Sep 292010
 

webcam_serveri’m glad and honored that one of my former article has inspired a programmer to realize a new graphical interface for an existing program.

webcam-server-dialog it’s a basic front-end to webcam-server.

From the original post

“When I started this project the only dialoger I knew about was dialog which is text-based and I needed something that would run in X. From researching alternatives to dialog I found xmessage which led togxmessage and eventually Zenity. Plenty to choose from and all different. Now I had another problem – which one to use with each desktop environment? I normally use Gnome but some of my clients use XFCE or LXDE. There is also the possibility of a KDE user in the future. While Ubuntu includes Zenity by default, which would work with XFCE also, a GTK application isn’t the best choice on KDE. I could use kdialog but either I had to make custom versions of the script for each environment, select the dialoger with a script parameter, or try to select it dynamically. In the great tradition of overdesign I chose the latter.

After spending several days solving a 5-line problem with 300+ I ended up with webcam-server-dialog. It supports dialog, whiptailXdialog, xmessage, gxmessage, kdialog, and Zentiy. Because it’s rather generic it can be expanded to support more without a lot of effort. It looks for processes that indicate a particular desktop environment or window manager, uses a built-in priority list of dialogers for that environment, checks for availability, then uses the best available to provide the GUI. The core of this script is nothing more than “ls /dev/video*” dumped into an array but the focus here was eye-candy……”

Read the full story here

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