Conduit UI Experiments - Some Conclusions
Thanks once again to the many people who commented on my last two blog posts. All the feedback has been gratefully received. I just released Conduit 0.3.13 which, amongst other things, features some UI improvements based upon this feedback.
Improvements to the Conduit user interface.
Technically speaking, the release adds a knowledge framework to the application. This makes it easy to assist the user as they work through the interface. New features, utilizing this framework are;
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Conduit now ships with a few example synchronization groups. These groups are shown to the user based upon the devices connected, and the data providers loaded. When the user selects an example, it is added to the canvas automatically.
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I have added a message area to the bottom of the window. This provides a limited number of hints to the user depending on their interactions with the application.
Coming Up This release also lay a lot of the foundations for the few remaining big ticket items on the 0.4.0 TODO list. In the very near future we will see
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Merging GIO port
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Merging of Alexandre's SOC work, which will improve sound and video support in Conduit
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The first release supporting Windows Mobile synchronization
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Miscellaneous PIM improvements (Improved Google support, ability to merge attributes during conflict)
John Carr is currently working on the ATK accessibility implementation. As far as we can tell, there are no other PyGTK applications that have implemented accessibility in manner we wish to (manual implementation of the Atk interfaces from a objects not derived from GtkWidget). Lucly he works with Mark!
As far as using and distributing Conduit goes, it may get painful before it gets better. The next release will likely depend on PyGObject > 2.17 (for GIO support), and maybe PyWebkitGtk (SVN because of lack of recent, stable, compatible releases of this and WebkitGtk). My experience with (py)GIO so far has been exceptionally positive, and those out there who have used the train wreck that is gtkmozembed before will appreciate my desire to move to PyWebkitGtk.