Announcing CuteVNC
Having a single screen connected to my PC, I was wondering if I could use my nice BQ M10 tablet running UBports as an additional screen. The idea was that if I could convince the X server to create a new virtual display, and then run the x11vnc server on it, I could then connect the tablet to it and enjoy my desktop on two screens. Yes, the M10 has not such a big display, but it couls still be useful to host a window with a mail or a chat client, so that I would not need to switch between applications just to check if new emails or chat messages have arrived (and I hate instant notifications, so I tend to disable them in every program that allows me to).
Anyway, I digress. I found some articles, and specifically this question, that show how one can add a new virtual screen and connect to it via VNC. I tried it and it kind of worked, but there were some visual artifacts that annoyed me (most likely due to the AMDGPU drivers), so I'll defer the creation of a demo video till when I'll have figured out a better setup. But the main point is that the idea, in principle, can work.
CuteVNC
So I sat down and started writing a VNC client for UBports, since it appears that there wasn't one yet in the store. I use the past tense, because after a week or so of work, CuteVNC is there. It's still a very alpha version, and does seem to get confused if the VNC server is using caching, but overall it's working. Its impressive feature list includes:
- Can connect to a VNC server, and show the remote display
- Can send mouse events
- Windowed and fullscreen mode
- Pinch to zoom
There's a lot more that could be done, but for a first release this can be OK.
Development of a UBports Qt/QML app with QBS
If, like me, you are a fan of QBS, you might want to have a look at the source code of CuteVNC (yes, the project was born as "Lomiri VNC", but since it's a generic QtQuick.Controls 2 application, there was no need to tie it to the Lomiri environment); there you can find a QBS module for UBports applications, which can help in filling in the manifest file and deploying other Ubuntu Touch specific files into their proper install location.
You can also see the configuration file to make clickable build a QBS-based project. In my mental task backlog I still have the idea of making clickable support QBS out of the box, but the integration of the two technologies is so easy even now, that I gave this task a quite low priority.
A class for computing viewport transformations
Last but not least, a developer might find useful the generic Scaler class I wrote to compute the viewport transformations: it's a simple, QtGui-only C++ class which takes an input structure with the viewport information, and returns a similar structure containing a QTransform matrix to map item coordinates to coordinates in the source object coordinates (in my case, the source object is the remote screen served by VNC) and some other useful parameters, such as the scale, center offset, and the painted area rectangle.
The class has a 100% line and branch coverage in the unit tests, so I hope I can rely on it.
Comments
There's also webmention support.