Making GNOME 3.0 attractive for developers
5. March 2010
This post is a spin off from the recent foundation-list discussion regarding the future direction of GNOME. It was pointed out that GNOME might not be a very attractive platform for new developers. The reasons was among others that there is nothing like a standard way of developing GNOME applications. Of course, everybody is somehow using automake and autoconf and some editor and bugzilla but not more than that.
Compared to windows, about any new developer will stumble over Visual Studio. On Mac, it is the same with XCode. For these tools there is tons of documentation, tutorial and books available and they are actively promoted with the platform.
For GNOME 3.0 we should also start having something like this. This doesn’t mean than present developers have to change their development model but they should be aware that their personal model might not be suitable for new developers especially those with no Linux/free software experience. As such, we should promote the tools we have to make life of new developers easier and ensure that they work with the workflow of a specific project.
In a perfect world, I would announce a hackfest here now, but I won’t 😉 But I would encourage people to help anyway. I have setup a wiki page to collect ideas. The major points are in my opinion:
- Write good tutorials how to build GNOME applications without touching command-line
- Setup a website (maybe on library.gnome.org) hosting all the information for getting started with GNOME development
Everybody is invited to contribute!
GNOME-Track on LinuxTag
1. March 2010
We have been offered the chance to run a GNOME-Track on LinuxTag 2010 (June 9th to 12th) in Berlin. As we would love to do that we still need 2-3 talks. So if you are located in Germany or want to come to LinuxTag and have something interesting to say about GNOME, please either contact Vincent or me so we can add you to the list. For now we only need a title and a short discription of your talk. It’s possible to do talks in german or in english at your option.
We would especially encourage some of the zeitgeist/gnome-activity-journal developers to do a talk as we know that some of them live in Germany.
The deadline for submission is today! Don’t blame me for that, we really would have liked to get this out earlier…
Let’s make this a rocking event for promoting GNOME!
For my fellow Vala hackers…
23. February 2010
…I proudly present support for Vala symbols in the Anjuta Symbol Manager. This will mean you can browser and search your project symbols like you can in C and JavaScript. This will either work with the automake backend of the project manager for automake >= 1.11 with Vala support or at your option with the new directory backend for automake < 1.11 or custom Makefile rules.
Credits go to Abderrahim Kitouni (former GSoC student) for writing the vala parser for ctags. We hope to add full Vala support including autocompletion and probably debugging before 3.0.
In related news, Anjuta 2.29.91 “Vala la révolution” was released with many stability fixes today. Give it some testing. Naba already did an awesome job in filing bugs for a lot of small but annoying issues. Follow his example 😉
Javascript support in anjuta
21. December 2009
Finally, after far too long time I found time today to merge Maxim’s great Javascript support patches from GSoC 2009 into master. You find screenshots and more information on his blog.
Thanks a lot for your work Maxim!
P.S.: Remember that scipting is for loosers while C is for real (wo)men 😉
New auto-completion engine in anjuta
24. November 2009
The great people from gedit/gtksourceview finally implemented a new completion engine for GtkSourceView which allows us to drop lot of ugly custom code in Anjuta. But it also has some cool features:
- Combine auto-completions from different sources (called “providers”)
- Add auto-completions in an asynchronous way
- Support to add extra information to the auto-completions
For now, Anjuta uses only the first two but it’s really planned to add API Help for symbols.
Despite having a more stable and tested code and a nicer UI that means that he will never be disturbed while typing because the editor is searching for auto-completions to appear. Instead all this now happens in background and it really feels fast. This also gives us a possibility to add macros/snippets directly into the auto-completion framework. Screenshot:
There are also some other interesting things coming soon:
- a better engine for C++ (auto-completion of class-members, etc.)
- GSoc JavaScript plugin which needs to be merged
- a new bison/flex based automake parser as project-manager backend (probably won’t be finished until 3.0)
- a completely rewritten git UI
GtkNotebook action widgets
9. November 2009
Remember the good old days when bug nummers started with 1xxxxx? Well, now we have one bug less in this area, GtkNotebook finally supports widgets in the tabs area:
GtkNotebook with action widgets
(Note that the buttons here are just examples and this was done mainly for testing purposes).
Why could this be useful:
- Firefox-style “Add tab”-buttons
- Saving space when dealing with notebooks that have a constant (and low) page number
- probably much more
There is nothing in the HIG yet of course and you should use it with care. I hope it’s useful though.
Credits go to Carlos Garnacho for the original patch and to Mathias Clasen for reviewing my patch and adding GtkBuilder support. Also thanks to Openismus for letting me finish this!
FedEx woke me up today…
22. September 2009
…and brought the new Google Summer of Code Shirt:
The main feature of the T-Shirt is being not black and actually really looking kind of non-geeky which makes it possible to wear it outside geek areas.
Glom on maemo fremantle
5. September 2009
Glom now bascially starts up on maemo fremantle which means that gtkmm, libgda, libgdamm and pygda are working together now on the maemo platform. Of course lots of bug-fixing and UI work left to make this really cool.
Screenshot:
This thing called “European Union”
4. September 2009
(Disclaimer: This is a political statement, so only read on if you can cope with it)
It all came into my mind again when seeing all the reports about the phase out of light bulbs starting from 1st of september in European countries. Apparently this isn’t a major issue for most people except the Germans who always fear to loose something.
Anyway, in all this reports it was talked about that this moster called “EU” has decided that no more light bulbs may be purchased. It was never talked about that the EU doesn’t decide anything but contrary as in every democracy, it is the people who decide.
In this case the proposal was made from the european commission which consists of 27 commissioners from the European countries approved by the European Parliament. A few months ago all Europeans had the right to elect their MPs though actually not so many did (less than 50%). If they had wanted to keep the light bulbs then they could have voted for it, but they didn’t.
I am writing this to conscientize people that sentences like “Brussels has decided…”, “the EU demands…”, etc. simply are not the truth. YOU ARE THE EU, YOU DECIDE!. And if you are dissatisfied with the decision it is up to you to change the European government.
Do you really want a light bulb to light your room that needs more energy than your laptop?
Update:Â Some people state correctly that this is an indirect democracy so you can’t influence the decisions directly – that’s true. But it is the way most countries are governed because otherwise things become difficult to organize. And yes, you don’t vote the commissioner directly, but indirectly through your local parliament.
Update2: About this Mercury thing – there is excellent information available on this –Â please use google.
Formula Student 2009 in Silverstone
20. July 2009
In case someone is wondering why I am not responding to mails or in general constributed only very few things in the last weeks I was mostly full-time working on our second year formula student car:
This is the first year we are participating both in Silverstone (FSAE UK) and Hockenheim (Formula Student Germany). After we failed horribly in Hockenheim last year with a half-finished overengeenered car our big aim this year was to have a running car. And actually things worked really good, we finished all disciplines.
We had some technical problems in acceleration and the drivers need more practice for skid pad, so we did not yet get good results there (look for car 74 – University of Erlangen). But after we already had a good pace in the sprint, we managed to offer an absolutely fantastic endurance result in difficult (english) weather conditions and finished in 3rd position. Overall this puts us on the 16th place in the overall results which is better than we could ever dreamt off.
We have two busy test weeks until Hockenheim and hope to be lucky again there and probably even improve our results further!
Links: