FrogBlog

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.

Now that KDE 4.1 there is some time to think about new features again. As almost every piece of KDE the KHTML library had been heavily affected by the changes in the underlying infrastructure. The switch to Qt 4, replacement of DCOP with D-Bus, new networking code and others required adaptions (and consequently bug fixing) that did not leave much room to even think about adding new features.

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The end of the day at the office is nearing. Sitting at my desk, going through the list of people who have requested a trial version of Squish today. Of course several from the usual suspects, i.e. large
international cooperations. But what never ceases to amaze me is the sheer endless number of yet unknown shops of all sizes and domains that exist around the world.

I notice a high-pitched whistle filling my ears but can’t make out the origin. The harddisk of my machine started to sing its final song? A technician from the lab below passionately grinding a dental prosthesis into shape?

With our crew decimated due to vacation time it’s a bit more quiet than usual. Clearly audible are Rainer and Roberto fighting their last table soccer match of the day. Rob is busy with a new internal test library. Andreas and Frerich are discussing their major rewrite of our test development GUI. Just checked: no modal dialog blocking the user’s flow, yet. Aaron would be proud of them.

Looking at how much code I wrote myself today: not much. Busy with customer care, administrative tasks and design discussions. But that’s fine as long it allows the others to concentrate on their projects. We have a new product in alpha, another about to start later this year and of course many more planned. SO MUCH ONE COULD DO. If you want to join us on this trip and know how to hack in either (or all of) C++, Java and/or Python let me know!

Note to myself: reserve many hours of KDE coding time for the weekend. Investigate redoing the the tokenizer of KJS. With the recent performance improvements of the execution engine the parsing phase starts showing up in profiles. Should be able to do better than my simplistic implementation from ’99.

Next of the senses that gets stimulated: the cooking school downstairs has started their daily evening course. One scent more tasty than the other coming in through the open window. Hmmmmm. A master of the profession must be at work again. Getting extremely hungry, going home. Bye.

With the application deadline for this year’s Google Summer of Code being over now (and the list of accepted projects to be published soon) I’d like to point those looking to make a bit of money working on Open Source software to another initiative.

Matt’s Bargain Basement Summer Of Code is privately funded which I find quite impressive. Matt is offering bounties for fixing issues in several components of software he is using every day. If you are interested in working on one of the tasks contact him. If you want to discuss some details do so. I can confirm that he is open to suggestions.

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A while ago, KDE branched the 4.0.x releases into their own subversion branch directory. This reminded me that I’ve been using a little script for a while which comes in quite handy when you want to commit a patch to multiple branches.

The script is called ‘ilc’ (which originally stood for ‘integrate last change’ but it actually integrates any revision you specify) and can be found at http://ktown.kde.org/~frerich/ilc. It’s a little Bash script which expects you to have separate checkouts for the different branches (so it doesn’t integrate the change “in place”).

For instance, in my directory layout, there’s the KDE trunk checkout in ~/src/kde/trunk and the KDE 4.0.x branch checkout in ~/src/kde/40. I usually work in the trunk branch, but every now and then I want to backport something (usually a bugfix) to the 4.0.x branch. So after hacking away, I eventually do this:


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ svn ci
Sending settingsdialog.cpp
Transmitting file data .
Committed revision 765024.
frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$


So SVN gave me the number of the revision I just committed. Using the ilc script, all I need to do to integrate this change into the 4.0.x branch is


frerich@helios:~/src/kde/trunk/kdenetwork/knewsticker$ ilc 765024 ~/src/kde/40


The script will make sure that the affected files in the 4.0.x checkout are up to date, then apply the patch, and finally it’ll let me inspect the patch it did, abort the merge, or commit. When committing, it’ll use the original log message plus a prefix like “automatically merged revision 765024:” so that I can lateron still see that this commit was actually a backport of something else.

Last friday a few fellow KDE-attached colleagues and me made our way to the KDE4 release party which was held at the mighty fine offices of freiheit.com.

Since there wasn’t much time left for Sven to organize the whole thing,  I was (more than) sceptical that there would be an actual party (with lots of people, beer et cetera) taking place. Turned out that I was wrong, very much so. When we arrived at 7:05pm (or something like that – the party was scheduled for 7pm) two nice ladies were waiting downstairs and crossing names out of a list. I didn’t know that we had to sign up for the party! Luckily, it seemed that Harri sent them our names, so one of the two ladies led us via the elevator to the party area. 

Amazingly, the room was already quite full when we arrived there. I would say there were about 30 people at the time we arrived and at the peak of the party there were about 50. I was pleasantly surprised! The freiheit.com people have a nice flat-screen display embedded into the wall of their cafeteria so we were able to view the live feed from Mountain View all the time. However, it was virtually impossible to understand anything which any of the speakers said simply because it was quite noisy in the office. I can’t say I missed the sound of the live stream very much, given that it can be viewed on youtube later (so I’ve been told).

All in an it was a very nice success, showing that one can certainly pull such OSS parties off in the HH area.

When the car* manned with our delegation of KDE developers paved its way through the dark and rainy streets of Hamburg I was expecting at most 10 guests (including us) to show up at the local branch of the worldwide KDE 4 release party. The place was crowded! The live stream from the California event was displayed on a screen – congrats to everyone involved in setting it up. Unfortunately, the speeches themselves drowned in the the noise of everyone chatting and having a drink or sausage in a bread roll and not exactly standing silent in awe. Had a bit of an art happening to see a babbling crowd of people gathered in the stylish freiheit.com rooms decorated by a live picture of a muted man gestucilating towards the viewers for 2 hours or more.

The number of people showing interest to come after the announcement necessitated the installation of an online registration. Quickly the max capacity was filled up. Many – like myself – learnt about this only in the last minute but were still lucky to end up on the list at the receiption. I later learnt that others were less lucky and could not enter anymore. Sorry to hear that! But the room was really jam-packed. Good news is that after last night a local event organizer has shown great interest in hosting bigger events (like Akademy) in the future.

The groups of attendees was a mix of KDE as well as Gnome developers and users. Provided for many interesting talks including a reunion with aRts author Stefan Westerfeld. Hope to receive some pictures to publish soon. Thanks for everyone who came and demonstrated that the Hanseatic City of Hamburg has a lively Free and Open Source Software scene.

Harri.

* Public transport is free here tomorrow. An attempt to repeat the car-free Sundays from 1973. Just (still?) voluntary this time.

Is the Swedish tradition of throwing “used” Christmas trees out of the window on a certain day a real one? That’s what a commercial of the furniture store IKEA wants us to believe at least. I don’t know which day would have been the right one but it was fun either way. Graceful glide from the fourth floor, no pedestrians or cyclists hurt.

To the main topic of this post: The city of Hamburg will join the choir of KDE 4 release parties taking place world-wide later this week. Sven Reumann has organized the local version for Friday, January 18st, 19:00 o’clock at freiheit.com, Straßenbahnring 22. Our new office is nice but the landmarked, refurbished, former streetcar depot occupied by freiheit.com is just impressive. We stick to supporting the culinary aspect.

Everyone with involvement or interest in KDE is heartily invited to join. Use the chance to meet with former, current and future contributors and users of our and other Free Software projects. Knowing the reliability of computer software we also count on being connected live with other places around the world.

KDE 4 is all about clocks. As I did not want to miss them while browsing the Net I sat down and extended Frerich’s Plasmoid Viewer code (a Workspace utility) to not only be a standalone program but also come along as a KPart. It can be embedded into an Konqueror HTML page with a simple element like this one:

<object id="myclock" type="application/x-plasma" classid="plasmoid:clock" height=200 width=300></object>

The patch – which was surprisingly small – can be found here. Below the obligatory screenshot showing some Plasmoids embedded next to an iframed search engine. The applet that locks the desktop locked it so well on testing that I had to kill the process from a console