The HaikuDepot application is our central app to find and install software. There are many packages, however, that don't have their icon set, nor are there screenshots available and many aren't sorted into a software category either. These are all things that help users when evaluating software.
Your job is to improve this situation.
Required for the task:
- installed both 32 and 64bit Haiku images
- an account for HaikuDepot, see the user guide
- installed application app2png from HaikuDepot
- installed application LibreOffice from HaikuDepot
The task:
Don't be deterred by the long list below. Describing the very easy steps is more complicated than actually doing them...
- Add these third party package repositories (32 and 64bit, info on that is on their sites):
- http://clasquin-johnson.co.za/michel/haiku/repo/index.html
- http://coquilletkd.com/repo/
- https://www.software.besly.de/
- A list of applications that you're supposed to work on is kept in a LibreOffice document. You find the download link in your task description at the GCI site.
- Go through the packages listed in your the spreadsheet your downloaded from your GCI task and
- install the package.
- use the software for a bit.
- assign up to three categories to the software by entering a "*" in the category columns of the spreadsheet.
- take at least one screenshot of the software in action and save as "1.png". Name further screenshots "2.png", "3.png"...etc. The window should be made as small as possible while still looking nice. It should show a typical/interesting state of the app.
Pressing the PRINT key opens the Screenshot app. Use "Capture active window" and "Include window border" to avoid having to crop the screenshot and preserve the transparent area to the right of the yellow title tab. It has to be pixel-precise, i.e. make sure you get the complete window and don't cut into it or include pixels of the background.
- save the icon as PNG (if it has an old BeOS bitmap icon) or the vector format HVIF (if it has a vector icon).
You can check what kind of icon an application has by right-clicking its icon and choosing "Add-ons | FileType" from the context menu. When a double-click on the icon in the FileType panel opens Icon-O-Matic with that icon, it's vector. Then you simply choose "File | Export as..." and save it with the format HVIF as "icon.hvif". If Icon-O-Matic opens empty, it's an old bitmap icon. Then you have to start the Terminal application and use app2png to convert it to PNG. Rename the generated images to "16.png" and "32.png".
Notes:
- If a package already has an icon, or if the app's icon is the generic app icon
, you can skip those steps. Same thing if there already are nice screenshots available.
- If a package already has an icon, nice screenshots and is correctly categorized, just ignore it and go on to the next. If there are many of those in your package, your mentor may assign you a second set/spreadsheet.
- Font packages get the icon Prefs_Fonts (.hvif)):
You should unzip and open this text file in StyledEdit, set the different styles (1st paragraph:plain, 2nd: italics, 3rd:bold) of the newly installed font, possibly resize the window, and take the screenshot.
- All fonts get the category "Graphics", demo applications have no category.
What to submit at the GCI site:
one zip archive with
- the edited LibreOffice document at the top level
- directories named "hicn/{packagename}/" with your icons (icon.hvif or 16.png, 32.png)
- directories "hscr/{packagename}/" with your screenshots (1.png, 2.png, 3.png...)
{packagename} is e.g. "sequitur" if the HPKG is named "sequitur-2.1.3-1-x86_gcc2.hpkg". After installation, you find the packages in /system/packages/.
