News

Well, looks like PicoGUI got slashdotted due to the new Psion support :)

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PicoGUI now works on the Psion 5mx! Thomas A. de Ruiter wrote the touchscreen driver and got me to hack the linear4 VBL a little. He has contributed a screenshot, and some files of interest to people wanting to try PicoGUI on a Psion on his Psion page.

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I set up a Wiki for the PicoGUI project. So far all the documentation we have besides the client API reference is in the form of short READMEs and example programs. Hopefully this Wiki will allow all of us to contribute documentation to make things easier for client programmers, server programmers, and users.

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Mark Juszczec sent in some PIM design diagrams today. I posted them here:
http://picogui.org/doc/diagram/pimpics/

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PicoGUI Update:
There hasn't been much traffic here lately, so I thought I'd just let everyone know what's up.

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Life has been awfully strange recently. I haven't posted much news recently, mainly because I've just started college, but also because I've been forgetful. Yesterday's attack is the kind of event that should make us all question life, our government, and human nature. It's hard to know how to react-- I know that when I first heard of it at about 8:00 MST yesterday, I couldn't comprehend the scale of things. The internet news sites were mostly slow or crashed, and there was no TV nearby. When I found a TV, I saw the video, the president's address, the interviews, and realized it must be real, and it must be on such a large scale that it can't be comprehended immediately. I've never been to New York, but I have a very good friend who just started class at Columbia University there. He's alright, but he lives less than 10 miles from the world trade center.

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Quoting from README.skins:

 PicoGUI's SDL driver supports 'skins', configurations that make PicoGUI appear and act as if it is running on a handheld computer or other embedded system. To use skins, you must have skin support for the sdlfb driver compiled in. Also, because the supplied skins use JPEG bitmaps you must have the JPEG loader compiled in. All the *.conf files in the 'skin' directory are skin configuration files. To try the Agenda VR3 skin, for example: pgserver -nc skin/vr3.conf Skins simulate the LCD's color constraints, and allow you to test some features that would otherwise be untestable on a desktop PC: the backlight, silkscreen area, and hardware buttons available on many handhelds. 

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PicoGUI now has the following standard dialogs:

• pgMessageDialog()
• pgInputDialog()
• pgDatePicker()
• pgFontPicker()
• pgFilePicker()
• pgColorPicker()

It is also very easy to build custom dialog boxes using pgDialogBox(). You can see all these dialog boxes in action in the new 'dialogdemo' demo program.

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PicoGUI finally has some useful documentation!

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Sean Barnes posted this to the mailing list a couple days ago (July 22) but I'm forgetful as usual in posting news to the web site... If you have an Agenda VR3 handheld, try out Sean's new romdisk!

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There's been lots going on recently. Unfortunately (?) most of it seems to only show up on the pgui-devel mailing list nowadays :)

Shane Nay, in addition to his Java integration project, has been adding new primitives to pgserver: filled and unfilled ellipses, and filled polygons. I recently added support for rendering to offscreen bitmaps, and automatic sizing for containers. My next few projects for PicoGUI are internationalizing pgserver, and moving most of pgserver's options to a flexible configuration file as the command line system can get a bit cumbersome.

A little offtopic, but I recently got a new iBook. Everone I have talked to was very impressed with the new iBooks. PowerPC processor, 1024x768 LCD, and much better battery life than any Wintel laptop I've seen. PicoGUI compiled out-of-the-box for Linux on PPC. (I'm using SuSE 7.1 for PPC) MacOS 9 seems like it's only good for games, but PicoGUI might be getting a port to MacOS X soon. (Should be easy, since SDL seems to be ported to MacOS X already)

I've been doing a little hardware experimenting on the side. In addition to Kiwi and the "uCsimm box" I'd like to get PicoGUI running on an embedded machine with VGA output. Since I recently decided to teach myself FPGA design, I started with a FPGA-based scan converter. It was overkill, but could convert any speed output from the Dragonball's LCD controller to VGA-compatible video. I'm now trying to get output directly from the uCsimm to a VGA monitor. (Well, with a logic gate or five) I've already got it producing 100x480 (Yes, it's a wierd resolution) with just a uCsimm, buffer, and VGA plug. I think I can improve the resolution further and get 8-color output, and whatever resolution I end up with would be doubled by running this on a 32mhz Dragonball VZ. This could be a cheap way to dock handheld computers to an external monitor/keyboard/mouse. Once I get the bugs out I'll post schematics and source code.

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Shane Nay posted some more screenshots of his Java integration work, now with canvas drawing support. Nifty! He has also sent patches to give pgserver ellipse drawing capability, and those should be in CVS shortly.

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Sorry for the lack of news lately- that should be changing. After a month of testing and a good handful of graduation parties I have three months of summer vacation before moving on to college. Three months in which I'm sure I'll get plenty done on PicoGUI. (But I also got Myst III recently ;-)

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Tada! The port of PicoGUI to the VTech Helio had its first release today. There's a separate page with downloads, screenshots, and information!

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I'm still making progress on the server. More video driver work, stuff that isn't that interesting in a screenshot :) Also some infrastructure improvements like a better build system and more compile time options.

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