Programming for the Eee PC with wxWidgets

There has been a lot of fuss about the Asus Eee PC in the last few months and Asus have clearly pressed the right consumer buttons with their cheap Linux subnotebook. No doubt there will be many more machines in this format in the future, representing a market of many millions, so it’s an attractive target for developers. Fortunately for wxWidgets programmers, it’s pretty straightforward to adapt wxGTK applications to the requirements of the Eee PC. This consists mainly of two tasks: fitting windows and dialogs onto the 800x480 screen, and distributing the application in a Xandros-friendly package (a .deb).

Here’s an example of one of my wxWidgets applications (Writer's Café) running on the Eee PC:

Should I port my application?

First, a few observations about the Eee PC from the perspective of a developer wondering whether his or her application would be a good match for it. What kind of users are we talking about? Well, it’s such a general-purpose machine it’s hard to narrow it down, but it obviously has appeal to children and women who generally have smallish hands and could more easily adapt to the diminutive keyboard. But at least for casual use, most people could get used to the form factor, and some tasks don’t need much keyboard use, such as browsing, listening to music or reading e-books.

There are plenty of reports of people using the Eee PC for substantial work – it’s good for journalists, photographers, students, and business travellers (although the limited battery life could be a problem on long trips). It could be useful for accountants visiting client premises, for example, or engineers often on the road. The Eee PC enthusiasts’ forums are full of examples of both business and home use. Unlike smaller devices such as the Nokia N series of internet tablets, or Windows Mobile devices, the usable keyboard means that this machine has the potential for running a fuller range of applications, albeit for shorter periods of time than on a larger computer (due to comfort and battery limitations). The high level of compatibility of files and applications between conventional PCs and the Eee PC increases the appeal of performing regular PC work on a highly mobile machine.

Apart from the small keyboard, the main limiting factor is probably not so much the slower processor as the low-resolution screen. However, people are getting used to it and one user has reported that they find a regular screen too big now, and they have to emulate the Eee PC resolution on their desktop!

So, the answer to the question, “Is it worth porting my app to the Eee PC?” is probably going to be “Yes” in most cases. If you’re already writing wxGTK applications, it’s almost a no-brainer. Apart from anything else, there’s a “cool factor” in showing your applications running on the gadget.

Starting wxGTK development

If you are targetting the Eee PC running Linux, then you will use the wxGTK port (wxWidgets on top of GTK+ 2). As a bonus, your work in tailoring applications to the Eee PC display size will also pay off when recompiling your applications for Windows, to target Eee PC running the Microsoft operating system.

There are many combinations of working methods and tools for writing wxGTK applications. I do most of my development on a Windows PC, and compile the apps on Debian Edge running on the same machine (using VMware) for deployment on Linux. The resulting wxGTK application runs on most modern Linux distributions, which all tend to come with the necessary GTK+ 2 libraries regardless of desktop environment in use. The Eee PC’s Xandros is no exception. The .deb archive I distribute for use on standard GNOME and KDE Linux desktops is the same used for the Eee PC, and the applications dynamically adapt to the display in use. Obviously if you’re going to deliver on an Eee PC it helps to have one for testing purposes – although you can do a certain amount of testing by reducing the resolution, you still need to check the installation and performance on real hardware. Having said that, debugging wxGTK-specific issues can mostly be done within the comfort of a spacious Linux desktop using a distro such as Debian, Ubuntu or Xandros.

As for all wxGTK development, you need the GCC compiler (available preinstalled on most Linux distributions), and the GTK+ 2 development libraries (search for the gtk2.0-dev package). For decent printing support, don't forget to install the libgnomeprintui2.2-dev package also before configuring and compiling wxWidgets. Get the latest version of wxWidgets in the 2.8 series, for example wxGTK-2.8.7.tar.gz at the time of writing. You can use plain old Emacs and gdb to write and debug apps, but you may wish to consider IDEs such as Anjuta and Code::Blocks, and for generating code, dialog editors/RAD tools such as DialogBlocks and wxDesigner. Basically, anything that applies to wxGTK development also applies to Eee PC/Xandros development.

If you decide to use DialogBlocks, both to generate first-cut application skeletons and to help generate detailed dialogs, DialogBlocks will help you compile wxWidgets as well as your own app. Create a project (or try one of the samples), select the configuration you want to use, set the wxWidgets path, and DialogBlocks will first compile wxWidgets before compiling the project.

Adapting to the low resolution screen

The following is applicable to any device with a low resolution, so it’ll help you prepare for future Linux-based mobile devices too. It’s also applicable to other operating systems that wxWidgets supports, such as Windows and Mac OS X.

Your first step might be to add a full-screen mode. This is straightforward in wxWidgets, using the wxTopLevelWindow::ShowFullScreen function. The usual shortcut key for this is F11. From wxWidgets 2.8.7, menu accelerators on wxGTK are still active even if the menubar has been removed, so the user can press F11 to restore the window to normal viewing. ShowFullScreen can retain your toolbar, or hide it, depending on your application’s requiremements. If your main window still uses a lot of space for non-essential control windows (for example tabs and extra toolbars), then you might consider reparenting the editing window to a new frame and showing that full-screen, subsequently reparenting the window back when the user returns the window to normal.

Note that currently on wxGTK, the toolbar is restored when returning to normal view, even if the toolbar was previously hidden. You may need to add some extra logic to hide the toolbar explicitly.

Also note another quirk if you’re planning to show a frame full-screen when the program starts – the window may show in its initial size momentarily, then resize to fit the screen. You can mitigate this effect by making the initial window size very small, say wxSize(1, 1).

You may find you made assumptions about screen size when designing elements of your main screen. Palettes, tabs and toolbars can look rather huge and leave little space for editing, especially when even a maximised main window has to compete with a largish title bar at its top, and a taskbar at the bottom of the Eee PC desktop. Here are some ideas for further adaptations:

• Add an option for small toolbar icons if your toolbar currently has large ones. Also make it possible to switch toolbar labels off, and remove inessential tools for low-resolution displays.
• Add an option to hide the toolbar and status bar.
• Use wxAuiNotebook for a tabbed interface, and set the notebook font to a couple of sizes smaller than normal. Native GTK+ tabs can be rather large.
• Use wxWindow::SetWindowVariant to set a smaller font size for panels.
• Use a wxChoicebook instead of wxNotebook for a tabbed palette, to reduce the vertical size requirement.
• Maximise the main window by default on a small screen.
• Make sure there are accelerators for important operations, so that the program is still usable when full-screen and without a toolbar or menubar.
• Consider a vertical toolbar or other control window to the left or right of your main editing area, since vertical space is in shortest supply.
• Use a wxScrolledWindow for larger panels containing controls. You can just replace the wxPanel base class with wxScrolledWindow, and call SetScrollRate to enable the scrollbars.

I have a function I use to test for a small screen – HasSmallScreen – which I use to make UI choices as the windows are created. You can have a balance of customisable and non-customisable choices: you might want everything to be under user control, or you might not want to burden the user with so many choices. But the defaults should reflect the best choices for the display resolution.

Making your dialogs fit

Probably the area you’ll find in need of most work is your application’s dialogs. You may find that some or all of them they disappear off the edge of the screen, especially vertically. There are several techniques you can apply here. Firstly, you can set the initial size of individual controls (such as listboxes) to be smaller when a small display is detected. You can also use wxWindow::SetWindowVariant, and simply omit certain controls and explanations from the dialog. You can do this by creating all elements as usual, but hiding some of them before showing the dialog, for example:

GetSizer()->Show(m_description, false);

In DialogBlocks, you can make sure the control and its sizer parent both have member names, and then before the end of CreateControls() write something like:

m_innerSizer->Show(m_furtherInfo, false);

You may find that after these adjustments, and others including dividing up the dialog into pages, your dialogs will fit. If not, you can take more drastic action using scrolled windows.

To make an ordinary custom dialog scrollable, add a wxScrolledWindow under the top sizer, add a sizer to the scrolled window, and place the main controls under that sizer. Keep the OK and Cancel button row under the dialog’s main sizer so only the main content of the dialog scrolls, leaving the OK and Cancel buttons accessible at all times. Initially, don’t make the scrolled window scrollable. If you are using DialogBlocks, set PPU X and PPU Y to zero and ensure “Fit to content” is checked and also that the wxNO_BORDER and wxTAB_TRAVERSAL styles are checked. When you have done this, the dialog should behave exactly as before, when wxSizer::SetSizeHints is called and the dialog shown.

Now you need to check whether the dialog size is the same or more than the available desktop client size. wxSizer::Fit (called by wxSizer::SetSizeHints) attempts to restrict the dialog to the available space, so you need to assume that if one or both dimensions are the same as the desktop dimensions, the dialog was too big and has been resized. If the whole dialog couldn’t fit, you need to enable the scrolled window’s scrollbars and resize the dialog, taking into account the dialog titlebar which wxWidgets 2.8 doesn’t currently do itself.

A simple example built with DialogBlocks is available as a zip file and as a tar.gz file from http://www.anthemion.co.uk/wx/largedialog.tar.gz or http://www.anthemion.co.uk/wx/largedialog.zip. You can use the demo version of DialogBlocks to build and run the sample, or you can adapt the makefile as you see fit, or you can simply copy and paste the relevant code for your own applications. The images below show the dialog first on a regular-sized Debian desktop (no scrollbar), and secondly on a 640x480 display (a vertical scrollbar appears).

The function that does the work is wxFitWithScrolling, in mydialog.cpp, which you can use with any dialog that has a scrolling part. Use it instead of wxSizer::Fit or wxSizer::SetSizeHints.

What if you have a lot of dialogs, and don't want to spend time customizing them? No problem - just replace wxDialog with wxScrollingDialog, a class that rejigs an existing hierarchy to keep the standard buttons shown. You can download the class here.

Distributing your application

While it’s best to create a .deb archive, you could also distribute a tarball. For a shortcut to making Debian archives, see checkinstall. For creating a .deb from scratch, see for example here and here.

The .deb or your installation script should also install desktop files and MIME type files. These are standards documented by Freedesktop.org in particular the .desktop file standard. When you install your .desktop files and icons into the appropriate place, and specify the application category, the KDE or GNOME desktop environment will know where to put your application’s shortcut(s) on its menus. However, most people may be using the standard IceWM window manager – the old version in use on Xandros doesn’t follow Freedesktop.org standards and you will need to add the ability to enable the Start menu and add your application’s menu items. I do this with a script that’s included in my application files, so the user can run the script to complete the installation. It’s separate, in case the user isn’t running IceWM. The script creates local IceWM preferences and enables the Start menu; then it appends an entry to the menu file if it’s not already there. The user should reboot X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace for the changes to take effect.

An example script is available here.

That’s all for now. Good luck with your Eee PC projects! I think the Eee PC and wxWidgets make a great combination, and it will be interesting to see how the market for desktop Linux will develop over the coming months.

Hildonizing wxGTK

Last week-end I have somehow managed to find myself with a couple of hours of free time and, instead of spending them on fixing random wxWidgets bugs as usual, I wanted to actually do something new and different for once and so chose to check how wx applications look on a Nokia 770 tablet. Several people have talked about porting wxWidgets to this device in the past and at least one has apparently done some work but it was almost two years ago and nothing has happened since, so I felt it was time to do something about it myself; especially as I own a N770 tablet since quite some time but, instead of writing programs for it as originally planned, I've so far spent time just using it (I do feel ashamed).

For those who don't know about Nokia internet tablets line, which started with N770 but has been extended with N800 and N810 since then, they're small handheld non phone devices which run Linux and use a modified Gnome desktop version called Maemo. Maemo basically just adds another level of libraries, called Hildon on top of GTK+ itself. So, while GTK+ applications can mostly run on N770 without changing, they don't have the correct look and feel before they are hildonized, that is modified to use Hildon-specific functions instead of the generic GTK+ ones -- hence the somewhat barbaric adjective used in the title of this article.

This is the theory, anyhow. And I've decided to check how it was in practice. The first results were encouraging: after a few simple fixes, wxGTK did build for Maemo and I could run applications on my device. However they really didn't look like they belonged here as can be seen by comparing the dialogs sample:

with a native application, such as this one:

You can immediately see several differences:

• The border of the window are not the same, the wx example doesn't fit into the desktop
• The menus are completely different: the native applications don't show a menu bar but use the drop down menus attached to the window itself
• The wx example shows a useless status bar with an even more useless resize grip (the window can't be resized anyhow)

So I set about fixing this and after a couple of hours of hacking here is what I got:

This is already much better: the points mentioned above were corrected and I also added a new class (which is available, and hopefully will be useful, under the other platforms too) called wxNotificationMessage and which is used by the small message in the upper right part of the window (such messages are often used in Maemo UI as notifications and also message box replacements)

Of course, there are a lot of other things to do. For one, wxToolBar needs to be changed in the same way wxMenuBar was. Next, as Maemo replaces almost all of the standard GTK+ dialogs with its own ones, we need to do it too. I did it for the colour selection dialog which looks like this now if wxWidgets was built with --with-hildon option:

And the same should be done for the file selection dialogs and several other ones.

There are also less trivial things to do, like to understand how can the size of the library (and of the applications using it) be reduced to be more in line with the embedded systems capabilities. But globally I think wxWidgets is perfectly viable for developing Maemo applications and is even more convenient for doing this than raw GTK+ (which is the native toolkit of the platform) because it transparently abstracts the differences between the desktop GTK+ and Maemo systems: the dialogs sample itself hasn't been modified at all (just extended to show the notification message) to use the correct menus and so on, everything is done inside the library so exactly the same code can be used for the desktop application without any loss in functionality. Of course, in practice you will need to adapt applications to the mobile devices by probably removing some functionality which doesn't make sense there and simplifying the user interface. But wxWidgets already does some of this for you and hopefully will do even more in the future.

Of course, I don't actually expect to have that much free time every week-end so the progress of wxMaemo depends on the help from others. So if you're interested in checking out wxMaemo for yourself, don't hesitate to grab the latest wx code from our svn and build it with the above-mentioned --with-hildon option under Scratchbox. If you are new to Maemo, notice that its web site has nice tutorial about setting up the development environment for this platform. And, of course, if you can contribute to this effort, don't hesitate to send us patches and join us in discussions on wx-dev.

Have fun!

Looking forward to wxWidgets 3

The first alpha version of wxWidgets 2.0 was released 10 and a half years ago and we are still (only) at version 2.8.6 right now so the wxWidgets version numbers don't change very quickly as we, with the disdain proper to free software developers, don't really like inflating them for marketing purposes. However soon -- hopefully in the beginning of the next year -- we will release wxWidgets 3.0 which will be the first change of major version since a long time and only the second time it happens in wxWidgets history. So it may be interesting to look at what exactly has changed to warrant this and I'll try to briefly describe it in this post.

First, a word of reassurance: there are no sweeping backwards-incompatible changes in wxWidgets 3.0 compared to 2.8. We did have to break compatibility in a few places but fixing the existing code to compile with 3.0 will be trivial, if needed at all, unlike 1.0 -> 2.0 transition which required rewriting it.

Second, the main change in 3.0 is the rethought support of Unicode. While wxWidgets supports Unicode since quite a long time, so far it did according to Win32 model: there were two different builds of the library, one ANSI and the other Unicode and you could either use the former to use the familiar char * strings but stay limited to a single encoding or choose the latter one and be able to use Unicode in the GUI but at the price of working with wchar_t * string only which implied using ugly-looking wxT() macro in a lot of places for example. wxWidgets 3.0 will have only one build (which on its own is a great simplification for developers, packagers and even users who won't hesitate between which one to choose) combining the best features of the two: it will always use Unicode internally but support char * string and simply convert them using the current encoding transparently. In other words, you will be able to write code in exactly the same way as with the old ANSI build if this is all you need but profit from the full Unicode support at the same time. This is especially nice for the existing wxWidgets applications which weren't always written with Unicode in mind and so often didn't even compile with the Unicode build of wx -- now they will and it will be possible to extend them to deal with Unicode at leisure instead of spending a big initial effort on wxT()-izing them first.

wxWidgets 3.0 is still work in progress, in particular documentation hasn't been updated to reflect the changes yet. However the API and the code are believed to be stable enough to be used and we'd welcome any feedback on the new API. In particular, please try recompiling the existing code with the version currently in the svn trunk and let us know about any problems you may encounter (other than those which are mentioned in docs/changes.txt: please read it first!).

There are, of course, many other new features in wxWidgets 3.0 (without speaking about the bug fixes...):

• The new wxDataViewCtrl class provides all the features lacking in wxListCtrl and a much better and simpler API to use them.
  
• There is a new wxDFB (DirectFB-based) port especially suitable for the embedded devices.
  
• wxGTK (and wxDFB) are also more efficient internally because they use UTF-8 for the string representation, instead of wchar_t and so avoid the conversions between the underlying toolkit strings and wxString.
• New and improved wxFileCtrl (thanks to Google summer of code).
  
• Many enhancements to wxRichTextCtrl.
  
• Important improvements to several controls under wxGTK, including wxToolBar, wxStaticText, wxHyperlinkCtrl and others.
• Support for auto-completion in wxTextCtrl and wxComboBox.
  

But, again, the most important change by far is the merge of ANSI and Unicode builds and the resulting changes to wxString. As this is the biggest change to wxWidgets API since several years we'd really welcome your comments on it, this will help us release 3.0 sooner and better!

wxWidgets in Leopard

The new schedule of Apple's OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard (to ship in October) allows us to get a newer version of 2.8 into the builds. So we aim for a 2.8.4 Release Candidate around the end of April, synching wxPython and wxPerl with it.

wxWidgets under Vista

I've decided to (finally) test how do wxWidgets applications fare under Windows Vista. Installing Vista (in a VMware Workstation 6 Beta virtual machine under a Debian amd64 host) turned out to be more problematic than I thought as the MSDN disk 2429.5 contains exactly 4 ISO images of Vista CDs while the installer asked me to insert disk 5 and as I didn't have I couldn't continue with the installation. So I had to install the Enterprise Edition from the disk 2430.2 which not only comes with 4 CD images on the DVD but also actually installs from them.

Other than that, installation was pretty uneventful and un-wow: the installer warns that the computer must reboot several times during the installation -- and so it does. Why no other system among those I installed (various Linux distributions, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, ...) needs to reboot even once? Anyhow, UI-wise the only useful information from the installer is that Vista seems to use ./../... animation as an indeterminate progress control (OS X, or Firefox which probably copied it from it, use a small spinning wheel for the same thing) so if we ever implement a separate control for this, we know how it should look under Windows now.

After finishing the installation and getting rid of half a dozen of the icons in the taskbar notification area (this is progress, I think XP had only a couple of them) I could finally run the widgets sample. The only problem I could see with it was with wxNotebook tabs on the left or right: this doesn't work at all under Vista and I think we should just abandon trying to make it work as it already was pretty buggy under XP.

But there are a few enhancements we could implement, of course:

• wxSearchCtrl doesn't look native but Vista does has a native version (just as OS X) and uses it everywhere so it's really jarring to have a different one in wx programs. Apparently the standard "Search Control" class is just a combination of "Edit" and "ToolbarWindow32" (with "Static" thrown in to show the inactive control contents) so we could emulate it easily even on pre-Vista systems. Or we could just use the native control, of course.


• Buttons with images seem finally to be supported (they can be seen in e.g. "Tools" page of a disk properties dialog), so we should update wxButton to support this too.


• As mentioned before, some file dialogs (e.g. Ctrl-O one in the dialogs sample) use old style while other ones (Ctrl-Q one) use a new style one which is inconsistent at best. Other dialogs seem to be just fine though, and the new Vista-style icons are used everywhere as expected, e.g. in the log dialog. Funny enough, the standard Vista error message dialog now looks a lot like wxWidgets standard log dialog with its "Details >>" button.

All in all I think wxWidgets applications look pretty decently under Vista, especially considering that we didn't spend any effort at all so far on porting the code to Vista. Of course, it's a tribute to Microsoft engineers backwards compatibility maintaining skills more than anything we did but it's still nice, especially compared with the transition to XP when previously working code started to crash and a lot of things didn't look right at all.

In Praise of Connect()

In this post I'd like to address a common misconception about wxWidgets which is that it is somehow dirty and beneath consideration of "real" C++ programmers because it relies too much on preprocessor macros. While it is true that the traditional way to handle events in wxWidgets is using the macro-based event tables, there is nothing really dirty nor evil about these macros: they are there simply to save typing. In particular, they don't suffer from the usual macro pitfalls as they don't have any side effects and are type-safe (static_cast is used internally to ensure this).

However the main point is that the event tables macros are just one of two ways of connecting the event handlers to events in wxWidgets and it's perfectly possible to not use them at all. Moreover, there are good reasons to use the alternative way beyond the subjective dislike of macros. This other way is the Connect() method which, unsurprisingly, allows to connect a method of a class derived from wxEvtHandler (which includes, but is not limited to, any wxWindow-derived class) to an event.

The syntax is slightly more verbose which is, of course, one of the reasons for using the event table macros in the first place, they simply save some typing. So instead of

BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(MyFrame, wxFrame)
  EVT_MENU(wxID_EXIT, MyFrame::OnQuit)
END_EVENT_TABLE()

you need to write (in the body of some method of MyFrame and not at global scope as with the event tables)

MyFrame::MyFrame(...)
{
  Connect(wxID_EXIT, wxEVT_COMMAND_MENU_SELECTED,
  wxCommandEventHandler(MyFrame::OnQuit));
}

Notice the use of wxCommandEventHandler which ensures that the method is of correct type by using static_cast in the same way as event table macros do it.

So we see that all uses of event table macros can be trivially replaced with Connect() calls. However Connect() is more powerful than macros and can do a few things that macros are incapable of:

1. Event handlers can be connected at any moment, e.g. it's possible to do some initialization first and only connect the handlers if and when it succeeds. This can avoid the need to test that the object was properly initialized in the event handlers themselves: with Connect() they simply won't be called at all if it wasn't.
   
   
2. As a slight extension of the above, the handlers can also be
   Disconnect()ed at any time. And maybe later reconnected again. Of course, it's also possible to emulate this behaviour with the classic static (i.e. connected via event tables) handlers by using an internal flag indicating whether the handler is currently enabled and returning from it if it isn't, but using dynamically connected handlers requires less code and is also usually more clear.
   
   
3. Also notice that you must derive a class inherited from, say, wxTextCtrl even if you don't want to modify the control behaviour at all but just want to handle some of its events. This is especially inconvenient when the control is loaded from the XRC. Connecting the event handler dynamically bypasses the need for this unwanted subclassing.
   
   
4. Last but very, very far from least is the possibility to connect an event of some object to a method of another object. This is impossible to do with event tables because there is no possibility to specify the object to dispatch the event to so it necessarily needs to be sent to the same object which generated the event. Not so with Connect() which has an optional eventSink parameter which can be used to specify the object which will handle the event. Of course, in this case the method being connected must belong to the class which is the type of the eventSink object! To give a quick example, people often want to catch mouse movement events happening when the mouse is in one of the frame children in the frame itself. Doing it in a naive way doesn't work:
   
   
   
   • A EVT_LEAVE_WINDOW(MyFrame::OnMouseLeave) line in the frame event table has no effect as mouse move (including entering and leaving) events are not propagated upwards to the parent window (by default, anyhow).
     
   • Putting the same line in a child event table will crash during run-time because the MyFrame method will be called on a wrong object.
     
   
   However writing
   

   
   MyFrame::MyFrame(...)
   {
     m_child->Connect(wxID_ANY,
       wxEVT_LEAVE_WINDOW,
       wxMouseEventHandler(MyFrame::OnMouseLeave),
       NULL, this);
   }
   

   
   will work exactly as expected. Note that you can get the object which generated the event -- and which is not the same as the frame -- via event.GetEventObject().
   

So the morale of the story is: don't hesitate to use Connect(), it's much more powerful than static event tables which should be reserved just for the most simple situations when you don't need any additional flexibility and wish to save some extra typing, or maybe not even then for consistency sake.