Copy and Paste with Semantics...

Copy and Paste now preserves RDF between both Calligra and abiword in both directions. This lets you select some text in a document in either application, copy it, and paste it into the other application and have the RDF that is associated with that part of the document go along with the text you selected.

In the below screencast, the document that Calligra is editing has some contact and event information stored in RDF. The three people in the first sentence all have contact information associated. As you can see, the RDF sidepanel in Calligra lets you know about this as the cursor moves around. James has his phone number captured in RDF which the edit dialog shows. If I select one or more of these contacts and "Copy" them to the clipboard, Calligra creates an ODF file with embedded RDF in it and offers that on the clipboard.

Abiword is happy to accept that ODF content and when you paste it into a document you can see that the RDF links are preserved, and that there are 7 RDF triples associated with James. Of course, you want full disclosure of this information, so clicking show RDF lets you examine and edit those RDF triples.

Copy and Paste of RDF from Calligra to Abiword from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

I put a little trick in going the other way just to spice things up a little bit. The multi.odt file that I have open in abiword has two RDF links in scope at the Wing-B link. RDF is associated with the whole paragraph and explicitly with the link itself. In particular, the uri:widetime is associated with the paragraph while the uri:wingb is associated with the RDF link itself. Once I grab that RDF link and copy it to the clipboard, again an ODF file is offered (as well as text and rtf), and again Calligra is more than happy to accept an ODF file on the clipboard. Notice that when I show all the RDF in Calligra both the widetime and wingb RDF triples have now become part of the document.

Copy and Paste from Abiword to Calligra from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

I made some changes in both calligra and abiword to get this to happen. Changes to the former were quite small. You'll have to grab trunk from both applications if you want to play along at home. The code is committed in both trees.

Bringing back /dev/pcm

Taking a peek in /dev/snd one might find device files for their sound card(s). Sequencers, Timers, midi, and pcm device files. I thought it might be interesting to apply a modern face lift to these devices; so now libferrris can mount pulseaudio and has write support for gstreamer.

What this means is you can write "audio" data to a virtual filesystem and have it play that back for you:

$ cat /tmp/sample.flac | ferris-redirect -T gstreamer://output/audio

ferris-redirect is like the shell pipe character but allows direct access to libferris filesystems without mount commands. The -T truncates, so it is like a ">|" bash redirection.

I also plan to make these output directories special. If you write to them like they are a file as in the above then it puts your data there. If you create a subfile and write to it you will be essentially writing to the output file itself. With that you could "cp" a directory of audio files to gstreamer://output/audio and they will play one at a time until you have copied them all to your speakers ;)

$ ferriscp -av /tmp/bongos-dir gstreamer://output/audio

Pulseaudio is available at pulseaudio:// or the shortcut pa://. The tree currently allows you to mute and alter the volume for playing streams and whole output devices. Reading a volume file will tell you the percentage that channel outputs at (or the average for volume-all). Writing a float to the volume files changes the volume to suit your request. The mute files similarly show if the audio is muted and allow you to set that by writing 1 or 0 to the file.

$ fls -0 pa://output/default
mute 0
volume-0 0.729996
volume-1 0.729996
volume-2 0.729996
volume-3 0.729996
volume-4 0.729996
volume-5 0.729996
volume-all 0.729996

$ echo 0.7 | ferris-redirect -T \
"pulseaudio://streams/amarok/Audio Stream/volume-all"

All this ferris-redirect stuff can have it's additional typing mitigated using a suitable inputrc.

For example:
$ cat ~/.inputrc
$include /etc/inputrc
">>>": "| ferris-redirect "
">>|": "| ferris-redirect -T "

This will be in the next libferris release tarball. Things slowly get closer for the libferris QML mobile audio app. You can already do index and search with libferris and get at the results as a QModel for use in QML, now you can also set volumes and "copy" sound to the earphones.

Abiword RDF Drag and Drop

Now that abiword has low level RDF support I thought I'd make it simpler to get some data into the document's RDF. The initial support lets you drag contact and calendar entries from Evolution into your document as shown below. Notice that a new RDF Link is created for you and when you choose to right click that link and "Show RDF" there are many RDF triples that have been created by the D&D action.

Abiword RDF Drag and Drop from Ben Martin on Vimeo.

I think these sort of user interface additions help to make using RDF quick and easy, even for those who don't know or care what it is and where it gets stored in the document. Abiword can load and save RDF in both it's native abw files and ODF formats. You can of course convert between both without loosing the RDF ;)

I plan to add D&D in the other direction later on, so you can pickup a person from a document or an event. Similar to how many email clients let you import ics calendar files into your local Calendar. Having RDF in ODF lets you share content, style, and semantics, all in a truly open format single file.

Oh, and the code should hit svn trunk real soon now.