After an eventful year in the Qt world it’s time for the annual Qt Developer Days again. We are very happy that the tradition continues and as it looks the European event, which starts today in Munich, will be more than well attended.
If you are at dev days too, make sure to drop by at our booth to see what’s new in Squish for Qt and beyond. #qtdd11
More than two weeks passed since Nokia announced that it will adopt Windows Phone as their platform for smart phones. This obviously raised a lot of questions about Qt’s and also MeeGo’s future and a lot has been said in blogs, public and private discussions.
From a personal point, all engineers here are froglogic are big fans of cross-platform software and think that Qt always was and still is the best toolkit to develop C++ GUIs.
From a business point we are of course also very interested in a successful future of Qt. While we as a company are not fully dependent on Qt anymore (about 40% of our clients use use our Squish for Qt product), the Qt market is still a very important one for us.
So for many reasons we are very interested in Qt’s future and further success. We had many discussions with different people and wrote up our take on the situation in an announcement today which you can read at froglogic.com.
KDE must have grown so big and old that it became unpopular to be associated with it. At least I cannot help having this sentiment after observing a couple of sub-projects trying hard to not be tied to KDE too closely.
Granted, the times when K* versions of applications popping up every day were a bit excessive. But the “kool” umbrella apparently helped to form a critical mass of developers, translators, documentation writers and others. More creative names for new components were introduced later when the desktop got polished for a wider audience.
The last few years saw a couple of sub-projects leaving this pool or not wanting to fully join in the first place. A couple of them are still located in the kdesupport module, others – like the newly announced ex-KOffice Calligra Suite will move elsewhere.
Granted, the authors always had some specific individual reason for their decision. Even if it’s just their personal preference – a right which should be preserved in an open and free software project like KDE. In this post I am just looking at this with from bird’s eye view. Similar to the view on the subject being different in macroeconomics compared to microeconomics. This allows just generalized assumptions about the motivation of individual entities. Factors one can presume:
What I am more wondering about is the effect on the project as a whole. Fragmentation is a challenge. Not only for technical reasons (e.g. management of source code, documentation and translations) but also for brand awareness. Having a common brand not only helps with attracting users but also contributors. As far as the focus on a specific platform is concerned….the more the better. Let’s just keep in mind not to get attached to a single one too much. KDE has already outlived some vendors in the past. And with regards to git: I love it. How KDE will deal with one of its strengths (distributed nature) will be interesting to see as it can also become a challenge to put things together in the end.
I listed the last point solely because I sometimes get the feeling that some more self-confidence in what we are doing is required and warranted 
After three years in froglogic’s office space it’s time to move on. We’ve outgrown this place after the last hires. Last year we already had to give up on the idea of having a dedicated room for a test lab. The machines got spread out to other rooms. Then, the library room with its sofa had to go. Foosball games were played in the meeting room thereafter which caused quite some scheduling conflicts between work and leisure. This was our third office space. Hard to imagine that we held a KDE quality meeting in the previous one.
When the hiring pipeline and growth projection resulted in 3 people ending up in a single room we started to look for a new space. The choice was quite big and real estate agents were bombarding us with often duplicated offers. Confronted with that freedom we started to become rather picky and filtered out the offers rather generously. Even if the space itself was shiny we discarded all places that did not have sufficient infrastructure around them, lacked nearby public transport or simply meant bigger changes in anyone’s journey to work. Quite some lazy folks we have become! Quickly the big choice collapsed to two almost neighboring places. After some back and forth between the respective interior designers we went for the one that did have so many pillars in the way. Just a few hundred meters away from here in “Gasstraße 18″ which is reminiscent of the gas plant that was operating here about 100 years ago.
The building we’ll move to reminds me a bit about the old Trolltech offices in Oslo where I enjoyed my life from 2000 to 2003. Old industry style building. From the inside, however, we’ll get a very modern black/white contrast style office with a lot of glass. Expect some people to bang their heads and noses against the doors and walls. Cries for inviting people to a house warming party, KDE sprints, more meetings and – most importantly – new developers that can now apply for jobs again! The new conference room table – as big as a small sailing boat – asks to be used and covered with pizza boxes!
The refurbishing of the interior is still going on. The new electric network was only activated today. And after the usual trouble with sub-contractors of Deutsche Telekom we even seem to have a working phone line. The SDSL Internet connection is still untested and besides that a lot of things are waiting to wrong: hardware breaking during transport, long running and forgotten network services not starting up anymore, Telekom deactivating our Internet connection when switching the phone line, etc. So please excuse possibly delayed answers from us during our move which will start on Saturday and hopefully come to an end on Monday at around noon.
It was nice to have attended Akademy again. Everything was well organized and the talks were interesting or entertaining. Or both. Particularly the improvised KDevelop presentation managed to impress.
Tampere was also a good venue. Big enough to offer a variety of place to stay, eat and hang around. But not too big as everything was still in walking distance. The Finnish people also showed their strong side of being gentle during the day and party professionals at night. One exemplary experience: while laying in a park on the “day after” some guy who apparently had too much to drink heavily throws up under a tree. As if nothing happens he opens a can of beer, lights a cigarette and walks away.
The only not so nice thing was the trip home: I had been heavily suffering from delayed baggage on several international trips during the last months. Up to a point where people around me started to switch from pity to amusement. Arrived at Helsinki airport one convenient hour before departure. More than enough time for a passenger to get on the plane. Apparently not for luggage. It arrived two days later. Granted, unlike being hit by this on the trip out it’s rather harmless at home. But I was sad about the tasty Finnish bread I imported (illegally?) being rock solid. And annoyed about the temporary shavers I bought emitting Aloe Vera and vitamin E but cutting my face until I looked like a victim in a horror movie.
Why oh why do airlines manage to screw up luggage transport so much? With all those computerized systems in place. Or because of the computers? I had long added Heathrow and Amsterdam on the list of airports to avoid. But Helsinki? I cannot help but feeling that airports accept way more traffic than they should do in order to get the fees by airlines. Airlines follow and accept too ambitious connection plans. Accepting a certain percentage of people and luggage missing their connections.
Advise for those returning from Akademy: get to the airport early. It’s not such a monster but relative to its size it’s absolutely overcrowded with people going on vacation.
After skipping the two last years I can’t help but attending Akademy again. Our company just released version 4.0* of our test tool Squish so I’m a bit more relaxed when it comes to thinking of hobbies I should have.
Also time to meet up with KDE contributors I still know and time to meet all the new ones in person. I’m also keen on seeing all the new ways to use spare cpu cycles and laptop batteries for impressive eye candy. Plus learning about latest developments from the alive KDEPIM and KOffice front.
Another reason for me going is the love for my mother country Finland. Tampere is just three hours away from the place I stay at almost each summer of my life. To show it I’m skipping the usual “I’m going to Akademy” banner and paste a picture of Lappajärvi which is my favorite of the >187,888 Finnish lakes.
On Saturday the non-profit association eXis-unlimited.org had organized the meanwhile second meeting of the Free Software community in our home town Hamburg. This time the organizers Sven Reumann and Ozder Abdurrachman had invited into the trading hall of the former coffee exchange in Hamburg’s harbor area. Some pictures can be found here.
The event was well attended and almost 30 users groups and projects presented their agenda, work in progress and meeting details. Among them were representatives from Open Streep Map, Ruby on Rails, OpenSolaris, Chaos Computer Club, working groups of local universities and Scribus. The sidux project handed out freshly burnt CDs of their distribution based on Debian unstable featuring KDE 4.2. Being invited for a short address in our function as a company sponsor I used the opportunity to call for all local KDE developers to come forward and unite. Everyone I got to talk to afterwards had reverted to version 3.5 though and currently wasn’t in the mood for any experiments.
Everyone sitting through the presentation marathon was rewarded with a buffet and drinks being served afterwards. A good opportunity to network with members of other groups. The presentations were taped on video as well as recorded by makers of NerdAlert – a show aired by the free local radio station FSK who also conducted individual interviews. So one can expect some online and on-air coverage appearing in the next days.
Postponing support for SMIL attribute ‘fill=”scroll”‘ for a long time, I now really needed this feature for extending the Atom feed support in KMPlayer. KMPlayer comes with a flash player backend and supporting the Youtube feeds was just a too low hanging fruit to not implement.
Anyhow, to ensure that the first flash link doesn’t play automatically on first load or when clicking on a next item, I’ve added as first link a summary of the entry using the media:description and media:thumbnail tags as SMIL presentation.
Since the presentation has a fixed aspects, ie. the text scales when resizing the player, some larger description text have their text fall outside the region area.
A quick implementation attempt was to simply draw the scrollbars over the right side of the text, painting it as black with 0.5 alpha value. Now that looked actually quite nice and has benefit that the scrollbar is there but also doesn’t take any screen resources (that is, one can’t click behind it but can see through it).
<smil>
<head>
<layout>
<root-layout background-color="white" width="320" height="240"/>
<region id="image0" top="5" left="5" bottom="5" right="5"fit="scroll"/>
</layout>
</head>
<body>
<img src="elep1.jpg" region="image0" dur="60"/>
</body>
</smil>
After that, it was a small step to extend the virtual area with the scrollbar width (so the clicking limitation is gone) and therefor added the horizontal scrollbar.
(took an image because the first reaction of my dear colleague Frerich R showing with text, was that it looked like a bug that the text was painted through the scrollbars – of course I suspect that because his knewsticker can’t show the media files like mine)
So I went to the Berlin summit this year. I might not have come if it wasn’t for for bunanson bringing my little project at a more popular level.
It was really nice to meet him in person (left on the picture, as a big thanks I bought him a german weizen beer). He also did a presentation, presenting his worldtv99 playlist.
Anyhow, the visit was really great and interesting. Mobile computing is an exciting area and, thanks to the Nokia internet tables, Moblin, Android and what not, opening up for open source.
Nokia employees presented the roadmap of their internettablet. Some insight talks about UI design. With years of experience with small form factor devices and their Symbian OS, definitely a good learning experience.
So the next device will include OpenGL-ES and on top Clutter for eye appealing applications. From what I recall, the destop will be Clutter based. Applications remain Gtk based. They’re pushing Gtk offscreen rendering for use with Clutter and there seem to be an effort for a Symbian port. So I don’t suspect this is likely to change anytime soon.
Qt is coming though, Ari Jaaksi talked about this toolkit for enabling multi-platform support for their applications. Also a Howto was presented by Nokia as one of the parallel sessions. As a froglogic Squish developer, I’m of course quite happy about this.
Exciting times for both toolkit, now competing on the same GUI. Obviously, the linux desktop as a whole will benefit from this downscaling and speedups.
Nokia UI designers seem to be quite modest about using animations though, avoid wow first, annoyance later experiences. I do suspect things like roll-down menus and such will be there. I think that animations may help hiding latencies for e.g. application loading and such.
One addition to my last blog, I already talked about the ‘handhelds GUI != desktop GUI’ thing. An UI design talk presented the minimal space for finger friendly clicking is nine millimeter, with a screen of 225dpy gives (9 mm * 225 px/inch) / (25.4 mm/inch) = 79.7 px. Now that is almost an inch on for destop screen.
The N810 is the third internet tablet that I own, starting with the first N770 that I got via the discount program.
Exciting to see that more KDE developers now starting to develop and blog about their experiences with this device. A somewhat dejavu feeling reading these blocks came about running desktop application KXyz and poor graphics etc.
I think it might be worthwhile for the new developers to catch up on the maemo-devel mailing list archives and read the lenghty threads about hardware limitation and such.
Btw. this mailing list was originally setup for the platform, but as developers prefer -devel mailings lists, changed to be targeted to application developers as well.
I have no idea what’s been said at the Academy presentations, so I hope it may be worthwhile to share my observation from the last three years as user (did some development too, but I don’t think that is very interesting to talk about).
A few weeks ago, I spent some days with friends in my home land. The N810 is really a nice travelmate to have. Listening to podcasts, reading a pdf file or watching a video while traveling, reading my google mail wherever I had Wifi access, using the GPS to find my way around, watching the latest news from the livestreams before I went to sleep and simply using it as a light source in an unfamiliar guest room.
At home, I basically use it as a mp3 player or as a TV device when drinking a glass of wine on the balcony. Since I live abroad, the Voice-IP feature is a real killer. Google talk is nice but not very common. Sip with an asterisk server is just great. I have one contact in my home land that has a VoIP account and flat rate access to the national phone network, I can dial to any number in this country for free using a second asterisk server over there.
The browser experience is okay, 800×640 is enough for most web sites. The keyboard is pretty good for responding to mails. However, the high dpi of 240 does makes reading stuff on web pages rather tiresome. A five euro +1 reading glasses surely helps a bit.
I’m not much of a gamer, did some quick games killing waiting time.
Some thoughts about software for this device. Like the first cars looked like a horse carriage without horse, the desktop metaphor might not apply on these devices.
Mouse drags, tab-and-hold for RMB, are just cumbersome, try to arrange the home applets. Now this may change in the next release, which should be more finger friendly (but this can only be about the size of widgets, dunno).
When publishing a program, keep in mind that slow application startup, slow feedback on actions are deadly. Actually, everything that consumes lots of battery power (unless the device is mounted somewhere so that it can charge constantly). What might sounds unexpected is that services listening for network data, drain the battery.
The trend observing is that the UI tends to become larger and more finger friendly. Which means that applications GUI’s diverge from their desktop counter parts already and becoming simpler.
The more popular provided open source application may show what makes sense currently. Various game emulators seem to be quite popular. Home automation, remote controls etc, surely are useful applications.
Analyzing software has its place. Bluethooth, Wifi, GPS, microphone and camera inputs allows things like network scanning, motion detectors etc (tricorder, anyone?).
Office or whatever management application are limited to mail and scribble/notes programs. Probably due to the troublesome way to enter enter text or do anything that requires lots of menu access and lack of overview given by the small display. I hope that this will improve, e.g. presentation software.
Interesting read is the thread from an Apple Newton developer in the maemo-devel archive. I really wonder if this device came too early that made them fail or that manipulating documents simply has no place on these gadgets,
I do suspect that perhaps in the propertarian world, things like invoice or whatever management in a client-server setup certainly may have some potential.
I hope the new KDE develops come with lots of new ideas. Qt surely lowers the barrier to get started.