Mind-Flip

SEE09 - What a fantastic trip

Chris Woods — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:23:46 +0000

I didn't want to report anything on my blog until it became official, however for the last couple of months I have been working with the Symbian foundation and the Symbian Horizon private beta program. Symbian picked TextQuick as one of their launch applications! The Symbian Horizon team have been brilliant in their support.

Twitter: #see09 textquick icon was shown during keynote! Brilllant - rock on symbian horizon http://m.mind-flip.com for a free demo

As Lee Williams the Executive Director of the Symbian foundation launched the Symbian Horizon website, right behind him on the big screen was a screen shot of the Horizon web site, and right there for everyone to see was the TextQuick logo. Unfortunately I just wasn't fast enough with my camera to capture moment – however I would encourage you to head over to the Symbian Horizon site.

For the first day of the SEE 09 event Symbian Horizon provided me with a pod completely dedicated to TextQuick, this was a fantastic chance for me to demo TextQuick to everyone within earshot. Apologies to all those folks trying to eat their lunch near by – I think I preach to all of them about TextQuick

Mind-Flip at the Symbian Show 2009. TextQuick via Symbian Horizon

Chris Woods — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:14:48 +0000

It has been a manic couple of weeks. I am please to say that TextQuick 1.5 has been accepted by the Symbian Horizon program, and will shortly be available to download through a number of new sites. I've been working hard to ensure that TextQuick is ready for the Symbian Horizon program. I'll be posting more news on this as soon as I have it!

Today sees the start of the SEE 2009 at Earls Court in London, I am attending – if your around and would like to meet up drop a tweet – you can find me on twitter at mcwoods.

See you all later!

Developer Diary 5: A long time

Chris Woods — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:45:30 +0100

Ok, no excuses. I should have updated you on my progress earlier...

I have been working on Venus, and progress has actually been really good. I have an initial version of the graphics library created, and have integrated it into TextQuick. This has allowed me to implement some really cool features. - But more about that later.

First, let me tell you about Venus. Based on my last post Venus is based on a set of graphical elements arranged in layers, or by Z order. I place these on top of each other, and draw them in the correct order to create an image in the screen. This basically creates a simple scene graph representing the image on the screen. Each element or node in the scene graph has a set of common properties. These include everything from the basic, X,Y,Z right down to alpha values, background colours and so on.

Although this allows me to create objects and display them on the screen, it does not allow me to animate them. Let's assume that I want to move an image across the screen horizontally. To do this I need to change the images X position. Using my scene graph, all I need to do is change the X value of the object and image will have appeared to have moved.

The beauty of this approach is its simplicity. The scene render takes care of redrawing the screen, and the object simply appears to have jumped from its original location to the new location.

While this does make things move, it does not provide a sense of animation, or fluid movement. To do this I need to modify the X value from its original position to the new position slowly over a period of time. If I play back these changes it gives a sense of animation, as the image appears to update over time.

If all the nodes within the scene graph have the same basic set of properties, and if these properties can be updated in the same way then it would be possible to easily change, not just one property, but many properties all at the same time. For instance, by changing the X and Y values of the image we can make the image move in a diagonal direction.

Complex animations can now be built up, with one node being manipulated in many ways at the same time. Indeed if there was a way to manipulate multiple properties on multiple objects all at the same time then this would create very complex animations.

Concentrating on Animation
Once I created the scene graphic render, I concentrated on creating an animation player. Of course no one would want all the objects on the screen at the same time, instead we would need some way to chain together actions or events. Basically to construction a timeline of actions to play back events on the screen. Some of these timeline events we would want to occur at the same time, like changing the X and Y values of the image to create diagonal movement. There are other things however, that we would want to happen sequentially. So for instance the image could move to the top right of the screen and then slide back down the screen.

To support this I created an active object based animator. The animator plays a set of timeline commands, and the commands can be chained together. You can chain the commands together sequentially, so each plays out after the other. Alternatively you can chain the events together simultaneously making them all happen at the same time. Allowing different combinations of these time line commands allows for some really complex behaviour.

I created a test harness to test Venus. This allowed me to try out some of the base functionality, simple rendering and animation. Of course, after all of the talk of Amiga's and Bitblt operations, I simply had to use an iconic image from the Amiga as the basis of the test harness. The following image is taken directly from the test harness.

This gave me the basic functionality I was after, but of course... there was still more to do.

Multiple Images
In any given scene there may be multiple copies of the same image, for instance a collection of stars on a background. To do this with the initial version of Venus would have required the me to load multiple copies of the image, created a scene node for each star. Loading multiple copies of the same image would waste memory, which is something of a limited commodity on a mobile phone. A better approach would be to have each of the nodes refer to a single image, and then have the rendering engine use the same image in many places to create the star field.

To enable this I created a referenced counted image handler within Venus, I called this the ImageBox. Just as a children's toy box contains toys, the imagebox should contain all the images Venus needs to render.

Vector Graphics
Now even with bitmap graphics being displayed there is still the need for some form of Vector graphics. This is really handy on mobile phones when the screen resizes. To support this I created a special vector graphic node within my scene graph. This could contain any number of polygons. The vector graphic node would then render these polygons within it's layer. This provided Venus with vector graphic support.

One of the really powerful things about vector graphics is that they can be resized, and rotated. Both the scaling and the rotation can be exposed as properties of the Vector graphic node. Once I did this I was able to use my animator to animate the contents of the vector graphic node. For instance rotating polygons to produce a spinning wait symbol.

Event Notification
Now that I've got a scene renderer, an animation control, the imagebox, and vector graphic support (phew), I still don't have enough to create the user experience I want. User Interfaces are based on responding to input from users, signals from other parts of the application or other events that are triggered throughout the system. I need the nodes within the scene graph to listen for and respond to events. So the next major development effort was adding support for events, both user generated and system generated. I ensured that each node was capable of receiving and generating events. Events can be signalled between objects, with a source and a destination. They can also be broadcast to a collection of nodes. This now allows the whole user interface to respond to user input!

Basic UI building blocks
Ok, so now Venus has event notification, a scene renderer, and animation control, the imagebox and vector graphics support... I am still not ready to produce a UI. Typically in a user interface I will need to display textual information to users. To allow me to do this I added a new node, specifically for rendering text. In creating this node I added event handling support, allowing the text node to respond to special events containing text. This way I can generate a special event which will trigger the text node to update and display new text!

This then gave me the basic building blocks of a new user interface.

TextQuick
So back to TextQuick, I integrated my completed Venus graphics library into TextQuick and the first major, rocking, area of functionality I focus on was... (dramatic pause).... the splash screen!

OK, OK, I know the splash screen is hardly a major area of user interface functionality, so let me explain. The splash screen is a fantastic integration experiment, as it would allow me to go to town using the functionality that Venus provides. One of the first versions of the splash screen I implemented is shown below. This also helps to show the majority of Venus' features off. The image below shows the splash screen along with some notes regarding the features that are visible.

This is not the final version of the Splash Screen, as that is still under development. However I do think it shows off some of the basics of what Venus can achieve. In my next blog post I want to cover some of the new features I've added to TextQuick.

Developer Diary 4: A good blt'er of inspiration

Chris Woods — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:05:20 +0000

I've never owned an Atari ST, nor was I lucky enough to own an Amiga. - Instead I had an Amstrad 5086 it was an Intel 8086 8Mhz beast! I did however have some friends who owned Amigas and Atari STs and of course we would argue until the cows came home about who had the best machine. - Just in case your wondering, my PC never won. However in hindsight... I think I've done all right... Why am I talking about old computers ? - Simple, graphics drawing. I need to draw graphics quickly on the screen to produce some of the effects I need.

TextQuick 1.5 Signed again

Chris Woods — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 02:23:36 +0000

I am now pleased to say TextQuick 1.5 is back again, and available to download.

Developer Diary – Entry 3 : Making Progress, composing some requirements

Chris Woods — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 01:33:38 +0000

Thank you all for the comments and support around Venus! It's extremely motivating to get such feedback - I really appreciate the offers of help, support, and encouragement! In this post I want to explain some of the work I've done in specifying my requirements for Venus. Keep the comments coming, let me know what you think about the direction I'm taking with Venus.

Developer Diary - Entry 2 : Introducing Venus

Chris Woods — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:00:49 +0000

How can one person try to compete against the slickness of Apple iPhone / Palm Pre using the stock S60 SDK ? - I'd like to introduce you to "Venus".

Developer Diary - Entry 1: 2009. TextQuick update & Sounding like Batman

Chris Woods — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:33:26 +0000

Happy New Year !! A vast update to TextQuick is coming & how to sound like batman, but feel like Hans Solo after being defrosted from his carbon bath.

Hooklogger : Tracking down memory leaks

Chris Woods — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:39:18 +0100

Hooklogger is a great tool for Symbian. I've used it a number of times to track down memory leaks.

Pulling my hair out: Emulator Tweaks

Chris Woods — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:09:43 +0100

Pulling my hair out while trying to simulate low disk space conditions within the S60 emulator. Arrr.. Just what you need on a Friday.

Starting an application at phone boot time

Chris Woods — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:27:20 +0000

As a developer this is a question which comes up time and time again. It's actually not difficult to do, but the files you need to change and how you change them can be quite tricky to remember. I did some research on this during my spare time, so I've decided to dig out my notes and place them up here for future reference.

Problems with Handango : A Note to TextQuick 1.4 Owners

Chris Woods — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 00:37:51 +0000

Help for anyone trying to obtain an unlock code (reg code) to upgrade from TextQuick 1.4 to TextQuick 1.5.

TextQuick 1.5 Released : Open Letter To Existing Users

Chris Woods — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 02:00:59 +0000

I'm pleased to announce the release of TextQuick 1.5. As an previous purchaser of TextQuick you are entitled to a free copy....

TextQuick 1.5 Released

Chris Woods — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:54:14 +0000

I'm so thrilled to be able to tell you all that I've completed TextQuick 1.5 ! It's now available to download...

TextQuick 1.5 : Opening Up To The Rest Of The World

Chris Woods — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:26:08 +0000

I want to tell you about how I'm opening up TextQuick to more people than ever before. I've put some exciting technology under the skin of the forth coming release of TextQuick. This enables me to deliver a better version of TextQuick, and it provides a fantastic platform for moving forward. There are some awesome plans under way to make TextQuick even better in the future.

Rediscovering the missing EPOCROOT

Chris Woods — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:25:06 +0000

Symbian / Nokia removed the EPOCROOT environment variable. This tool let's you get it back, by obtaining the path to the currently selected environment.

You can't fix it if you don't know it's broken

Chris Woods — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:32:28 +0000

Since TextQuick 1.4 was released a handful of users contacted me with issues they discovered. Their input has been fantastic. As the saying goes “You can't fix something if you don't know it's broken”, and it's absolutely true.

TextQuick 1.5 RC 1

Chris Woods — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:51:46 +0000

Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. I'm pleased to announce that TextQuick 1.5 Release Candidate 1 is ready.

Protothreads : Removing the State from State machine

Chris Woods — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:56:49 +0000

Protothreads and how they can be used with Active Objects. - I discovered a really excellent paper on Protothreads. This paper describes how Protothreads can simplify code by removing the need to maintain the state information. They provide a stack-less light weight thread-like structure. It allows a developer to create code which looks and acts as if it's thread, although with a much reduced overhead not to mention producing code which more closely matches the developers original intention.

I'm Back!

Chris Woods — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:19:50 +0000

With news of TextQuick 1.5

A quick break

Chris Woods — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 13:20:45 +0100

Just a quick note to let you know that I'm taking a quick break, I'm away on holidays for the next two weeks. So development of TextQuick will be a on hold until I return. See you all real soon!

Calling space in an emergency

Chris Woods — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:21:21 +0100

Why does the letter " " cause so many problems, and in an emergency I can't call my friend. The bugs and their fixes coming soon in the first update to TextQuick 1.4

TextQuick beta 3 is dead... Long Live TextQuick 1.4

Chris Woods — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 09:45:47 +0100

The end of the beta period and the creation of the first release version of TextQuick, means I know get the chance to lift my head from the code and talk about some of the new features I've added.

Hello, this is TextQuick Beta 3 calling

Chris Woods — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 00:28:04 +0100

Chiseling at the code face to add a new feature to TextQuick.

Bugs & Features

Chris Woods — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:52:14 +0100

With the last of the major bugs out of the way it's time to look to the future, and adding some more features. What would you like to see included in TextQuick ?

Back to the code-face

Chris Woods — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 10:18:16 +0100

Just when I thought it was time to relax, I'm back at the code-face again.

TextQuick

Chris Woods — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 11:56:25 +0100

Make your phone easier to use.

Hey June, don't be so sad

Chris Woods — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:55:47 +0100

Woops, I missed an entire month.

Software KVM

Chris Woods — Mon, 14 May 2007 23:58:00 +0100

Synergy a software tool that provides a virtual KVM, excellent for sharing a full sized keyboard & real mouse between a desktop and a laptop.

Fixing the emulator crash

Chris Woods — Sun, 13 May 2007 17:11:11 +0100

Does your S60 emulator crash on startup, well here is the fix.