Fpp:

The possibility(*) is just that. because in the end what we saw was: People wanted a lot of features and fixes, and we needed a way to develop the neat UI's as fast as possible. Pygame / sdl are som simple that it wasn't enough to what we needed. So what was the goal :

Create a infrastructure that makes pretty easy to do crazy stuff on top. This crazy stuff today is our media application.

EFL is just great. We got pretty close to Rasterman since bossa and that was crucial to define that EVAS was really what we need. For those who don't know edje is incredible flexible, fast and easy to build rich uis (of course can evolve a lot) and evas is fast. So put this 2 guys together with a lot of optimization work (Opensource) to convert it's software rendering to 16 bits and all the python binds to fit your needs what you get is a REALLY nice tool to work with. The best part : whole thing has 600k memory footprint (approximately) and yes, FPP is right we are consuming a lot LESS memory than the old canola, and a lot less memory than any other pygame-sdl based application.

I'm really thrilled to see this "speed up" in development in practice in the last 5 weeks, and more excited to think that people will now be able to use the whole thing in their own plugins.

But the simple thing remains from now : From us, canola still a media thing =) if you want to make it more, it's up to your, but the real end user gets the simple part of it, that we will make sure it runs nicely, smoothly and most important : this time we will not be quiet, Canola will have a very fast and responsive dev team, with new features, bug fixes being deployed in scheduled dates in small time frames.

As we think that people can use some of the same tools: we already released the plugin we use to export psd layers to edje_editor (so developers don't need to go there positioning and write edje verbose code and worry about pixel position) we just finished the version of the plugin for photoshop (great work by miguel btw) and this will also be open to those who wants to experiment. Along with that we also giving away some real nice icon templates, theme guidelines, and tutorials on how to compile it.

There's more on canola than you have seen on the video, and it's only possible because we realized that although SDL / pygame is quite nice, it's just not flexible enough to the thing that is really important in great UI design / development : late change.


That made, (took a lot of time) now we are just "putting pieces" together, and to be able to do a smart work we are doing everything the way that we think is pretty organized and has a great re-use potential.

What we have learned: Rich ui demands a complete different thought UI toolkit, and we didn't want to revolt against anything or fight to change something that has other goals ( GTK ) so we looked for something that was created with rich ui in mind.

We will have those who want to play with canola plugins, and for sure see what can be made, but like you said Fpp : it's quite easy to do crazy stuff with EDJE + Evas and python. Now it will be time to have those applications for 2 purposes :

1) to supply the author's needs for something (or his friend.. or of a group)
2) to put out framework to test and to identify future needs.

We are so simple that we cannot predict what users will need, but with plugins coming out we will be able to at least to take a glance on what's really hot for the future!

*update: I forget to wrote the * : I wanted to point out that because we needed a nice framework to work on (with) python it was a happy consequence to have the same thing available for developers.