Hack Jam Log Book is a log of progress made in and around a weekly hack session. Topics include natural language processing, high energy electronics, linguistics, interface design, &c. Enjoy.

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1.7.11

 

Movie GUIs

I went to Hackjam the first time in who knows how long and it was nice to see everyone again.

I found accessmaincomputerfile.net the other day and was inspired to try my hand at some immersive or attention-grabbing GUI components. Movie GUIs are overkill and extreme and make "real" GUIs look like the 20th century -- the ones I get excited about anyhow. The other ones I get excited about are the ones that are too real such as Trinity+nmap or SunOS in the new Tron movie. These aren't very exciting to see on your normal computer though since, well, they already are on your normal computer.

My first step is to implement a clock applet resembling the screenshot from Darkstar. I am running XFCE4 in Arch right now so I am going to target this environment. Adam was very helpful to me in gathering some information and getting started on setting up the build environment and sharing his perspective on how it might work. I have successfully compiled the original clock applet now. There are five options, each of which is based from a .c file in the xfce4-panel source tree, so my intent is to add clock-darkstar.c as an important part of finagling a sixth option into the mix.

After doing all this hard work I decided making a XFCE plugin did not really further my goals and it would probably be more fun and tasty to pursue another avenue that did not necessarily require XFCE for example.

I already have some experience with SDL so I am going to bark up that tree.

As much as I want to learn new things, what I really want is to have a sweet new Darkstar (1974) clock applet. Now I am abusing the term "clock" and "applet" since this beastmaster can be so much more! A clock for starters, but the view implies so many fiddly knobs! Every text field is completely configurable in a number of ways. Good grief I am already in over my head before I even hit the water!

I am going to nuke my copy of the xfce4-panel out of spite and also to make sure I have a lot of headache to go through in case I forget that I am doing this with SDL and not making a xfce4 plugin.

I am also listening to Voltaire right now. Background music, not advice.

Cheers!

EDIT: here is a great link to what I have accomplished thus far https://jonathanstone.homeip.net/darkstar.tgz. Please kindly disregard the certificate error, thanks. You can build it with some normal command such as "make". Also you need to put a 639x359 darkstar_1974.bmp in the folder at runtime since I am NOT distributing that. I got mine from accessmaincomputerfile.net as linked above and converted it to bmp with such a command: "convert darkstar_1974.jpg darkstar_1974.bmp". The 20ms delay is necessary to make the thing not nom down on all the cycles. Experimenting with higher values resulted in even lower (<1%) CPU utilization but then I couldn't close the window because the events occuring during the wait cycle are not processed.

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