setAllAttributes (newProps);

or, How to Know When You Still Have Learning to Do

Yes, that is a line I recently patched out of my own code.  I was wondering why my simplifyProperties wasn’t working right, so I tried it then saved it to disk - and lo and behold, all the style properties had become XML attributes.  In learning the AbiWord piecetable, I’ve had to struggle a bit with the concept of attrprops - attributes and properties.  Specifically, I tend to mix them up - attributes are things like “name”, “label,” and “props”, while properties are things like “font-size: 12″ which can also be stored as the value of the aforementioned attribute.  So now that you know that attributes and properties are different, I’m sure you can spot the bug in my post title

My GSoC project is moving along now!  Just have to remember the difference between attributes and properties…

Syndicated 2008-07-17 16:20:37 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

Wow, the piecetable is crazy!

Just a quick update on my progress in the Summer of Code.  One general observation: the piecetable is a highly-engineered, fairly complex chunk of code!  I need a bit more “mentoring” than I anticipated when working with the piecetable, so I’ve decided to work on a few fronts: when I get stuck on one, I switch to another until someone shows up in IRC and can help (or, alternatively, until time helps me figure it out on my own).

First of all, I have the Stylist enhancements.  I’ve added the “Add” button, which is succeeding in adding a hard-coded style.  Right now, I’m working to make it add from the current selection.  It looks like right now we can’t “rename” a style, which means I either prompt the user for a name (not what I’d prefer), generate a useful one automatically (possibly tough and/or insufficient) or implement some sort of rename, possibly just with the style label.  (See next )  I will also revamp the display here, borrowing liberally from the GTK toolbar style list which shows only a nice subset of styles.

The addition of Labels to styles (splitting internal identifier from user-visible identifier) was the first task I tackled, and in retrospect, possibly a bad idea since it required direct PT work.  I have all built-in styles adding a label by default, and I’ve gotten it to save.  I still have to add some helper functions to pd_Style to handle labels, localize them, etc, as well as figure out how to change the UI’s.  (It looks like I’ll probably need to have a map of Labels to Names added to some document-wide structure, presumably right next to the map of Names to pd_Style objects.)

Finally, we have the handling of the manual style editing system.  I’ve started work on this by implementing “simplifyProperties,” which removes properties from a style if they are identical in the based-on style (that is, if they can be inherited).  This will allow my edit dialog to show a useful list of applied properties, rather than a CSS-like string of every possible property.  This is what I’m working on at this precise moment - trying to figure out how I somehow end up with “this” being 0×0 when I have a function member call another function member.

Till next time, keep on marching, ants!

Syndicated 2008-07-01 16:23:53 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

Summer of Code: Interview yourself!

As a part of my Summer of Code project, I’m working on doing a user interface redesign!  To confirm the concepts I developed in my proposal, I’m conducting interviews, and decided to use the Internet as a tool to help me here!  Though I will be also doing in-person interviews, you’re welcome to download and complete the interview and email it in to me!  All word-processing and text-processing (so as to not exclude more layout-oriented apps like Pages and perhaps KWord) users are welcome to participate: the interview questions are in rtf format.

Please download the form here: General Interview Questions - instructions are included.  Just type your answers right into the document!  I’d like your answers by June 6 (Friday) so that I can keep moving on the project.  If you have a blog that’s more syndicated than mine, please feel free to pass on the invitation - the more data I have, the better I’ll be able to create an interface that’s efficient for a variety of users.

Syndicated 2008-06-02 18:18:54 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

And they’re off!

Google Summer of Code 2008 officially starts this week in the “main section” - coding!  In my case, I’ll be working on revamping the Styles support and interface, and to avoid having to code it three times, I’m starting first with a design phase.  As such, I’ve been working on an interview script, which should be ready to use now.  The purpose of the interviews will be to confirm or fail to confirm the characterization of use cases I made in my proposal.  I will also do bug triage here tomorrow, looking through the open Styles bugs and seeing if I can also filter out the Styles bugs in the Front End components in Bugzilla - see what actual software flaws there are to resolve, what insight/ideas I can glean from enhancement requests, etc.  With this I’ll be able to create a more comprehensive plan and schedule, as well as give me something to chew on when I don’t have test subjects available to provide interview results or prototyping feedback.

Though I’ve done the Summer of Code once before, this will be a totally different experience - new mentor, different codebase region (by a lot!), and entirely different focus - I’ll be replacing working but not human-friendly with friendly, efficient, and hopefully still working!

Oh, and how did I prepare for the summer of code?  Well… I built a new desk!  (I already took care of community bonding a couple of years ago.)  An ergonomic, efficient desk area will inspire an efficient, ergonomic design - at least that’s the idea!

PS.  The hackergotchi on Planet AbiSource right now is not very flattering, not to mention fairly old - if one of the cool AbiFolk could change it to my new one, that would rock.  Bonus points if you put in a good word with the p.g.o folks too - get some AbiWord representation on the planet!  (It seems the “put your stuff in this table on the wiki” page disappeared from l.g.o without my request being fulfilled…)

Syndicated 2008-05-28 05:13:15 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition

The secret of Microsoft’s success

Clearly, it is AbiWord’s lack of videos like this that keep it from being the dominant word processor “in the industry.”  We don’t have an equivalent, but I can fix that pretty easily.

Vista Sales Video

Syndicated 2008-05-01 09:49:23 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition