Themes!

[Toma]

Hey kakaroto!
You might remember me from #e on freenode  
Im a themer for E17 and all things edje and Id like to offer my support for creating some neat themes to make EFL unify with the modern linux desktops. Eg. a KDE4 theme, Gnome2 theme and maybe a couple really snappy themes for the sake of it. Id also like to chuck in any help with other people making themes with edje as Im quite good with it and know how tough it is to dive into. Its also an insanely powerful themeing engine compared to QT and GTK. Im downloading and compiling amsn2-efl now. Just drop me a line on freenode!
Congrats on choosing EFL  :wink:  We'll make it the best looking frontend youll find.

[Toma]

I also noticed youve gone with ETK? ETK is not as well maintained and from what Ive read has been abandoned by its author. There are alot of EFL apps using ETK but EWL is still actively maintained and if you requested it, Im sure pfritz and the other EWL guys would be willing to make some roads to adding images in textblocks support (for smileys and the like). On a side note, with the style support in edje, you could make a font with smiley faces in it then have the text style block have a tag: "smile1" "font=Smiley"; working to render the smiley font. Thats just a workaround for now, but of course, not as neat as real images with animations. Also, you might be able to embed 'eap' icons for smileys inside the EWL textblock. Anyway, this is all discussion for the e-devel list.

[kakaroto]

Hey Toma!
Glad to see you posting and of course I remember you from #e and even from before when you were on #amsn... :p
This is really great news and I'd like to thank you for proposing your help with edje... I'm really not having enough time to keep the efl front end up to date as well as working on the core (which I'm not doing either anyway :p)...
billiob started to work on the efl front end too, he wanted to add support for images....

I suggest you first read the technical details of how we want to do it : http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.network.instant-messaging.amsn.devel/9502
that's the design, so it's really simple and gives a lot of power to the core and minimum power to the front end.. problem with that is that edje can have scripts and can have so many things done in the .edj that it might limit the themeing... but I guess we'll see about that when the time comes...
Did you get the amsn2 svn and got it to work? I saw on #e that you couldn't compile python-efl because it's not updated to work with the latest version of cython.. there's a thread in this forum about it and which version I was using to get it to compile....
I'd like you to read the edc files I wrote for the login screen and get your comments on it, I spent a llloooot of work on that login screen so be kind :p
Anyways, having an experienced edje developer would be really awesome, I just saw the themes you did and they look nice, I have yet to try them...
Do you have any python experience by the way ?
give me your SF username and I'll add you to the team members so you can get write access to the SVN.

About the big, huge EWL/ETK debate... I never know which one to use, I even started a flamewar about that on e-devel a while ago (a year ago I think)... at the time, both were maintained, and both authors were bitching about the other toolkit.. I didn't mind either API and I  decided to try them both and see how it goes...
etk_test worked very well.. and ewl_test was buggy as hell, so I thought etk was better, but ewl devs said that the ewl_test app was the one that was buggy, not ewl itself... anyways, I still wasn't too sure (very hard decision) but I liked the 'performance review' wiki page on ewl... and when k-s (the indt guys) were writing python-etk bindings, I decided to go with etk since that's what they were using and they made the bindings for it...
I just tried ewl_test again and it looks like it's still as buggy as before... and I'm not convinced...
anyways, we'll see about etk/ewl later... for now we still need the core to be made into something more usable... have a good contact list and chat window... then we can look at etk/ewl... if we decide to go with ewl, we'll have to first write the python-ewl bindings... and the change will be small.. I was thinking of maybe having efl-etk and efl-ewl front ends.. can't be that complicated!! :p (same code, share the same edje base, and have a flag to either use etk or ewl for the widgets...
after all.. amsn2 is all about the choice of your toolkit

about the textblock thing, that would be cool, but I wonder how indt are advancing with the efl port of webkit...
anyways, our original idea was to implement the obstacles detection in evas, then the webkit idea seems so nice... we'll see about that, but if the efl team can help us with all that, it would be awesome (amsn would become 'THE EFL killer app' so they have a looot to gain by helping us :p).

By the way, as I said before, billiob was trying to implement the Image interface of the front end.. and we ran into some problems.. it seems you can't create an evas image (Evas_Object *) without the corresponding evas.. so we can't create one image, and use it wherever we want (a smiley that we'd want to show in the contact list, and in multiple chat windows...), it also doesn't match with the design, and I think it would be really ugly to create an 'image' object passing it the window where we want to put it... + it's different from other toolkits, so the core wouldn't know whether it would need to create a new Image (if an image/smiley is used twice for two windows) or if it should reuse the one that was created before...
It would be nice to be able to have an Image object not associated with any Evas window, and then add the image to the Evas window and Evas would take care of creating an Evas_Object linked to that Image object....

That's it for now, hope to see you soon with some exciting stuff.. I'd really like to see what magic you can do with edje
Take care

[Toma]

Ok, first things first, Im not a coder as such.... I can do Edje/Embryo and bash to an extent but sadly, Im still not able to do C and as such Evas
As for the compilation, Im still having issues but its more than likely a PEBKAC and after it works ill make a little script for myself and all will be well.

EWL... I went into ewl theming with a great deal of humming and haaaring but that might have been because I themed ETK first. After looking at ewl and how it dresses up its widgets, you tend to get an idea of what it can do. Either way, youll get a dead sexy interface with much less overhead than GTK and QT. Mind you, python will probably take a hungry bite out of the efficiency. And no, I cant code python either
Another thing, ewl_test has a list of bugs against it as long as the commit list. I told the ewl dudes once in IRC "You cant expect people to use EWL and theme it when the test app doesnt work!" The lib itself is really quite good from what i hear... but enough about that. Ill let the EWL guys take up the challenge

I have been waiting anxiously for this release since you asked about it all that time ago
Good job so far!