xfce-bluetooth

[Natanael Copa]

On Fri, 26 Jul 2013 09:18:52 +0200
Marco Milone <marco.sting at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Natanael, being not a programmer I can't help with the code but my
> feedback is that this tool would be greatly appreciated and I am
> promoting your project with the italian Xfce community on Gplus that I
> help maintain...Hopefully someone could be helpful and submit some
> patches.

Actually, I think the most valuable help at this point get is
help with the UI, drawings of the dialog boxes and ideas on how it
should work.

We have the example with the "discoverable" property which not really
is a on/off setting. It is a timer which will be enabled for
DiscoverableTimeout seconds. Its like a start/stop action, where you
cannot really 'stop' once started - you can power off to stop it. I
have not found any property that tells how many seconds are left.

So how to present that? We have a checkbox (checkbutton in gtk
language) like on the screenshot but add an input box for the timeout
value and tooltip that says, "set to 0 for let it be enabled forever"?

I think we can do better than that. I don't know how though.

Then we have the list of devices. Should we list all devices in a
single list and have an 'action' button for 'Pair' or should we only
have the currently paired devices in the list, and use the "add" button
to get another list with all devices not paired? I was originally
thinking of doing as the latter, but I'm not convinced that this is the
best approach.

So basically, I'm not really needing coders to help at this stage, but
I'd like some help from a UI talent. I can try code the glue between
the UI and the bluez backend.

To get an idea about what different properties that are available, look
at the api docs (specially adapter-api.txt and device-api.txt):
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/bluetooth/bluez.git/tree/doc


Thanks!


> Thanks for your work,
> 
> Marco.
> 
> 2013/7/25 Natanael Copa <ncopa at alpinelinux.org>:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have long time wanted a lightweight bluetooth manager.
> > gnome-bluetooth has done the job til now, but I have never liked all
> > the gnome deps it pulled in. blueman have been there but its python
> > (which tends to eat more memory than I like).
> >
> > now that bluez-5 is out, and gnome-bluetooth is dead, I had a look at
> > writing a manager.
> >
> > Since this is mostly some dialogs and glue to the dbus interface, I
> > have picked vala for the job so far. It makes both dbus binding and gui
> > coding easy, without adding too much overhead. Once it works I might
> > consider to port it to C, or parts of it. (the agent will probably en
> > up as C to save memory).
> >
> > So far I have a preferences dialog with:
> >  - power enable/disable
> >  - discoverable enable/disable
> >  - a list of devices
> >
> > Screenshot:
> > http://imgur.com/1iTsEK9
> >
> > The buttons to right does not work yet. The idea was to have +, - and
> > properties buttons like in the panel preferences, but i'm open to other
> > ideas.
> >
> > I also need some way to select which bluetooth adapter, in case there
> > are many. I was thinking of a combobox like when selecting soundcard in
> > the xfce mixer application.
> >
> > I would appreciate feedback, specially on how the gui should look/work.
> >
> > The code is here:
> > https://github.com/ncopa/xfce-bluetooth
> >
> > Patches are welcome.
> >
> > -nc
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
> > https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce4-dev
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-- 

-nc