Saturday, July 31, 2010

Whats up doc?

Pardon me for the excessively cliche title, I was short on time :P

Its been a week now since college began, and already I feel the
extreme busy-ness that occurs trying to squeeze every activity into 24
hours. The vacations were comparatively totally empty.

The UPnP collection support in Amarok is concluding pretty well. Today
I committed the fix that considerably shortens the amount of data
transfer required over the network for subsequent queries once the
local cache is relatively filled. With a relatively small share on
miniDLNA, I got near native performance, with the tracks being
populated as soon as I opened up a tree. The kioslave too has had some
additions that allow applications using it to bypass many of the
user-friendly features (required for browsing via Dolphin or
Konqueror) and get blazing fast results instead.

With another Amarok release coming up, I want to get some time to fix
bugs, but it has been hard to come by, even on a weekend.

My other pet KDE project has been Rekonq, more specifically Chrome
extension support. I can't remember the last time I blagged about it,
but just so it doesn't get buried as defunct project, let me give a
status update. Work is slow but not stalled. I have extension
installation working. I have figured out how to interface the C++ and
JS parts, although it is a bit hacky. The Chrome Tabs API is mostly
implemented, (localization and script injection and message passing
are not), including the captureVisibleTab() method. Now that I have
some experience, it should be much easier to implement the rest of the
APIs. I still have to figure out how to implement background pages
(most likely a WebTab not added to the UI), implement safe message
passing and so on. A nice UI to manage extensions would also be
required, and it would be great if others are interested in jumping in
to the project.
I would be glad to explain the architecture ( I have a IRC log lying
around, thanks to Rohan Garg :P )

I don't know about 1.0, but extension support will get there in the
end, so lets not remove my name from the Credits :)

Posted via email from nikhil's posterous

4 comments:

  1. Glad to hear that!

    I know you are free to implement what you want but why not start out with userscripts.org extensions? I believe Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and Midori support these extensions.

    Good luck to bring that well-roundness and customization that KDE is known for to Rekonq.

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  2. :D
    Been at Akademy? Hope so and enjoyed it.

    PS: uPnp collection support rocks!!

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  3. @CTown, well I don't really use userscripts at all, and so it wasn't the first thing that popped to my mind. Chrome extensions use HTML/JS only so they are easier than firefox extensions ( which might even be too hard with our technology stack ). So essentially thats my argument. I use quite a few essential Chrome extensions, and my aim in implementing this is to be able to use Rekonq with the same features. I would not be a good choice to implement userscripts due to lack of motivation :)

    @adjam Yes, akademy was great, perhaps we'll have more Rekonq devs at Desktop Summit :) Thanks for the UPnP appreciation.

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  4. It seems you're pretty Active , Nikhil.
    What's this Rekonq I keep reading about?

    Apologies for my n00b-ness. :)

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