All things considered, the “.0″ release has turned out very well. There are various problems and regressions for sure, but still I am impressed about all the work that has been done, especially during the last two month. I just want to thank everyone involved!

Unfortunately I did not manage to make it to GUADEC again

But, thanks to Fluendo and Flumotion, I can still follow the talks as WebM streams!

After countless failed attempts I came up with a simple yet working setup which can be implemented in about two minutes:

1. install pd-extended, jack-audio-connection-kit and fluidsynth
2. start JACK: jackd –realtime –silent -d alsa –midi-driver seq &
3. start FluidSynth:
   fluidsynth -l -i -s -a jack -o synth.sample-rate=48000 /usr/share/soundfonts/default.sf2 &
4. connect FluidSynth to ALSA:
   jack_connect fluidsynth:left alsa_pcm:playback_1
   jack_connect fluidsynth:right alsa_pcm:playback_2
5. pd -rt -jack -alsamidi -midioutdev 1

I first tried to not use JACK because I thought it would clash with PulseAudio. Problem with this approach: Pd does not support PulseAudio natively and neither does FluidSynth in F11 (upstream supports it, but that is another sad story). So it’s either PCM sound or midi, but not both at the same time

Fortunately, JACK turned out to work great – but for normal desktop usage, I am still very happy to have PulseAudio

During the last months I have mostly been busy with university. Unfortunately things tend to take a bit longer than expected… But now, having only only one exam left, I took the chance to get up to speed with the latest GNOME, Linux and FOSS development.

The general “theme” for GNOME 2.26 seems to be getting rid of legacy dependencies like libgnome(ui) everywhere, which is very nice. Also, there’s a lot of small-but-welcome improvements here and there. Finally PulseAudio will be properly integrated into the desktop (if the remaining bugs can be fixed before the final release, it will rock). Brasero is a 1st class GNOME app now: the team has done some impressive work, just look at the level of integration they accomplished during the last development cycle!

While WebKit/GTK again didn’t make it into GNOME 2.26, the progress still seems to be huge and it should really “be there” for release+1. Even without it, Epiphany got some really nice improvements (woohoo bar!).

In other news, the coming Thunderbird will follow Firefox and provide a nice native look. I really hope the motivation to draw all the needed icons will be high in the weeks to come…

I’m also pleased to hear that OpenOffice is finally starting a GUI revamp, even if this effort will take quite some time: every journey starts with a first step.

Nautilus

• Tabs
• fixed DnD
• Restore from trash
• Improved removable media eject and insert handling

Evolution

• Speed (!)
• More Tango icon and general UI love
• Gmail contacts

Update: I had to modify a lot of .menu, .directory and .desktop files to get a nicer (upstream-like) menu. Can we please have this out-of-the-box in 11.1?

Update 2: The Build Service is just incredible. I used it to create some updated bluetooth-related packages (bluez-gnome, obex-data-server, nautilus-sendto). You can find them here. Still not 100% satisfied with bluetooth on 11.0 though.

Today I was inspired by this new project to think about feed reader UIs again. Over the years I have used a lot of different apps for reading feeds: Straw, Liferea, Blam, some Firefox browser extensions, Liferea again, Google Reader and finally Evolution-RSS. There are about half a million more, but none of them seems to really satisfy my needs (or… expectations). So, what does the perfect feed reader need? For me:

• it has to be simple (not full of features like Lifera)
• it has to be able to render content correctly (read: no gtkhtml)
• it needs to way to categorize feeds (folders or even better: tags)
• it should be able to run minimized and notify me if new feed items are available
• it should have a pleasant look and feel

Maybe Summa will be “the” feed reader for me at some point in the future. Perhaps it will even look similar to this:

I know, some will hate the mockup but for me, a reader like that would be about perfect. Here’s a sample menu layout as well :

(Note: some of the icons used here are based on some concept art done by hbons)

Yesterday, my parents needed to watch a picture DVD and their DVD-Player was unable to handle the disc. I resurrected my old first-generation Centrino laptop and installed Ubuntu Hardy and Elisa. My parents really liked the simple UI and I’m sure they would like to use something similar for their other PC use cases: web browsing, email and word processing.

Now let’s assume GTK+/GNOME applications were flexible enough to seamlessly integrate into such a mediacenter-like environment (using some alternate, simplified GUI markup for example). We could easily build a mediacenter-desktop mix, which IMHO would please a lot of users (not the regular geek, but children and the older generation!). Such a product would be nice for devices like the Eee and perfect for those Wii-shaped mini-computers some companies have started selling recently.

Even if this mediacenter-desktop thing is just some stupid idea of myself, I really think GNOME needs to be able to better adapt to the needs of the future… and “the desktop” as we know it today will only be a (small?) part of that.

After reading through most of the posts and comments, it seems like there are some fundamental differences in how people a thinking about GNOME. Some seem to think of it only as a desktop (either “corporate” or not) while for others GNOME has a much wider scope. Another group seems to have a focus on the platform and yet others see GNOME more as an evolving process rather than a product. But who is right?

Of cause there is no right or wrong here. As part of a community it is only natural that everyone has his or her own personal motivations and goals. But in the end we all want to keep the GNOME project alive and also want it to be successful. So, what are my personal opionions about this? Well, I don’t think we need a radically different “Topaz” or “3.0″ release. But still I think GNOME should move on to the “next level” soon. How does this fit together?

Rodney had some very nice thoughts about “the desktop”. I really think we should take this into account for “3.0″. We need to be more flexible in the future, and we need to be able to adapt to new hardware devices and usage models. Yet I don’t think “the desktop” will die anytime soon, so we should also work to improve things in this direction. Read: we have not yet reached the full potential of what we could achieve. The question is: what can we still do within the “2.x” release series? Some people have voted for small incremental updates over multiple cycles if needed, which is good. But this has been practiced during “2.x” all the time, one way or another. Truth is that at some point, we really need to make a cut and enter this “next level” I was talking about earlier.

Now, some concrete visions:

• Platform: Let’s finish Project Ridley ASAP and see what other changes the core libraries need to serve as the base of GNOME for the next 10 years. Yes, a base for “the desktop” as well as other/new use cases. I assume “core libraries” in this context mostly means GLib/GTK+ “3.0″, but perhaps we also need to tie in things like Clutter? Do we need a gconf-ng as part of glib? I’m sure there are a few more things that need to be addressed. Anyway, this will also be the opportunity to get rid of legacy stuff and clean up things a bit, which will make it easier for new contributers to get started. I think we have waited about as long as we can with this move. If we don’t bring the platform to the next level within the next 1-2 years I think we will lose both supporters and users.

• Core Desktop: As “core desktop” components I see the panel, applets (containing notifications, hardware stuff), as well as the file manager. Those core components should work together more closely in “3.0″. Again, no radical changes should be made but we should start seeing panel/applets/nautilus as one unit (not just individual modules) and improve all the common workflows. The whole thing should still be flexible but it should not have the “pieced together” feeling of the current desktop. We also should rethink some parts: the emblem system in Nautilus would be a good start. We should also aim to integrate some add-on apps (or their functionality) better with the core components: Deskbar and Do are both very nice and usable applications but we already (still?) have the old run and find dialogs. We also have separate GUIs for Beagle and Tracker in addition to that. Why can’t we just have a single super-usable run and find GUI (using Xesam for querying Beagle and/or Tracker) integrated with panel and nautilus? I’m sure we can! Finally, people were also talking about better OS integration and hardware interaction. We can surely still improve things here but we are already well on the way: compare WLAN and Bluetooth handling now and two years ago for example. Ideally GNOME would feel like “the OS” instead of “the DE”, just like Aqua feels more like “the OS” rather than just a GUI on top of BSD. But this is something we can aim to improve during “3.x”, after migrating to the new platform

• Applications: Apps would need to be adapted to platform changes of cause but in most cases I think we have some really nice apps already. There are, however, two things to consider. First, GTK2 GUIs tend to have a quite “boxy” look. I think we need to change something in the guideliens for things like spacing and background areas to make apps look and feel smoother. Some nicer stock widgets (ListView anyone?) and use of app-speciffic widgets could help, too. Second, applications should have the ability to make use of advanced toolkit features as seen in Banshee 1.0 in places where it makes sense: sliding widgets, pulsing items, kinetic scrolling… this is *not* useless bling. It really helps the user to interact smoothly and naturally with the application. Besides, a pleasant look never hurts. Same for “Compiz” effects btw: while I totally agree that about 90% of the plugins are only useful in “see what I can do”-demo scenarios, some actually have a use. Things like transparency, shadows and animations can greatly improve the user experience – if used correctly.

That’s all for now.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
127 cd
77 vi
40 svn
31 ls
28 rm
27 sudo
27 make
22 ssh
14 cp
9 mv

Looks like I still don’t really trust Nautilus to do some of the basic file management