can obtain prebuilt binaries for it. Also take a look at this page. You will also need the same dependencies as for Ecere on Linux, such as libjpeg, libpng, freetype, fontconfig, etc., some of which might not be already installed on your system. Some other problems seem to be caused by the interaction with quartz-wm (another window manager might work better). For some reason, new windows always want to be positioned at the top-middle position of the desktop. I had to patch the X driver to get around this problem, but it still causes some annoying repositioning of the windows. Sadly, the overall performance especially with text seems a lot slower for me than on Linux/X.org 7.3. I am not sure what is making XRender so much slower on my Mac. On my system the IDE has a little trouble dialoguing with the installed GDB 6.1 which prevents the integrated debugger to function. It might work on a more recent version of GDB.

Please give me feedback on how Ecere on Mac works out for you in the comments.

A few important improvements were also made to the X driver. Windows can now be closed through the window manager. Repositioning windows from the Window manager doesn’t confuse their positions anymore. 15/16 bit displays are now supported.

I found that the Xrender API documentation is very difficult to find, and quite incomplete. Here is where the latest Xrender protocol is at and here is a copy of Xrender library API documentation. Trying to get 16 bit working, the XRenderFindFormat function was particularly difficult, but I learned that the count parameter which the above documentation isn’t so clear about had to be 0. The color masks should also not be shifted.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Windows
Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Linux
Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.10 for Mac OS X

After all this struggle to get SCIM working, I could finally implement the international input support.

Ecere Communicator now includes the new runtime library and supports international input as well.

The Linux SDK now also properly supports X keysyms to follow the correct keyboard layout.

I believe the X clipboard operations should be fixed for good this time. (I tested and was able to copy to and from FireFox and between two Ecere IDEs.)

The X bitmap rendering features some additional support.

Two small samples were added, a transparent clock, and a utility to take a screen shot of the X desktop.

A smal fix was made to desktop-level transparent windows using OpenGL. The IDE and Debugger had some minor improvements done as well.

An issue was resolved on Windows, whereas internal resources could not be accessed when a executable was inside a path containing non-ASCII characters. The last installer itself would not work when ran from such a path.

With the Windows taskbar autohiding, the Ecere applications do not resize anymore (it was causing a “jumping” effect) .

The runtime now prompts for reestablishing Windows network connections.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.9 for: Windows or Linux

Download Ecere Communicator 0.02 for Linux

In order to implement and test international input on Linux, I had to get an input method such as SCIM working.

It turned out my locales were not installed, so I decided to upgrade my GNU libc while I was at it, and that didn’t go too smoothly. I’m running on Ecere Linux which has been my self-built Linux distribution for many years. Here’s a few hints to those trying to build their libc (I upgraded to 2.7).

If you get something like /bin/sh: no: command not found, it seems this is just a tactics from the configure script to fail, and “no” here is a placeholder for some tools not recent enough. Upgrading gettext was the solution to that one.

Make sure march is set or you might get something like undefined reference to `__sync_bool_compare_and_swap_4′.

For some other unknown reason, I had undefined reference to `__stack_chk_guard’ while trying to build the nscd directory. I had to manually edit the Makefile and add -lssp to that line LDLIBS-nscd = $(selinux-LIBS) -lssp .

My working configure line was the following:

export CHOST=”i686-pc-linux-gnu”; export CFLAGS=”-O2 -march=i686″; ../glibc-2.7/configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr –enable-profile=no –enable-add-ons –enable-kernel=2.6.0

I was quite relieved to see “Your new glibc installation seems to be ok.” come up on the screen.

After make install, I couldn’t couldn’t login remotely or from the console, su would jam on a send.
Upgrading the coreutils and/or restarting my syslogd seemed to resolve that.

Then to install the locales I did: make localedata/install-locales

With locales in place, SCIM was more likely to work. I installed scim, anthy & scim-anthy for japanese support, kasumi which is a dictionary editing tool which you can use with anthy, as well as scim-pinyin for writing chinese in pinyin.

In order to make SCIM work with XIM, the following environment variable should be set: XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM

SCIM should also be initialized on X startup with: scim -d

I tested with Firefox, but Firefox 2 would crash if my locale was set to Japanese. I tried Firefox 3 beta 1 and I could finally type my first japanese characters in Linux!

I’m pleased to announce a new release of the SDK for both Windows & Linux, supporting Unicode and all recent improvements which have been going on in the last 3 months. (The Windows SDK was somewhat outdated, from August). The Linux version features a number of bug fixes and improvements. Quite a few samples have been added as well to showcase the power of the SDK, all released under the BSD license.

Ecere Communicator is now available for Linux. It is an instant messaging client under development supporting AIM/ICQ, MSN and Jabber/XMPP protocols. Basic messaging and contact list functionality (sorry, cannot add contacts yet) are fully working.

A very tiny sample to take a screen shot of the X desktop has been included (code follows) as I’ve found this to be a tedious task to do on my self-built Ecere Linux distribution. It proved itself especially useful while trying to take the attached screen shot with xcompmgr running, somehow the usual xwd, xwdtopnm, pnmtopng utilities didn’t know what to do with the extra alpha channel.

import “ecere”

class ShotApp : GuiApplication
{
Window window { };
bool Init()
{
Bitmap bitmap { };
desktop.Grab(bitmap, null, false);
bitmap.Save(”shot00.png”, null, null);
delete bitmap;
window.Destroy(0);
return true;
}
}

I would like to emphasize the very small footprint of the Ecere SDK (libecere.so is all an application needs to run and is only 1.5 MB) and small number of dependencies required to use it. With full functionality, Ecere only requires standard graphic formats, X, GL and core system libraries. It aims to be an alternative to GTK, Qt, GNOME, KDE and therefore doesn’t require any of those. If you ever tried to build them for your LFS (Linux From Scratch), you know how heavy, dependent and long to compile they are. Yet, Ecere already provides a very appealing level of comparable functionality and is still far from what it intends to become.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.7 for: Windows or Linux (obsolete)

Download Ecere Communicator for: Windows or Linux

After much wrestling with X, XRender, XShape & GLX, here they are: the Linux versions of the desktop toys.

Here is a screen shot of them in action:

The Linux Ecere SDK now supports alpha blending window contents through the “bool alphaBlend” property of the window class. When set to true, the window has its own alpha channel which a proper composite manager such as xcompmgr will happily use to make parts of the window translucent or completely transparent. The SDK will also automatically redefine the input region through the XShape extension so that clicks in transparent areas will click through on the underneath windows.

To render non opaque contents on the window, use a value smaller than 255 for the surface’s foreground and background while calling drawing methods (Proper support through both XRender and OpenGL in this release). You can also use a value between 0 and 1.0 (exclusively) for the window’s opacity to automatically have a translucent background drawn for you.

A few fixes were also done to the X OpenGL driver and it should now properly run anti-aliased if possible. Here is a binary version of Chess for those who do not yet wish to install the SDK.

Feel free to let me know if you get these running nicely on your system, and I’ll appreciate if you send me nice screen shots of those in action on your own favorite Linux desktop environment. The above screenshot is lacking hiragana characters on the cube as a CJK enabled Unicode font was not found by fontconfig. Ensure you have one of those (see previous post) if you wish to see them.

Download Ecere SDK 0.41.17.5 for Linux (obsolete)

Download Ecere Chess for Linux

Download Windowless Hiragana Cube and Color Spheres for Linux

The Ecere SDK finally supports all those things in the world of the penguins.Thanks go to Keith Packard for all his work on the Xrender extension which the SDK now makes use of.The runtime library now also supports fontconfig (new dependency for the standard libecere.so, also fontconfig requires libexpat.so.1 for parsing the XML config file), so it is no longer necessary to set the environment variable ECERE_FONTS.fontconfig will be used both with the X and the OpenGL driver.I tested with the default fonts.conf from latest X.org release 7.3, and the following free fonts:

• Aegean
• Bitstream CyberCJK
• Bitstream Cyberbit
• Bitstream Vera (Serif, Sans, Mono)
• Caliban, Caslon, Monospace
• Chandas
• Liberation (Serif, Sans, Mono)
• Sazanami Gothic & Mincho
• Sun-ExtB

Download