Screenmovie released
My first application ever in python has been released, Screenmovie as I chose to call it. It’s a very simple application for recording your desktop or windows on your desktop. Download and put somewhere in your filesystem and unpack it, and start it. It’s very simple to use, it uses pygtk to create a taskbar icon in your window manager. Click it once, and you get a cross-hair mouse pointer. Click the window you want to record, and the application starts recording straight off. Click the icon again to stop recording. To record the entire desktop, click the background somewhere.This application only works with Linux and other systems using X11 window management and requires xwininfo, ffmpeg and python 2.6 + pygtk+.
If you have any comments or thoughts, feel free to mail me.
Secondly, I’ve come quite far along with the pyEveApi, a rather large project I began a few weeks back. The project is perfect imho, it gives enough problems to solve and also introduces me to a lot of functionality in Python that I would have a hard time finding out about otherwise. I’m not close to a release yet as I only support 4 API’s so far, and just restarted quite a lot of the work with rewriting the caching functionality. The Long caching method has been fairly well implemented atm, and works, and I’m currently working on the Modified Long method, using the WalletTransactions API to test with. Either way, I’m hoping to have something releasable sometime soon.
Working with Python
A while back I started pondering Python as a language, and mostly the fact that I haven’t really tried any of the newer and more modern languages around. Not to any great lengths at least. So, about a year or two ago I started fiddling with it, mostly just trying different scripts, writing some small hacks, and so forth.First, I wrote a Bluetooth scanner for bluez, then via Dbus interface and so forth. The ease this came with was completely amazing tbh.
Last few weeks I started writing some larger applications with python, to try and learn it a bit better. First of all, I’ve had large problems with all desktop recording tools I’ve found so far — they either don’t support GL/Direct rendering, or they simply crash, or colors are all flunked out, and so forth. So, simple idea was to use the tool I know that works — ffmpeg and xwininfo — and make an easy to use interface for it, a taskbar icon. Click it once, and get a cursor to choose which window to record, click it and recording starts (icon changes to a recording button), and click it again to stop it. There is a right click menu to make some preferences and to stop the recorder as well. It works, and it’s very very simple :-).
Second set of tools I decided to make is a set of API’s for the Eve Api. This is also nothing new, but it was a good way to get a handle on how Python works, and how the Eve Api works. On top of this I have written some very simple apps that downloads all marketorders and wallettransactions in game and displays them nicely in a console. It has built in support of all caching styles, downloading, login, local disk cache, and so forth, but so far has very limited support for the different API’s.
My main observation so far has been that I like Python for it’s hackability and ease of use. Stuff comes naturally once you get used to it, but the dynamic typing and hackability also comes at some price. First of all, it is very easy to create scenarios where the code will crash due to bad types in the dynamic type checking, and the hackability also means you need to be very wary of your architecture. Hacking away is almost never a good thing if you are preparing to undertake any larger projects imho, the risk of writing bad code is paramount, and testing bad code … well, it’s just worse 😉 . That said, I do like the language, it’s completely awesome, and someone else said not so long ago, you can get around the problems, you just have to test the code so much harder for it to be reliable. Personally, I wouldn’t use Python for a critical system/application, but for my day to day use, it’s not a problem, I can survive a crash every once in a while. Also, after getting used to the pydev plugin to eclipse, I just love the entire environment even more :-).