I just noticed that back in May, Matt Croydon got my program glock, a simple analog clock, running on Maemo, Nokia’s open source environment that was designed for their 770 web pad.

He shows it running on Maemo on an x86 (PC) platform, but I assume that it would work on the 770. He suggests that it should be converted to a “hildonized interface” (native Maemo).

I think that’s a great idea. I don’t currently have time or inclination to do it myself, and I don’t have a 770, though I’m considering getting one. But if someone does it, I’d be happy to integrate their changes with into the glock source tree.

My own plans for glock involve making it use SVG images for the face and hands, so that people can develop nice “skins” for it, which will work well at any size.

I originally wanted to do this using librsvg, which has the advantage that it is present on most Linux distributions. But I wasn’t successful at figuring out how to draw an SVG image with an arbitrary additional rotation (not specified in the SVG file). It looks like the librsvg is capable of doing that, but the necessary functions aren’t exposed in the public API.

Now I’m considering using libsvg instead. libsvg is based on the Cairo graphics library (and librsvg is apparently starting to support Cairo as well). But libsvg is not available in most Linux distributions, and in particular is not in Fedora Core 5 Test 1.

Update:

It appears that libsvg is deprecated, in favor of the Cairo-enabled librsvg, so I suppose I shouldn’t waste any more time investigating the former. I just need to convince the librsvg maintainers to make the necessary affine transformation functions part of the public API.