Debian repository on Google App Engine

So here is the post about the eureka moment I promised on Twitter.

Last week before releasing Inkface v0.1.2 and twitter-inkface client, I was working on submitting the packages in maemo-extras-devel repo. I was following a long list of instructions. Halfway through the list, I noticed that the example package is assumed to have had autotools kind of build framework. One of my packages uses SCons. I had a doubt (yet unconfirmed) that it won't work. So I scratched my head and that brought to the surface one of the ideas I have had at the back of my mind for a long time. Using one of these "cloud" services to host a debian repo.

And what cloud service can be better than the one that is absolutely free (for such a low traffic purpose, at least) - Google App Engine. So I went through the basics of Debian repo and put together an app for Google App engine. Under couple of hours, I had my very own Debian repo. (Yeah, that's when I leapt out of my bathtub and ran to twit 'Eureka Eureka!') That's what you hit when you point your apt-get to repo.altcanvas.com.

I have submitted the small script as a recipe in Google App Engine cookbook. You can also find it in altcanvas source tree.

Inkface + Clutter

Clutter is the easiest way to start coding GUIs with accelerated graphics. I liked it when I first saw the demo in March last year. So all the time while working on inkface, I was waiting for some free time to use inkface with clutter. After getting Inkface v0.1.2 out, I tried my pyclutter... pretty soon figured out a simple way to combine the two.

Check out the following 12 minute video. I put together a simple program in few hours and the video documents all the steps I needed to do. It demonstrates a slider widgets which controls the rotation of a steering wheel.



The program is 169 lines of python code in a single file (including comments and some boilerplate code). It loads the GUI from two svg files (slider, steering). As you can see the slider is unlike any GTK or Qt widget and it was put together in less than 10 minutes in Inkscape (the video is real-time).

[You can skip through the video from 1:00 to 9:40, if you don't want to see all the details of drawing in Inkscape]

Now animated "clutter" GUIs can be designed with smooth curvy shapes and smart color palettes, which are difficult to program, but easy to compose in an image editor. Libraries like clutter are making it possible to design out of rectangular widgets. A library like inkface makes it possible to design those new widgets in an image editor.

Inkface v0.1.2, Twitter-inkface client

Finally it is ready. Actually it has been ready for more than couple of weeks now, but I wanted to make sure the bugs in my demo app were not due to problems in core library.

The demo app is a client I wrote for the Twitter service. The intention was to demonstrate how an intuitive GUI can be designed using an Image editor. With the GUI designed using Inkscape and an off-the-shelf python library to talk to Twitter service (Thanks to DeWitt for python-twitter), I only had to write simple glue code to get the whole app working. Check out the video.



Good news is I have setup a debian repo to host packages for this app.

In the Maemo Application Manager, add following Catalog:

Name: Altcanvas
Web Address: http://repo.altcanvas.com
Distribution: testing
Components: main

Refresh the application list. You should see 'twitter-inkface' app in the list. All the dependencies will be automatically pulled from the repo.

Since the repository implementation is currently experimental (No it's not a standard web server! I will save it for a separate post), you may face a problem while installing or I may have to take it offline for modifications. In that case, you can download following four packages and install them with dpkg ("dpkg -i *.deb")

libaltsvg,inkface-python, inklib, twitter-inkface.

For more info on Inkface project, visit the project page.