laoshi : A Chinese learning application

I had some free time recently so I created a small application to learn Chinese. The name "laoshi" is the pinyin for "老師" which means "teacher".

For the moment the application features :

• A dictionary, using the database from cedict containing more than 90,000 entries.
• A lessons viewer, with automatic dictionary lookup when we pass the mouse over the text.
• A flash card player.
• Two lessons that I wrote for beginners.

I wrote everything in python using gtk for the interface, so it should work on every platform. I don't provide any package yet, but people interested can check the code at google code.

Tichy running on GTK

Those days I am working on Tichy again.

Tichy is a python applet manager that allow to easily write applications for mobile phone.

From the beginning I tried to make the applets code "widget-agnostic". That means for example if an applet need to show a list of item, instead of creating the widgets for that, it will request the system for a 'design' service that will be in charge of representing the items. This way we can have totally different interfaces for the same applications.

An other advantage of this approach is that I can use any widget toolkit I want. So today I tried to make Tichy running with gtk, instead of SDL. Here is the result. The first image is using my own SDL widget toolkit, the second image is the same application using gtk toolkit.

My goal is to create a back end using etk + edje, as well as a backend using Clutter.

First day at OpenMoko

Today is my first working day at OpenMoko.

After I met my new coworkers - I will need some time to get used to all the new faces - I started to play with the Neo FreeRunner. So I followed the wiki instructions to flash my cell phone with the last kernel and file system image. It worked fine :-)

Of course, since I am a fan of python and gtk, the second thing I tried was to run a python / gtk / glade application. And the proof that it works with no problem :

Here is a screenshot of glade designer running on my laptop :
And here is the same interface running on the Neo FreeRunner, from a python script :

This is pretty cool. The only problem is that the menu bar looks a little bit too small for a screen touch interface.