Worklog 20090102

This is a worklog of my contributions to WEBenableIT's flagship software - Emanate.

Today I started merging in several major changes that I've been procrastinating on for some time, as my development branches and stable branches of code were getting too out of sync and I want to show features from the development branch in a demonstration on Sunday.

Some time was spent getting properly set up with Xrandr - now I have a dual screen desktop which makes a lot of the visual work, log monitoring, and code referencing a great deal easier. I also tweaked the colours (xorg.conf values generated by GAMMApage) because lately my laptop had been giving me headaches (even with the brightness totally down) and it's a lot nicer now. Whilst Googling for details and fiddling in configuration files took a bit of time, it was worth it. My concentration seemed to gain a reasonable boost - placebo perhaps, time will tell.

Once that was out the way, the first code related task was a long-overdue change to the align property in Vexi. This has a large footprint on the codebase as a change, but the significant widget changes were more tedious than anything else (a pass through of each reference to the align property and correcting it) and it resulted in a fair bit of cleaner layout code than before. There were also several trivial bugfixes as a result of the pass through the code, and improvements to the way containers work. (Incidentally this was the only blocker on an official Vexi 3.0 release, other than documentation.)

Part way through this, I was notified by Dave (SolarVenti) of some issues, which I resolved in the trunk client. If this is not ready to go live by Sunday, I'll backport the fixes to the b4 branch and update that.

I also focused somewhat on the immediate shortcomings of the form designer - previously only one could be open at once due to the way it interacted with the surface object but, with cloning now working perfectly in Vexi, this is getting solved. With it comes a slew of improvements to the form designer code.

Tomorrow will see a pure focus on getting the demonstration running smoothly on the development branch.