Panorama

[DasFool]

Nothing like a visually impressive UI to catch people's attention. I think it's looking pretty great, dflemstr, as well as usable.

 

[craigix]

Looks really nice. I like it.

 

[renwils]

I really like that this can take advantage of the work going into pmenu skins. It would be a bit of a shame to fracture the brilliant work people are doing for all of these different application loaders.

 

[Esn]

I'm amazed, frankly.

Maybe my favorite feature that I've seen so far is the quick ability to search for a program by typing its name. (maybe I'm just easily-impressed... I haven't used anything besides Windows 2000 for ages so...)

 

[Awakening]

This looks really interesting. I find Pmenu a little too restricting for my taste. I like the low CPU usage and the fact that I can make whatever GUI I want with it. I haven't touched Javascript in ages though. Two things to consider adding:

Multitasking
The best things about Windows is the Task Bar, it makes switching applications really fast and convenient. I don't want to use a menu to switch between applications.

Music player
It would be so handy if we could integrate music players into our UIs any way we want. I usually listen to MP3s while I'm working, and when I'm not working.

 

[zhasha]

I hate to ask the obvious question but if you're rendering with WebKit and Qt, how are you going to get acceleration on this? I'm a little afraid a 600MHz processor won't be able to handle the strain of your eye candy, especially with software rasterization of Qt transitions et al.

 

[dflemstr]

I hate to ask the obvious question but if you're rendering with WebKit and Qt, how are you going to get acceleration on this? I'm a little afraid a 600MHz processor won't be able to handle the strain of your eye candy, especially with software rasterization of Qt transitions et al.

WebKit is only used for text parts and then only if necessary, the rest is rendered using a QGraphicsView that contains z-ordered elements that are arranged via anchors.

In other words: behind the scenes, WebKit fills a texture for me with text (once). That texture is then rendered, along with all of the other textures (there can be up to 200 simultaneously rendered textures in the Magma theme iirc; in other words like the average SDL game) to build the final QGraphicsScene and out it to the screen. Ample opportunity to use the graphics card, and it is in fact already being used, since Qt itself is graphics accelerated per default (It's very annoying to see Valgrind spit out the thousands of memleaks inside of the nVidia drivers every time I run it ).

@Awakening: both of those things are really difficult to implement, since 1. Panorama isn't a window manager and 2. I don't currently have any media libs loaded, and see my previous post on the topic for more information. I will *try*, though, since these seem to be common features everyone want, but there are no guarantees. Everyone's welcome to come with patches of course.

 

[zhasha]

Qt itself is graphics accelerated per default (It's very annoying to see Valgrind spit out the thousands of memleaks inside of the nVidia drivers every time I run it ).

Yes, it's accelerated... provided OpenGL is available. We only have OpenGL ES for which I've never heard of a Qt engine. There's an X11 (very slow) backend but I don't assume this is supposed to run under X and if it is I certainly see no use for it as an alternative to PMenu.
Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, but I think Clutter is the obvious choice here for a PMenu alt.

 

[dflemstr]

Qt itself is graphics accelerated per default (It's very annoying to see Valgrind spit out the thousands of memleaks inside of the nVidia drivers every time I run it ).

Yes, it's accelerated... provided OpenGL is available. We only have OpenGL ES for which I've never heard of a Qt engine. There's an X11 (very slow) backend but I don't assume this is supposed to run under X and if it is I certainly see no use for it as an alternative to PMenu.
Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, but I think Clutter is the obvious choice here for a PMenu alt.

Well, it certainly seems possible to use OpenGL ES judging by this article:
http://tiexpressdsp.com/index.php/Building_Qt_for_OMAP35xx_with_OpenGL_ES_accelerated_by_SGX
That should give me Qt Embedded with acceleration.

I don't know whether it integrates well with EGL and X but I'll have to see once the Pandora comes out, right?

 

[fusion_power]

Looks very nice, even with the huge ammount of apps. "Kinetic highlighting" movement, very interesting. Now, the whole Menu could be kinetic scrolling ^^
Is it possible to scroll straight with the finger onto the Pandora Touchscreen?
Does this menu wastes CPU Power when an app is running?

 

[ssj195]

Yes, it's accelerated... provided OpenGL is available. We only have OpenGL ES for which I've never heard of a Qt engine. There's an X11 (very slow) backend but I don't assume this is supposed to run under X and if it is I certainly see no use for it as an alternative to PMenu.
Don't get me wrong, it's very pretty, but I think Clutter is the obvious choice here for a PMenu alt.

Well, it certainly seems possible to use OpenGL ES judging by this article:
http://tiexpressdsp.com/index.php/Building_Qt_for_OMAP35xx_with_OpenGL_ES_accelerated_by_SGX
That should give me Qt Embedded with acceleration.

I don't know whether it integrates well with EGL and X but I'll have to see once the Pandora comes out, right?

There's a good piece on hardware accelerated rendering in Qt here:

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/03/13/using-hardware-acceleration-for-graphics/

(the author is a member of these forums, actually )

 

[dflemstr]

Looks very nice, even with the huge ammount of apps. "Kinetic highlighting" movement, very interesting. Now, the whole Menu could be kinetic scrolling ^^
Is it possible to scroll straight with the finger onto the Pandora Touchscreen?

I don't know, I don't have a Pandora
But yes, it should be possible, judging by what craigix has said (aka that you can use your finger instead of a stylus). The whole interface is otherwise designed to be usable with the touchscreen as far as possible.

Does this menu wastes CPU Power when an app is running?

Yes, at the moment. But it's like a 4-line thing to add suspend (add a hide-gui invocation before executing the app)

I haven't run this thing on a frame buffer yet, so I still need to see how it behaves in such a situation (e.g. most apps will need to have an X-server running before starting them). First version that I get running on the Pandora will probably still use X (and be slow because of that unless I can do a custom qt-x11 build or unless the Ångström Qt build uses GL ES 2.0 already); after that I'll get it to run on the frame buffer.

 

[kloplop321]

dflemstr, that is really awesome! There could be some other smooth things, but it is pretty good so far!

 

[Tensuke]

I'm amazed, frankly.

Maybe my favorite feature that I've seen so far is the quick ability to search for a program by typing its name. (maybe I'm just easily-impressed... I haven't used anything besides Windows 2000 for ages so...)

You can use Quicksilver in OS X or Launchy in Windows/Linux to achieve the same thing, there are other programs that do this too.

 

[dflemstr]

New stuff:

Test builds
I made test builds for i686 and x86_64. Go grab 'em here:
http://github.com/dflemstr/panorama/downloads

The builds are kinda huge because they also contain a build of Qt 4.6.1. You will need all of the libraries you'd normally need for Qt installed for this to run, which means that you only have to install Qt 4.6 or Qt 4.5 on your computer, and all of the correct dependencies needed for Qt 4.6.1 will be pulled down along with that package.

Note that the build I included only has limited support for image formats (It lacks SVG support for instance) so it will spit out warnings on the terminal quite a lot and spend more time than necessary with locating icons.

Please post here if you experience any problems (especially with the 32-bit build since I haven't tested it)

EDIT: Also, the key mapping on the Pandora is that the top action button is mapped to "1", the right one to "2", the bottom one to "3" and the left one to "4". Most UIs use this mapping, so you'll have to use your keypad or those numbers to navigate.

New theme

Simplicity (for those who don't like bloat)

Updated guide for themers
http://wiki.github.com/dflemstr/panorama/creating-panorama-user-interfaces

 

[ashdjones]

New theme

Simplicity (for those who don't like bloat)

Bigger picture?

 

[dflemstr]

New theme

Simplicity (for those who don't like bloat)

Bigger picture?

No, you have to check it out for yourself.

j/k

But there's really not that much to see.

Spoiler

 

[fusion_power]

Uh, where is the .exe File?

 

[dflemstr]

Uh, where is the .exe File?

This is a Linux application.

I can't make a Windows version because the program relies on special files like /proc/meminfo, /proc/stat, /usr/share/applications etc to get all of its data from. If I was to make a Windows version, I would have to battle with the Windows API to get the same information, and I much prefer to just open special files like I do in Linux.

 

[Jan-Nik]

Works fine here. But the Magma theme takes quite some time to load and takes up 439 MB RAM. Also the scrolling has vertical tearing (could be caused by my ATI driver).

But the kinetic scrolling is very nice! Good job! Overall the menu seems already pretty usable and the theme engine is awesome.