I’ve been doing too much Java at work recently, so in the interest of keeping my hand in with some low-level C++, I picked up the code for my mobile twitter client, TwitToday, again.

I originally wrote it at a hackday, but I’ve since come back to tweak it a couple of times to get it to spawn background worker threads, add SIP on-screen keyboard support, and improve support for sending special and accented characters.

After another evening of tweaking, I’ve added a few new minor features:

Transparent text box

When not in use, the text box is now transparent. When it has focus, it is coloured in white as usual.

A few people commented that a bright white text box could dominate a dark Today screen too much, so this is hopefully a nice aesthetic improvement.

I did this by creating a custom windows procedure for the text box.

My CurrentCost desktop software is written in Python, and uses the matplotlib library for plotting graphs.

I am a big fan of matplotlib – you can create some very cool graphs with it. It’s not without it’s issues… for example, I’ve still yet to work out how to do realtime graphing with it that isn’t massively inefficient and resource intensive. But that’s for another post

One of the nice things that you get with it is a toolbar that lets the user switch between different modes that the mouse supports – zooming, panning, and so on.

Adding the toolbar is straightforward – I create an object of the class NavigationToolbar2Wx and add it to a sizer which in turn I add to the graph Plot.

self.toolbar = Toolbar(self.canvas) self.toolbar.Realize() sizer = wx.BoxSizer(wx.VERTICAL) sizer.Add(self.canvas, 1, wx.EXPAND) sizer.Add(self.toolbar, 0 , wx.LEFT | wx.EXPAND) self.SetSizer(sizer)

Saturday 25th April saw the return of HomeCamp. HomeCamp started last year as the brainchild of Chris Dalby, aiming to bring together a growing community of people interested in “green” hacking and technologies.

I’ve had this post sat in draft for weeks now, meaning to come back and turn them into proper notes. As it’s been a few weeks now and I still haven’t, I thought I might as well post my rough notes as I took them on the day. Apologies that they’re a little sketchy!

James Governor:

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