Release PNDManager

[hmc]

mcobit and milkshake,


thanks for the information.


I have already used the "average PND" example from the wiki as a start.


Having exactly one app inside one PND is probably the most usual case, and my question about redundancy was only related to that case. In my new TrueCrypt package I have even used another scheme: I have created a quite long explanatory description for the package, and only a very short one for the application, because repeating the long one does not make much sense.


However, as I understood the specification, there should be (recommended, but not necessary, but I try to also follow recommendations) at least three descriptions per language, some of them identical, due to backwards compatibility to pre-HF6 firmware (i.e. there is this <descriptions> field, which contains <description>s and outside there should also be at least one <description>, which is used by older firmware. And in addition there is the <package>/<descriptions>/<description>.


Or did I misunderstand the specification?


Daniel

 

[milkshake]

Nope that's spot on.

 

[bzar]

PNDManager 1.2.0.5b


Pndman fixes, trying to zero in on the bad connection crashes.

 

[bzar]

How's the last beta? Any problems with it?

 

[Holliefant]

I am testing right now, Dowloading GCrompris with it

 

[kuru]

Just noticed the milkyhelper pnd updated today is the highest rated with considerably more than 5 Stars, there's stars all the way in PNDManager home tab. Can anybody confirm this?

 

[Cloudef]

Just noticed the milkyhelper pnd updated today is the highest rated with considerably more than 5 Stars, there's stars all the way in PNDManager home tab. Can anybody confirm this?

It was bug in repository, also way to get milkshakes_'s attention.

 

[milkshake]

Cloudef? whats the issue? is the rating bug still there? I thought we squished this already?

 

[Cloudef]

Cloudef? whats the issue? is the rating bug still there? I thought we squished this already?

No, you fixed it.

 

[milkshake]

ok cool

 

[ekianjo]

Is it possible to fix the rotating arrow icon on the bottom right corner? (or is it already fixed in the latest beta?)


I tend to be very picky about details like that, but the icon is not well rounded and its rotation is not exactly in its center either, giving it a wierd rotation effect... I do not know how to say, but basically there is some issue with the rotation point coordinates, I believe.


Otherwise the interface of PNDManager is very, very well done.

 

[bzar]

ekianjo: This will change in the near future. The current solution was something I came up with under the pressure to finish PNDManager in time for the competition

 

[ekianjo]

ekianjo: This will change in the near future. The current solution was something I came up with under the pressure to finish PNDManager in time for the competition

No problem

 

[Neelix]

After all the the '100 star' ratings were deleted, PNDManager still showed them until the database was cleared, even after Sync.


- Neelix

 

[_wb_]

PNDManager is just great! The only thing that can possibly make it more user-friendly, is to be included in the official firmware release


One minor remark though: the startup time of PNDManager is quite substantial - could this be improved? What is causing this? If it cannot be improved, perhaps a "Loading..." progress bar could be added - that makes it at least psychologically faster to load.

 

[_wb_]

Oh and another thing: it should check for network connectivity before trying to download anything - I just forgot to switch on wifi before starting PNDManager, and I had to kill it because it became unresponsive while trying to download something (I assume at some point some timeout would happen, but I didn't want to wait for that).

 

[hmc]

PNDManager is just great! The only thing that can possibly make it more user-friendly, is to be included in the official firmware release


One minor remark though: the startup time of PNDManager is quite substantial - could this be improved? What is causing this? If it cannot be improved, perhaps a "Loading..." progress bar could be added - that makes it at least psychologically faster to load.

this brings to mind an idea I had before, when I developed weeXpc back in 2007/2008, which was an adapted pdaXrom distribution for the Sharp Zaurus. A lit of programs needed substantical tine to start up, and so I added a wrapper script for each application call, which raised an xdialog dialog (xdialog is the predecessor of our zenity), that showed an hourglass and the approximate time the application needed to start up, with a countdown.


I our case, the PND system would be a great precondition to implement something like this, because it could be implemented in a central place, rather than requiring modification of each .desktop file or each PND.


The dialog in weeXpc is shown in this screenshot:

Will open a new discussion thread for this feature soon.


Daniel

 

[_wb_]

What would the progress bar be based on if this dialog is to be shown in an application-independent way? Would it just keep track of the average time needed by the application to start? But then how does it know when it has actually finished loading? Somehow ask the window manager when a new window gets opened? (but even then, some apps might quickly create a window but take a long time to actually show anything in it) Or would it have some database of empirically obtained "starting times" for each application (but then the times would probably not be very correct if you run at a different clockspeed or have exceptionally slow or fast SD cards).

 

[Binky]

Maybe wait until that program stops eating cpu time?

 

[hmc]

What would the progress bar be based on if this dialog is to be shown in an application-independent way? Would it just keep track of the average time needed by the application to start? But then how does it know when it has actually finished loading? Somehow ask the window manager when a new window gets opened? (but even then, some apps might quickly create a window but take a long time to actually show anything in it) Or would it have some database of empirically obtained "starting times" for each application (but then the times would probably not be very correct if you run at a different clockspeed or have exceptionally slow or fast SD cards).

Hi wb,


answering your questions in the new dedicated thread.