GSoC part 5: exams

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As mentioned in my previous blog, the X.Org Foundation now wants us to blog every week. Whilst that means shorter blogs (last week’s was a tad long), it also means that there isn’t much to blog about if I didn’t do much in a week.

Such is the case for this week, sadly. It’s the last week of university, and so there are a few assignment deadlines that I needed to complete; I haven’t been able to invest as much time into my project as I would have wanted. That’s oke though, because as I said in the previous update I’m ahead of schedule. I discussed this with Peter, my mentor, and we agreed that there is no problem.

So, what has actually been done the last week? Three things; first, I’m now working on adding support for left-aligned buttons in the MouseMap widget. I have something working, but I’m not quite happy with it yet. Definitely something I hope to improve next week!

Second, highlighting SVG elements is now significantly cleaner. With the old approach Piper would reload the SVG for every change, not that efficient. I came across a blog update of a GNOME GSoC student, who also had to highlight SVG elements. After asking the Cairo developers, he settled for drawing the button to a separate Cairo surface and using that one as a mask to draw the original surface. A clean and elegant solution for sure, much better than my original approach!

Finally, Peter has added an API to libratbag to query a resolution’s minimum and maximum DPI. We are going to need this in Piper to correctly cap the possible values in the resolution stack page.

That’s all, folks! I hope to see you again next week when I’ve made up for this lousy week!

This blog post is part of a series. You can read the next part here or the previous part about the first development sprint here.