This week I began working on Log-activity. The activity is tremendously useful, to debug and find errors. It organises all the log files that are generated into a nice Hierarchial-tree like view that increases visibility as well as makes it easier to keep track of log files.

The issue that I wanted to fix was that, on activity start, the current log file that is displayed was never being highlighted in the list of files, and that used to create problems. A user might misintrepret it as the first file in the hierarchy, but that wasn’t the cases as the files were loaded randomly onto the activity, and thus it could be any file that was currently displayed.

I enjoyed my time on this issue because I had read a lot of documentation on Gtk.TreeView and the MVC model on which the widget is based on. MVC stands for Model, View and Controller and each of them handle what the name suggests. I had to store the last used log file and at the same time modify the view in a controlled manner, and thus I was involved in all three components of the widget. I read up a lot of tutorials on the subject, and even covered Gtk.TextView, a similarly based widget for different purposes, figuring that I will require to know it later anyways.

I also worked on the GTranslator activity, which again like Bichos, had unconnected forks. But rather than delete the repository, I cherry picked the commits and merge the unconnected dorks into one repository and pushed the leftover history onto to a new branch. That way the history of the discussion was kept infact.

I started to work on the Calculate-activity, to implement the feature of a Self-Colored calculator. The reason being studies have shown that children suffering from Grapheme-color synthesia, have vivid visualisations of color associated with numbers. Each number springs up a different color in their mind. It is like having a color associated with each number, and it sounds so cool. The feature turned out to be way harder than I anticipated. Primarily because I failed to understand what was required in terms of user experience and had to go back and forth several times. Careless mistakes, typing mistakes caused considerable delay.

The feature also required that any place the number was displayed, it should be colored. But that required a complete re-write of the widgets that were being used to implement the activity. I decided to stop with the implementation for now, and the changes were merged as a separate branch called “Synthesia”, to which I plan to continue to make the necessary port.

Links to PR: Log-activity PR: #16 GTranslator I: #8 Calculate-activity, Self-Colored calculator