Hey guys,

how are you? The oneye community is growing slowly, but it’s growing and that’s really, really great to see. Thanks everyone, who helped the project and me during the last years !

In April I plan to embed the oneye project into my local business project, media23 group. That’s a really difficult job to do and I hope to be a lot more sensitive than the eyeos company when they released eyeos 2.

First of all I should clarify some really, really important points, which we all had learn from the project’s history…

• oneye will be a product of the media23 group, developed by our internal “media23 system” division. Hey, that’s me …
• Community related work in the forums, via mail, accepting translations, appreciating code commits won’t change at all.
• The license won’t change and everything will stay open source !

The release plan got mandatory changes:

• oneye 0.9 was planned as totall rewritten product, will be released as “media23 system” instead. But don’t hesitate, cause the first alpha release won’t be out in the next six months.
• The current oneye release will be followed by oneye 0.9.0, planned for mid of April including an updated ACL interface and several fixes in addition to a nearly full rebranding as “oneye”.

That way we don’t even mix both architectures in future discussions, cause media23 system will be something totally independent. Additionally you can be sure to have a still supported oneye product.

Since we moved from the eyeos project to the oneye project, my personal business inquires fell down heavily. To keep up work on improvements and additional features it’s planned to create a donation page, listing specific features and how much money it requires. Donators will be able to enter a purpose of use. This might not happen before may 2012 though.

This is a preparation for the mid of April, but things might still change. You are free to discuss everything just below this post and I’d really like to know, what you think of it. Do you have another idea to help the project?

And now enjoy and have a nice day !

To comment, visit my forums post, “Preparing media23 embedding“.

Before reading it, please consider these important notes:

• Latest SVN commits have improved both the mechanisms and the GUI of ACL management. Having oneye SVN 7358 or subsequent is a requirement for all the procedures mentioned in the tutorial. You can find an howto about upgrading your oneye system to latest SVN here);
• Setting wrong ACLs can damage your oneye system and make it unavailable. Please always back up your data and test your ACL modifications on a testing oneye installation before using it in production;
• Normal users are not allowed to see and edit ACLs on an oneye system. So this tutorial is obviously targeted at oneye system administrators only;
• This tutorial is a draft and maybe it will be modified in the future. Please always be sure to have latest version. Current version is: draft2 – 02/28/2012

Ready? Here you are the tutorials!
ACL management in oneye 0.8 [English]
ACL management in oneye 0.8 [French - translated by Sable]

That one has been developed by Jose Carlos Norte from the prior eyeos Team, nowadays CTO at eyeos Company. Let’s say it’s been a very good step, but didn’t continue any way sadly.

I personally (!) like to write UI code on my own, but I guess there are a lot around, that’d like to try it. You can now get more information on eyeDesigner and grab the original eyeDesigner installer package from its wiki page.

PS: Just hover the “Downloads” menu entry and take a closer look at translations, eyeSync or what ever you want.

What has happened…
Instead of others I am using a local svn server – just on the same disk as my development repository. Normally this is just fine and I back up things each month, but this month the was some chaos, ’cause of the movement to another city. Everything worked fine and I planned to backup things on Monday. But just on Saturday my MSI notebook just crashed (seems TortoiseSVN did some crazy things…). As every Windows user I just rebootet and… and… and… cry! No more partitions available.

Finally my solution ended in…
Downloading demo of the recovery live cd from www.livecd.com and checking for lost files through the file recovery application. This allowed me to get back files smaller than 65kb. Sadly the oneye 0.9 files aren’t necessarily smaller than 65kb, so I just needed to create a disk image on an external drive.
Later I could download and install Active@ File Recovery (“Standard” costs about 25€) to read such disk images and get back my data.

I am back up…
During the next days I will probably go and create a first video showing some UI elements of oneye 0.9 and maybe even some things in the background. What’d you like to see?

1. First of all, you need to have a good PHP knowledge, since oneye is written in PHP, and at least a few basics of Javascript.
2. Download and read the eyeOS 1.x Developer Manual. It’s quite old, so it misses a lot of the new functions available to developers, but it’s extremely useful for a newbie to understand the oneye structure, essential to start programming;
3. I strongly suggest you to use the Firefox browser with the Firebug plugin. In order to see the applications error messages directly in Firebug, you have to set the EYEOS_DEBUG_MODE to 3 in /eyeOSxxxxxxx/system/conf/system.xml;
4. Start trying to modify the HelloWorld app, included in all oneye releases;
5. While you program, never forget to always have a look at the greatest friend of the oneye developer: the eyeOS 1.x Documentation Center. Also, you could find useful the eyeOS 1.x Wiki. Remember that both have not been updated for some releases, so you’re not going to find all the functions…. But you can find the largest part! For the others, while you’ll become a better oneye programmer, you’ll learn to look by yourself into the code to find the functions. TIP: all the widgets are in the /eyeOSxxxxxxx/system/lib/eyeWidgets/widgets folder;
6. For question, always use the current oneye Development Forum. Also keep in mind that you can find a lot of useful resources on the old eyeos Development Forum (always check that the question refers to eyeOS 1.x and not eyeOS 2.x, since the latter has a completely different structure).
7. If you’re thinking about writing an application starting from zero….please check that there is not another one in the eyeOS 1.x Application Repository. If there is one similar, maybe you can try to improve it, instead of writing one from scratch!
8. Hey, all here is open-source….if you manage to write a good application, please publish it on the Repository!

So….have fun writing apps!

PS = Updating the documentations is a huge work, but it makes life easier for all the developers interested in contributing to the project. If you’d like to help updating it, please reply to this topic on the forum.

1. Download the latest oneye SVN tarball;
2. Uncompress the tarball and move all the content of the “1.9″ folder inside the folder that you want to be the eyeos installation root;
3. Rename the “eyeOS” folder to a name which is enough difficult to guess for a user but not exagerated long, as for example “eyeOS43h49d98g8jdfn”;
4. Now edit /settings.php adjusting the REAL_EYE_ROOT constant to the folder name you just chose at point 3. In case you wish to use the “real” VFS module instead of the “virtual” default one, please also change the VFS_MODULE constant;
5. Now edit /eyeOSxxxxxxx/system/conf/system.xml and set EYEOS_DEBUG_MODE from 3 to 0 (unless you are a developer and you want to keep the debug mode on). You can leave all the other configurations to their default value, since you will be able to change them from the oneye system, via the System preferences;
6. You are ready! Please make sure that the oneye folder and all the files are writable by the web server user and then go with your browser to the new installation URL, login with “root/root”, open the System preferences, change the root password and edit all the configurations to fit your needs! If you have questions, please ask them on the forums.

Link to the article on the PHPClasses site

1. URL: If not specified, a dialog will appear asking the user the address and all the following parameters will be ignored
2. TITLE: This is the title of the Window. If not specified or set to 0, it will default to “eyeIframize”
3. WIDTH: The window width, in pixels. If not specified or set to 0, it will default to 75% of the eyeApp screen width
4. HEIGHT: The window height, in pixels. If not specified or set to 0, it will default to 75% of the eyeApp screen height
5. START MAXIMIZED: If it is set to 1, the window will be opened maximized (100% of eyeApp screen area). If the user presses the maximize button of the window, it will be resized to WIDTH and HEIGHT, if they have been specified (otherwise, it will be resized to 75% of the screen area)

To take advantage of the improved eyeIframize, you can either install the patch on your existing eyeOS 1.9.x installation, or make a brand new install, by downloading the latest eyeOS 1.x SVN. If you use the original eyeOS 1.9.x eyeIframize you can still open iframes, but you can’t specify the title and the window size.

For example, to integrate Wikipedia into oneye, you just have to right click on an empty space on your oneye desktop and choose “New launcher”:

In the command line, I typed: eyeIframize.app http://www.wikipedia.org Wikipedia 900  500 1
So my application will open the page http://www.wikipedia.org, will have the title “Wikipedia” and will be opened maximized. 900 and 500 pixels is the size of the window if the user presses the “Maximize” button of the window.

On the desktop we have now the Wikipedia launcher and the site is perfectly integrated into the oneye system:

PHP
This C-like language is especially designed for server usage and simplicity while developing. It’s possible to use a lot more languages on the server-side, but PHP is pre-installed in nearly all web hosting offers.
PHP supports class-based object-oriented programming even though its core functionality is procedural. The PHP project is hosted at www.php.net, where they offer PHP and its nice documentation.
PHP is a powerful platform, but integrated functions do not follow unified rules for names and parameters. Additionally PHP offers a wide range of syntax elements and – sadly – some alternative syntaxes, making it more difficult for beginners to read sources from different developers.

<?php
$product = 'eyeos';
if ($product === 'oneye') {
	echo 'You are already using the latest community.';
} else {
	echo 'Please update your community.';
}
?>

Did you know?
“PHP” stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor” and as such it’s a recursive acronym (source).

It’s early in the morning, no rain this morning, my window is opened and… And?
And I’m partly sitting, partly laying on my bed while starting a new series of blog posts. I’m feeling fine. People, let’s have a good day!

In the series “JavaScript, PHP or both?” I’ll write about similarities and differences between the probably most-used web development languages: PHP and JavaScript. I’m not sure how many posts this series will get, but I’ve enough ideas for a couple of weeks.

The first post, published later today or tomorrow, will concentrate on introducing both languages, explaining their use cases and programming paradigms.

Please tell me what topics you might be interested in. It’ll help me prioritizing. Thanks!