Zaurus Port Of Treeline, Out the door Options

[fpp]

Episode 6 - A real problem...

The only thing I've found that is not workable on the Z is the "Configure Data Types" dialog in its present state.

The top and bottom parts are off-screen, along with a couple of fields and the OK/Cancel buttons...

On my 760 the Cancel button on the keyboard dismisses the dialog, but the OK button does not validate it. So as far as I can tell, you can't *define* a new record type directly on the Zaurus version.

Of course, you can run the app on your desktop PC too (Windows/Linux), so you can organize your data types there, then copy over the .trl file(s), so that doesn't mean you can't put treeline to good use on the Z !

Maybe someone familiar wih Qt/QPE could turn that dialog into a vertically scrolling one like the General Options above ?

 scrn005.jpg ( 108.9K ) Number of downloads: 182


Thanks to Zenyatta for making his port available !

If there's something specific anyone wants tried/tested/checked, just ask...

Enjoy,
fp

[kahm]

Episode 6 - A real problem...

The only thing I've found that is not workable on the Z is the "Configure Data Types" dialog in its present state.

The top and bottom parts are off-screen, along with a couple of fields and the OK/Cancel buttons...

On my 760 the Cancel button on the keyboard dismisses the dialog, but the OK button does not validate it. So as far as I can tell, you can't *define* a new record type directly on the Zaurus version.

Of course, you can run the app on your desktop PC too (Windows/Linux), so you can organize your data types there, then copy over the .trl file(s), so that doesn't mean you can't put treeline to good use on the Z !

Maybe someone familiar wih Qt/QPE could turn that dialog into a vertically scrolling one like the General Options above ?

 scrn005.jpg ( 108.9K ) Number of downloads: 182


Thanks to Zenyatta for making his port available !

If there's something specific anyone wants tried/tested/checked, just ask...

Enjoy,
fp

I'm not familiar with Python, so I'm not even going to try and fix the problem. Just curious, though - Have you tried rotating the screen? That may bring the dialog buttons into view.

[zenyatta]

fpp: You da man! I'm very impressed. Two of the problems you mention are very easy to solve or work around:

1. The Enter key on the keyboard is equivalent to the OK key, at least on the 5500. That allows me to define new data types even on the Zaurus (although it is pure torture). I have added this workaround to the documentation.

2. If the biggest difference between Sharp and OZ packages is the archiving program used, it's very trivial to create both versions. I have now added a package to the download area that will hopefully work with Sharp ROMs. I have no way of testing that, of course. There may be dependency problems if python packages on the Sharp side are structured differently than under OZ. It might have to be installed without dependency checking.

I must say I never thought that differences between Sharp ROMs and OpenZaurus might present bigger problems than differences between Zaurus models

Cheers,
z.

[fpp]

fpp: You da man! I'm very impressed. Two of the problems you mention are very easy to solve or work around:
1. The Enter key on the keyboard is equivalent to the OK key, at least on the 5500. That allows me to define new data types even on the Zaurus (although it is pure torture).

On the 760 keyboard the Enter and OK keys are also equivalent, and generally map to a dialog's OK/Yes button... but not on this one. Mostly it seems to call the "modify data type list" dialog, although it depends where the focus is.
There are other workarounds though : kham's idea works (nice call kham, see below !), and also you can tab your way to the OK button itself (4 tabs from the "output format" field, or 2 shift-tabs from the first field) and press Enter. But I agree it's strictly for emergencies only

2. If the biggest difference between Sharp and OZ packages is the archiving program used, it's very trivial to create both versions. I have now added a package to the download area that will hopefully work with Sharp ROMs.

Well, dunno if it's really trivial, but this one doesn't work here :

CODE

# ipkg install treeline_0.8.1_sharp_arm.ipk
zcat: stdin: unexpected end of file
ipkg_install_file: ERROR unpacking control.tar.gz from treeline_0.8.1_sharp_arm.ipk

BTW, that's the exact same error I received many times while trying to build my own ipk from the OZ original, which is why I ended up installing by hand. So there must be another difference somewhere...

[fpp]

Episode 7 - Mo' Fun !

Yes, I know there ain't no Star Wars episode 7, but just for kicks... When I started Treeline from the console today, to check on the above, I got a very different result than on Friday :

 scrn001.jpg ( 73.41K ) Number of downloads: 138


More legible and easier on the eyes, no ? I've already seen both the small text/large text versions, but I'm not sure how to reliably get either. Guess it comes from launching through the console... I wonder which version a proper IPK installation with a working icon will give ?

Obviously though, the "Configure Data Types" dialog problem just got worse :

 scrn002.jpg ( 115.3K ) Number of downloads: 120


Fortunately, kham comes to the rescue : if you rotate the screen, this is what you get (well, most of the time anyway - here too there are variants :-) :

 scrn003.jpg ( 137.61K ) Number of downloads: 137


Yay, an OK button

[zenyatta]

I wonder which version a proper IPK installation with a working icon will give ?

*sigh* I have to buy a new unit by the end of the month. This is no good without a Zaurus.

Cheers,
z.

[mandjab]

CODE

# ipkg install treeline_0.8.1_sharp_arm.ipk
zcat: stdin: unexpected end of file
ipkg_install_file: ERROR unpacking control.tar.gz from treeline_0.8.1_sharp_arm.ipk

I have the same installation problem with my 760 - Cacko 1.22

Could you help me?

[fpp]

I have the same installation problem with my 760 - Cacko 1.22
Could you help me?

Sorry, no. I've tried, several times, to build an ipk on my own Z by disassembling zenyatta's and putting it back together, but I always get the same result. It's either something with the Cacko/Sharp installer, or something to do with the contents of the control file, despite its being plain text...

[fpp]

Episode 8 - Icon works !
(Match that one, George L ! :-)

Saw this thread over in the python forum : http://www.oesf.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11827

and tried some of those hints. Guess what, now the Treeline icon launches Treeline, nifty uh ? More good news, it launches the large-text version

I don't pretend to understand any of it, but it seems to boil down to this :

- either you take the treelinelauncher script that's called by the icon (Exec= in treeline.desktop) and you make it much more complicated using the stuff from the thread above (env, PYTHONPATH, output redirection, not sure which does it...)

- either you take it out of the loop entirely and just stick the path to treeline.py as the icon action, seems to work just as well :-)

Okay, back to that darned ipk...

[zenyatta]

- either you take it out of the loop entirely and just stick the path to treeline.py as the icon action, seems to work just as well :-)

Can you try the following please?

1. Launch TreeLine by tapping on its icon.
2. Push the Home button to get back to Qtopia desktop.
3. Tap the TreeLine icon in the task bar to go back to TreeLine.

I remember having a big problem with this - TreeLine would never come back up. My setup of treeline.desktop / treelinelauncher / treeline.py is the only way I found to make it work.

Thanks,
z.

[fpp]

Can you try the following please?
1. Launch TreeLine by tapping on its icon.
2. Push the Home button to get back to Qtopia desktop.
3. Tap the TreeLine icon in the task bar to go back to TreeLine.
I remember having a big problem with this - TreeLine would never come back up. My setup of treeline.desktop / treelinelauncher / treeline.py is the only way I found to make it work.

Yes, I seem to remember such things being discussed in the forums sometime last year (maybe it was you :-).

Well, I had done just this without thinking about it during the course of my testing, and I just tried again just to be sure, and I can confirm it just works, even with my treeline.desktop calling treeline.py directly...

Actually it's very fortunate that it does, because there is one peculiar thing about launching treeline on my Z : quite often ("...but not quite always", as seems to be my mantra these days :-), it will appear briefly then switch back to the desktop or to another app that's running. So you have to tap its icon on the taskbar to get it back.

It's not a problem, just a bit strange - the PyQt "demo app" (basic example) doesn't do this for example. And I *think* the behaviour was there with treelinelauncher, too.

Oh, and I seem to remember that early in the thread there was a question about start times. Subjectively I find them quite acceptable : with my 760 running its usual set of apps (Ko/Pi, Opera, a couple of python instances and a Snakelet server) loading Treeline takes just under 10 seconds. Not bad ! A bit more than lighter, native apps (like Portabase), but on par with compiled code like Ko/Pi, Ka/Pi etc., and certainly much better than some monsters running on kdemicrolib (like Tuxcards and Kcommander) that take so much of forever to start that they need a splashscreen to warn the user... Go Python/PyQt ! :-)

[zenyatta]

OK folks,

today I received my "new" 5500 so things should slowly start moving once again.

In the few long weeks without a Zaurus I've come up with alternative ways of doing PIM stuff. Thanks to that I will try to use the Zaurus less as a PIM tool and more as a development and testing toy. Hopefully my life will not disintegrate into complete chaos.

I would like everyone who is interested in this program to let me know
- the ROM (including version) they want to run it under,
- whether that ROM is available for the SL-5500, and
- where that ROM can be downloaded.

Thanks,
z.

[ken]

I dont know if this is of any help, but I've found 'stageone' to be a great outliner. It can be found at http://www.handango.com

It's one of the few apps that I'd buy the author's other programs if he made more apps.

It's well worth the price. Since I first purchased it last year in November, I've noticed that he still is providing updates.

[zenyatta]

Yes, there are several outliners on Handango, most of them quite good as far as I know. Certainly, people who want a polished outliner now should go with one of them. I'm just having fun dabbling in Python, that's all :-)

z.

[zenyatta]

I have spent some time living under SharpROM 3.13 and come up with an ipk that installs without crashing and produces a working icon on the Applications tab.

There are some limitations, of course. I've given up on registering .trl files as a mime typ e in Qtopia because I couldn't get TreeLine to associate properly with them. At best, TreeLine would launch upon tapping on a file's icon but it didn't receive the file name on the command line - apparently Qtopia uses the QWidget::setDocument() slot to implement the association but I couldn't get it to work.

I also updated the OZ ipk with one small bugfix (resizing when an input method area pops up). I can now finally leave SharpROM, re-flash OZ and move ahead with other things.

Cheers,
z.