Thursday, April 14, 2011

New camera-ui in CSSU

There is a new, open, camera-ui in the latest CSSU. It looks like to the but has some impressive new feature also. Distance to focus point, configurable startup/shutdown of camera app, more geotagging options (gps/location), image effcets, triggering from touch screen, timer and quick access to White balance and ISO sensitivty settings.

Screenshots below:
New camera-ui main interface, notice the new focus distance information, timer, trigger, image effects and the two 'A's

New startup/shutdown options
Look just like the original



Now you can select how to geotag your images, with GPS position and/or textual location

Capture timer

And last, image effects.

Great work! And thanks to the whole CSSU team for their awesome work.

Thursday, April 07, 2011

gdspeak, a D-Bus espeak service

I've been planning on doing this for a while now (a year or so, sigh), a simple and easy to use D-Bus service for speech output, using espeak.

What it does is queue text with a simple priority system, with just a few simple D-Bus calls. There are two interfaces, on fire-and-forget and one that can be used for tracking the output so calling applications know when it's speech has been output. It will also send signals for spoken words and such. Language and voice settings can be changed.
Currently LC_MESSAGES is used to set the default voice, but a proper control panel applet is planned.

It is still work-in-progress but works mostly. My current problem is that when using pulseaudio output espeak won't report any events. Testing version is available in extras-devel, but not recommended yet for any serious use.

TODO:
  •  Fix the event reporting
  •  Make control panel applet