Got something done! Yea!

Testing screenshot showing a ComplexTrack with several sources, two of which are overlapping. Sorry about the colors: I'm a programmer, not an artist.

I'm currently in Prague, which is a gorgeous town. Primarily due to lack of planning, I've got a couple of dead days which I used to work on PiTiVi. I had left the States with out a complete gstreamer install, without svn installed, without goocanvas, and a whole host of other silly things that are easy to take care of when you have reliable internet access, but impossible without it. Today, after two weeks, I have finally made another commit.

Basically, I figured out the easy way of making some of making some of my utility functions a bit more friendly to MVC. I have a function calle make_dragable which works on any goocanvas.Item object. It connects signals and sets appropriate data items to make the canvas item dragable. Previously, this function and its associated callbacks handled all the interaction from button_press to button_release, including actually moving the object in question. This posed a problem for the MVC design pattern, as the object should not actually be moved until the appropriate callback is received. I wanted to save as much of this code as possible, as it handles a lot of nice details, like keeping track of the mouse-down offset (so that the object being moved doesn't suddenly jump to the cursor position). I had tried various ways around the problem, such as having a flag to not set object position, using part of the code and connecting signal callbacks manually, even starting over from scratch. Everything I tried had problems from breaking existing code to just being downright buggy. There's no substitute for already working code.

I finally hit on the solution in the shower yesterday morning, and it involved changing about 3 lines of code to add an extra callback. Worked like a charm. I can finally get moving again. This will also make the simple timeline code easier to manage, so though I haven't written many lines of code in the last 2 weeks, I have actually made a good deal of progress in terms of thinking about the problem.