For those who were looking forward to the GUADEC table quiz, I’m sorry to say that it won’t be happening this year. Unfortunately, problems organising an appropriate site, and a lack of room in the schedule (which is packed with great social events) mean that it’s not going to fit in this year. Thanks for all your interest though – and hopefully the torch will get carried on to next year. Quizzes are, after all, great.
Some recent stories have started raising brows among some comentators on GNOME Mobile (see the comments in particular):
Both of these stories are not complete abandonments of GTK+ or the GNOME platform. Sugar will still be GTK+ based, and OpenMoko will continue to support GTK+ in the platform, and the previously developed GTK+ applications.
But it would be disingenuous to suggest that these announcements don’t represent a cooling towards the GNOME platform on the part of both organisations.
So what happened? There are two plausible explanations:
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
I think most people who have tried would say that software development with GTK+ in C is hard, development in C++ or Java is quicker and less painful. A case, if one needed to be made, for focussing more than ever on gtkmm and java-gnome, and ensuring that these bindings are promoted, and as high-quality as possible.
But if you look at the goals of OLPC, their goal was to completely rewrite the graphical interface to the OS to be completely focused on the educational paradigm they were aiming for. This is a huge task, and it seems clear (in hindsight) that the enormity of it was underestimated. Free software is not the cure to all ills, things don’t go quicker just because you chose a free software licence for your project. The reality of the project’s status didn’t keep up with schedule pressures and marketing, to thepoint where the project’s credibility has been damaged by theGive One Get One and some high-profile withdrawls from the program.
The same thing goes for OpenMoko. Looking in from the outside, the technical management of the project has not been consistent from the beginning, partly because unreasonable expectations at the beginning led to impatience when early objectives weren’t being met. With objectives unmet, band-aids were plastered on band-aids, the direction changed, and now the OpenMoko platform has three competing application frameworks supported – QT, GTK+ and EFL.
It may be, and I hope it is, that both these projects survive their current difficulties and go on to be great successes. I’m sure that there are lessons to be learned for us in their stories.
But people who announce that this means the end of GNOME Mobile are quite obviously over-reacting.
We have several high-profile participants, including Nokia and ACCESS, committed to using GTK+ in their platforms. Important components of the GNOME Mobile stack area key part of the moblin platform, and are included in the LiMo reference platform (PDF). Devices such as those announced recently by Verizon, and the 18 phones announced by LiMo earlier this year, are based on this platform, so it seems clear that we are going to be a player in the mobile device space for many years. Success stories like the Vernier LabQuest and the iRex e-book reader show that we can be a compelling option in niche devices with custom interfaces.
With the current work of the initiative following on from the Austin summit last month, which includes creating a GNOME Mobile release set for release with GNOME 2.24, and raising awareness of what we’re up to, you should be seeing some interesting news over the coming months. The GNOME Mobile initiative is more necessary and useful now than ever.
I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday for three days in LinuxTag 2008 to meet up with some members of the maemo.org community, see old friends, and generally chat with as many people as possible.
After arriving, I managed to get out for a run, which was surprisingly pleasant – ourhotel is quite near the Tiergarten behind the zoological gardens, so while running around I accidentally went past some lovely landmarks, and managed to scout out a nice beer-garden beside the Neuen See where we had some nice Weisswurst last night.
It’s been fun so far – I met up with Quim and Marcell on Tuesday, and Kate, Peter, Niels and Marius yesterday. I spent a lot of time wandering around playing “spot the familiar face” – it was great catching up with Jochen Topf from Open Street Map (formerly FOSTEL organiser), Vincent Untz and Joe Brockmeister who are here for OpenSuse, Nils and Florian from OpenEmbedded and GPE.
I ran into Anne Oestergaard too, and it was great chatting with MaryBeth and Rob from OpenMedia Now, Knut Yrvin from Trolltech, and most of the KDE eV board who are here this week too – I met Aaron Seigo for the first time, after years of email conversations, and Sebastian and Cornelius are here too.
With so many familiar faces, it can be tempting to just talk to people you know, but I do like meeting up with new people at these things too – and the number one conversation starter I’ve had this week has been Big Buck Bunny – my kids love this cartoon, so much that Tuesday they watched it on repeat for an hour. And it goes down well with the adults too. Mad props to Ton, Sacha and the gang on the great success – they have attained their goal of an accessible cartoon to follow on from the “arty” Elephants Dream.
Already today we’ve heard Cat Allman from Google telling us about Google Summer of Code and GHOP, and the always entertaining Knut Yrvin on QT. After Knut’s session the maemo.org track starts, and I will be reporting as much as possible. Nick Loeve (trickie) proposed having a Wiki sprint today, and if I can get critical mass (and critical internet access) for that, we’ll do that a little later.
Select All: Ctrl A: Selects all content in the current document.
Whose bright idea was it to have Ctrl-A close the current note in the version of Tomboy shipping with Ubuntu 8.04? This was a really bad idea.
Update: Owen Taylor on #gnome-hackers, and 5 minutes later Vincent Untz in a comment, hit on the answer: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=162726
The upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 had installed the US layout on me, even though I have an AZERTY keyboard (which was the layout selected). So when I hit Ctrl-A, GNOME was helpfully saying that I must have really meant Ctrl-Q. This is really useful if you’re using a non-latin layout, since you can still use Latin shortcuts by installing a US keyboard layout, but if you have another Latin keyboard layout, this sucks big-time.
So, in fact, Tomboy wasn’t closing the current note, it was closing all notes (it just happens that I only ever had one note open at the time).
Lucas wrote a comment on one of my “Links of the day” posts which had several GNOME 2.22 links.
I love those links about 2.22 you post in your blog! They save me a lot of time on searching for user feedback. 🙂
For those of you who are del.icio.us users, if you tag articles related to the release “gnome222” then we’ll be able to find them all in the one place at http://del.icio.us/tag/gnome222 – I’ve been doing this for several releases, have a look at the gnome220, gnome218 and gnome216 tags too.
So join in – I don’t see any articles in languages other than English and French, it’d be nice to have a collection of articles from around the world tagged gnome222 so that we can see how far the release is reaching. As Lucas says, this also gives us a valuable source of user feedback after a release.
Keeping up my “tradition” of del.icio.us saving all of the articles on the GNOME release that I find (tagged with gnome222).
Tectonic follows up their “sneak preview” with an article on the release.
I’m not one to make GNOME/gnome jokes, but this was too much of a coincidence to let it slide. Gnome sighted in Argentina on date of GNOME release.
A collection of awesome things – many great ideas united in one place, an endless source of inspiration and time-wasting! I liked the “Home things” section.
For reference: the announcement by Red Hat of the keynotes for their conference. Compare & contrast with our announcement of the keynotes for GUADEC.
(tags: redhat conference guadec)
Series of articles describing the evolution of the UI redesign of Microsoft Office. Interesting stuff.
One or two journalists jumped the gum and came out with articles on the 2.22 release before it was made… the cheek! 🙂
Yet another trigger-happy online journalist. I suppose that’s what you get when you have an ultra-predictable and transparent release cycle, with release notes collaboratively written in public.
GNOME Do – one of those applications you think you’ll never use, and then you wonder how you ever lived without it.
ArsTechnical article
I just ordered a hard copy of the GNOME annual report (PDF) from lulu.com. At €9.05 postage included it’s a little pricy for a 24 page printed document, so I’m expecting top quality. I almost backed out when I saw the final bill, but I figured that a good chunk of that is going to the foundation, so what the hell, I’m a happy guy. Congratulations to Lucas and all the others who made this possible this year. I’m honoured to have been listed in the credits, given that I did so little this year to help.
Important update: I just heard back from Lucas that the reports are being printed at cost at Lulu; so €6 is the cost of printing the thing (€3 delivery on top for Europe), and nothing is going to the foundation. Also, lulu doesn’t cancel orders under any circumstances. Not saying that you shouldn’t buy it, only that you should only do so if you think it’s decent value for money.
Wouldn’t it be cool for GNOME to have partnerships with bookshare.org and Project Gutenberg? How about integrating evince to provide books for download?
