README

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                                Tichy 

  copyright 2008 Guillaume Chereau (charlie@openmoko.org)

  Tichy is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.

  Tichy is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License
for more details.

  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with Tichy.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.


                               WARNING

  Tichy is curently unmaintained.  People should have a look at paroli
project instead (http://paroli-project.org/).  The paroli project is
mainly based on tichy.

                                ABOUT

  This is a python applets manager.  My goal is to make a very simple
environment for people who want to write applications for OpenMoko.
The approach is very different from what we can get in the currents
available images for OM.  I came to the conclusion that the current
way of writing applications for desktop computer is not suitable for
mobile phone, where applications need to be very tightly connected to
each other.
    
                    The main ideas of tichy are :

- Everything is written in python (Or cython/pyrex if we need
  speed). So there is no choice of the language here, all the applets
  have to be written in python. It is still possible to start external
  applications, but they won't be able to communicate with the rest of
  the system.

- All the applications run in the same python interpreter. Once again
  it is possible to start external applications that will run in
  separate process, but they won't be able to communicate with the
  system.

- Everything is a plug-in. Even the most fundamental services (like
  file browser, keyboard, etc) are defined into plug-in.

- Plugins can register and request for services. A service is just a
  python object with a defined interface.

- All the plugins share the same mainloop. They can't block and have
  to use callback instead. To eas things, I implemented a tasklet
  system that allow us to use the yield syntax of python to write
  callback code that looks like threaded code.

- The plugins should only describe the items they act on, and not the
  way they show it. The design itself is controled by the 'Design'
  service. This allow us to have many different kind of design for the
  same applications.


                               INSTALL

  If you just want to try tichy on your destop, the simpler is to
directly run it from the location where it has been downoaded. That
is: cd into "test/", and run "python tichy"

  To make it run faster, you can compile the cython version of the gui
module : Go into ./tichy/guic and type: "make"
    
  That should create all the .so files, then the execution is much
faster.
    
                           RUN ON OPENMOKO

  This is a little bit tricky, I won't explain the steps in details,
contact me if you have problems

1- Get the FSO image
2- Install python-pygame 
3- Compile the files in guic using OM Toolchain
4- Copy everything on the OM
5- export DISPLAY=:0
6- go into tichy/test
7- run it : ./tichy
    
                           GRAPHIC BACKENDS
    
  By default tichy will try to use tichy/guic as the widgets
library. If it can't load it (c files no compliled), it will try to
use tichy/guip.  There are also experimental backends for gtk and edje
(guig end guie.) To try it out, edit tichy/gui.py file.

                            DOCUMENTATION

  Some documentation can be found in the doc directory. Most of the
classes have embedded documentation using extended markup format. You
can generate the doc with epydoc, from the doc directory :
    epydoc ../tichy

                               AUTHORS

- Guillaume "Charlie" Chereau, main developer. charlie@openmoko.org
- Michael "Goodwill", openmoko /a/ webhippo.org