Quote:
Originally Posted by jonathan_s
I couldn't resist the temptation to show off  And ask a few important questions while I'm here. The attached thumbnail demonstrates openoffice running on the dr800 (not the emulator) using easy debian. I was a bit surprised that it worked without a swapfile. Anyway, as far as making it usable goes, there are a couple of sticking points, which I'm sure people have addressed in porting other applications:
1. The device doesn't seem to know when to refresh the screen. My understanding of e-ink is that the screen refresh is a big deal and chews power, so it makes sense to want to be economical with refreshes. But I often find that I have to force a screen refresh by hitting the bottom button to launch the start menu. Can anyone advise on how an application may force a refresh?
2. Doesn't appear in the taskbar, so if you move away from it you can never come back 
3. The little keyboard is pretty much useless. I tried installing the ported matchbox-keyboard, but that doesn't seem to work. Can anyone advise?
3a. I'm still hoping to get an external USB keyboard connected anyway. Virtual keyboard is too painful for serious work.
Once again, many thanks to all involved. |
You have found the e-ink limitations...
Anyway, good work. Experimentation is the basis for future improvements
Now, on a more positive tone:
1. IREX modified gtk+ to allow partial refreshes. You have more information on section 4.2 (page 23-24) of the document "iOn Development Environment". Download and study it, it's quite interesting.
Also, IREX provided a low level API (liberutils) to perform partial refreshes.
Take a look at thread:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83641
As examples look at Mackx's xournal port or rxvt port sources.
2. To integrate with DR you have to do some calls to the API IREX provides.
Take a look to xournal or fbreader ports. Or if you prefer something smaller take a look at the vala-written sysinfo program included with DR800+.
3. "ask and you'll be given" (ok, English is not my native language ;-)
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=119617
3a. There are some threads discussing it, but I can't remember the results, sorry.
All in all, you should build a development environment with a proper emulator, it simplifies the development a lot. And read the document in point 1 above.
Download everything from:
http://developer.irexnet.com/iOn/
If you are going to study IREX code you should build you own sources documentation with doxygen.
https://inigo.katxi.org/ereader/dr800-sources/dirs.html
As you can see we are a small community, but there have been many efforts from some people so there are a lot of work done and knowledgement in this forum.
I've attached a very-incomplete document Mackx and me started to document some points on development/porting apps for DR devices. Maybe it would be useful for you.
Feel free to complete and return it back to the community for other people.
(Note that the versions the doc mentions are old, last "internal" version for iOn platform is 4.0, which is the basis for DR1000 and DR800 "public" version 2.0).
Iņigo