Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Some Yummy Elementary Applications

For those who aren't aware Elementary is the top level building block for the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL). The EFLs reached their first stable release almost a year ago, but aside from E17 there haven't been very many applications written using these libraries to date. Today I would like to highlight a few applications that are being developed using Python and Elementary that have reached a usable state.

Epour - Torrent Client:


Epour uses libtorrent as a back end and currently supports all the basic features you need for a functional torrent client. You can pause/resume torrents and it resumes a partially finished torrent just fine. Epour is currently being developed by Kai Huuhko.

eCcess - System Tool:


eCcess is intended to be a desktop neutral GUI for managing various system tasks. It is still very much a work in progress, but currently it allows you to:

  • Create users
  • Delete users
  • Change a user's password
  • Change the current time
  • Change the current timezone
There is a small screenshot gallery here. I am currently the driving force behind eCcess and I am very much open to ideas for what features it should include in the future.



Valosoitin is a audio player with a very simple playlist interface. Supports all audio formats supported by either Xine or GStreamer. Valosoitin is also being developed by Kai Huuhko.



I already mentioned eAndora a couple of weeks ago, but I figured as long as I was talking about Elementary applications I would bring it up again. Since my first post it has gained a few new features. It now remembers the last station you had playing when you close/relaunch the program and you can now "like" and "ban" songs from your stations. I also improved some back end things so the application is more stable and times out far less with extended play.

Getting these applications:

If you are currently a Bodhi Linux user all of the above applications are just an apt-get away. If you are using a different operating system just make sure you have the latest EFLs installed along with their Python Bindings and then check out the source code from the links I provided above. 

Working with these libraries myself has been a lot of fun. I hope in the future we will see more application development using Elementary as it is a very powerful/flexible library.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

8 comments:

  1. Absolutely loving it! I'm currently learning python and my main goal is to be able to create some EFl apps. The thing that discourages me however is the fact that the python binding are only partial. I would really like to have complete contact to EFL through python. Plus I think there needs to be a community of EFL app developers with some central Forum, so devs and especially beginners like me could help each other out. Honestly, the enlightenmet mailing list is just to 90's style of communication.

    Cheers!

    Simon

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    1. Simon, can you be more specific as to which bindings you would require? We already have good coverage for the core libraries Evas, Ecore, Edje, Elementary, Emotion and E_Dbus. These enable you to create versatile applications.

      Writing the bindings for the other libraries is not too hard if you know Python and some C, as they are written in Cython. Contributions are welcome. ;)

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    2. Thank you for your clarification Kai. As a complete noob I just found it a little discouraging that the Python bindings on the efl website are being described only as "good" in comparison to ruby which is "complete." But nevertheless, having to know C, for a noob like me still sounds a little frightening. :)

      Cheers!

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  2. Thank you Jeff for bringing these out into the world.

    In addition to the apps mentioned there's one more recently matured application written by Davide Andreoli using the EFL python bindings:

    EpyMC - Media Center
    http://code.google.com/p/e17mods/wiki/EpyMC

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  3. I like this. good to see this progress being made and will definitely try them out on my bodhi install.
    Just one issue though, why does the theme inside of the app not look the same as the desktop theme, it would be a lot better if it did look the same (the way you can have matching window border and gtk themes to go well otgether), and also the apps look like they're using the old black&white theme. It'd be great if this was sorted out

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    Replies
    1. Elementary applications use Elementary themes - not E17 themes.

      Since Elementary hasn't been used much to date there aren't many themes for it. That will change with time.

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    2. Thanks for the clarification, good to know

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  4. I will definetly like to try them on my bodhi Install...

    ReplyDelete