Mailing List Archive: Maemo: Developers

Finger-Friendly Entry Completion/ComboboxEntry

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bchiodo at gmail

Jan 5, 2010, 2:15 PM

Post #1 of 4 (569 views)
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Finger-Friendly Entry Completion/ComboboxEntry

I'm trying to add search history support to a hildon.Entry but am having a
bit of trouble. In short, I want to have the user type into the entry and if
what they are typing is present in their history, have a list appear showing
what their current entry matches in their history. If the user taps on an
item in the list, it should set the entry to that value (basically a
gtk.ComboboxEntry that is populated based on what the user has currently
entered into the entry).

Looking through the PyGTK widgets, it seemed that a gtk.EntryCompletion was
exactly what I was looking for. I tried creating a hildon.Entry and using
the .set_completion() method to set the entry but that doesn't appear to
work very well. The main problems are:

1) The generated list doesn't seem to popup reliably (sometimes it will,
sometimes it won't)
2) The rows in the popup aren't clickable -- you can select them via the
up/down then return buttons on the keyboard, but are not directly clickable.
3) The rows aren't finger-friendly at all (not that you can click them
anyway...)

So, how would I go about creating the above? It is doable, because I pretty
much need to know how to make something like the builtin browser uses in
it's toolbar (actually, the browser search bar is exactly what I want to
implement, I just don't know what widget(s) are required to do it).

Thanks for reading!

--
Best Regards,

Brent Chiodo

bchiodo at gmail

Jan 18, 2010, 5:30 PM

Post #2 of 4 (445 views)
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Re: Finger-Friendly Entry Completion/ComboboxEntry [In reply to]

I have to give a bump to this. Does anyone know the secret behind the
browser URL bar? Is the code even posted somewhere (Not sure, is that part
of the browser open source?).

It's perfect for what I need... Thanks!

On Tue, Jan 5, 2010 at 5:15 PM, Brent Chiodo <bchiodo [at] gmail> wrote:

> I'm trying to add search history support to a hildon.Entry but am having a
> bit of trouble. In short, I want to have the user type into the entry and if
> what they are typing is present in their history, have a list appear showing
> what their current entry matches in their history. If the user taps on an
> item in the list, it should set the entry to that value (basically a
> gtk.ComboboxEntry that is populated based on what the user has currently
> entered into the entry).
>
> Looking through the PyGTK widgets, it seemed that a gtk.EntryCompletion was
> exactly what I was looking for. I tried creating a hildon.Entry and using
> the .set_completion() method to set the entry but that doesn't appear to
> work very well. The main problems are:
>
> 1) The generated list doesn't seem to popup reliably (sometimes it will,
> sometimes it won't)
> 2) The rows in the popup aren't clickable -- you can select them via the
> up/down then return buttons on the keyboard, but are not directly clickable.
> 3) The rows aren't finger-friendly at all (not that you can click them
> anyway...)
>
> So, how would I go about creating the above? It is doable, because I pretty
> much need to know how to make something like the builtin browser uses in
> it's toolbar (actually, the browser search bar is exactly what I want to
> implement, I just don't know what widget(s) are required to do it).
>
> Thanks for reading!
>
> --
> Best Regards,
>
> Brent Chiodo
>

--
Best Regards,

Brent Chiodo

csaavedra at igalia

Jan 19, 2010, 2:00 AM

Post #3 of 4 (443 views)
Permalink

Re: Finger-Friendly Entry Completion/ComboboxEntry [In reply to]

El lun, 18-01-2010 a las 20:30 -0500, Brent Chiodo escribió:
>
> I have to give a bump to this. Does anyone know the secret behind the
> browser URL bar? Is the code even posted somewhere (Not sure, is that
> part of the browser open source?).

There is no such combobox/comboboxentry in the toolkit. What you see in
the browser is something they implemented themselves. As far as I know,
the code is not open.

The reason why you don't have such a widget available is that, for Maemo
5, we support and encourage the usage of the new Fremantle widgets. For
any use case where a combobox is necessary, you have HildonPickerButton.
If a combobox with entry is necessary, you have HildonPickerButton +
HildonTouchSelectorEntry.

Claudio

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bchiodo at gmail

Jan 19, 2010, 4:25 PM

Post #4 of 4 (446 views)
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Re: Finger-Friendly Entry Completion/ComboboxEntry [In reply to]

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I'm familiar with the new Fremantle widgets, but none (I believe) are
suitable for implementation of user entry history. The browser team probably
also thought this, since they developed a custom widget for exactly this
purpose.

Text entry on a mobile device is always a difficult thing, so any way a
program can ease this via history is an important feature. I've had many
users ask for implementation of a browser-like history in my application and
am trying to satisfy this seemingly popular request. Unfortunetely, as you
allude to, there doesn't seem to be a platform-wide system in place for
this.

If anyone knows how to implement a browser-like entry history, then I'd be
very eager to hear...as long as it can be written in Python and isn't too
complicated ;)

Cheers!

On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 5:00 AM, Claudio Saavedra <csaavedra [at] igalia>wrote:

> El lun, 18-01-2010 a las 20:30 -0500, Brent Chiodo escribi�:
> >
> > I have to give a bump to this. Does anyone know the secret behind the
> > browser URL bar? Is the code even posted somewhere (Not sure, is that
> > part of the browser open source?).
>
> There is no such combobox/comboboxentry in the toolkit. What you see in
> the browser is something they implemented themselves. As far as I know,
> the code is not open.
>
> The reason why you don't have such a widget available is that, for Maemo
> 5, we support and encourage the usage of the new Fremantle widgets. For
> any use case where a combobox is necessary, you have HildonPickerButton.
> If a combobox with entry is necessary, you have HildonPickerButton +
> HildonTouchSelectorEntry.
>
> Claudio
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> maemo-developers mailing list
> maemo-developers [at] maemo
> https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
>

--
Best Regards,

Brent Chiodo

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