Monthly Archives: November 2013

GNOME, Hacking

GNOME and the missing one-fifth: part one

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GNOME ParkingEarlier this year Lionel Driscot’s “The Last GUADEC” was slashdotted, redditted, and everthing else-itted that can happen to a viral blog post in the tech community.  It’s a provocative piece.  It also sparked for me the impetus to write this entry, which I’ve been mulling over for a few months.

My one nit with Driscot’s post are the questions he ends with, his call to action:

How can we evolve? Can we move the GNOME spirit into a web browser? How can we make use of our history and bring freedom to users instead of becoming just another web dev consultancy company?

These are not the questions I would have asked.  I do not believe the answers to these questions will yield appreciable fruit.

Here’s a portion of Emmanuele Bassi’s response to Driscot’s post (which I can no longer access, unfortunately):

GNOME is about building a whole operating system, and a whole ecosystem of apps, libraries, and tools, for people to create applications to consume and to create content.

This hovers closer to the questions I would have asked.

GNOME’s stated goal of “a complete free software solution for everyone” seems to me to be four-fifths met.  What GNOME offers is (1) free, (2) software, (3) a solution, and (4) for everyone.  I question the word complete.

I say this specifically as an application developer, not as someone maintaining a library or writing development tools.  Yorba isn’t even a cross-platform developer.  We target UNIX, and, frankly, we’re not proactive about any flavor of UNIX other than Linux.  Our requirements for a development platform aren’t particularly stiff.  Yet even slicing away Windows and Mac support, I still think GNOME is far from complete.

Here are the questions I would ask in place of Driscot’s:

  • How does the GNOME platform fit into a world of big and small interconnected devices accessing a variety of Internet services?
  • How is GNOME enticing developers to build upon — not build, build upon — that platform?

If I was a developer building Mac, iOS, Windows, or Android applications, I’d be able to answer those questions.  I honestly can’t answer those questions as GNOME application developer, at least not in full.

Thinking about those questions got me to thinking about another: What’s missing from the GNOME platform?  I’ll take that up in my next post.

Announcements, Shotwell

Announcing Shotwell 0.15.1

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shotwellYorba has released Shotwell 0.15.1, an important update to our Shotwell Photo Manager.  This update includes these fixes:

* Install Tumblr plugin resources (Tumblr plugin failed to work without them)
* Fix crash when video thumbnails are being inspected and created

Yorba strongly recommends all users upgrade to this release.

The tarball for Shotwell 0.15.1 is available at http://www.yorba.org/download/shotwell/0.15/shotwell-0.15.1.tar.xz  Ubuntu Quantal and Raring users can update by subscribing to Yorba’s PPA.  We hope that a version for Saucy will be available soon in Ubuntu’s repositories.

Announcements, Geary

Geary 0.4.1 now available

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Yorba is pleased to announce the release of Geary 0.4.1, the latest version of Yorba’s IMAP mail client.  We highly recommend all users upgrade to this version as it corrects a number of bugs.  Fixes and updates include:

  • Compile-time support for WebKitGTK 2.2
  • Fixes IMAP STARTTLS failure to connect bug
  • Works around LIST bug in IceWarp IMAP servers (crasher)
  • Solves crash when IMAP connect fails due to timeout
  • CamelCased MIME types now handled properly (prevents blank emails)
  • Adds missing RTL icons
  • New translations

Geary 0.4.1 can be downloaded from the Yorba web site.  See Yorba’s wiki for information on how to build and install.  Geary 0.4.1 is also available for Ubuntu users at Yorba’s PPA.

Announcements, Geary

Would you like to see Geary 0.4 available on Ubuntu 12.04 / elementary Luna?

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geary-yorbaWe’ve received a lot of complaints from users that Geary 0.4 isn’t available for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and elementary Luna.  It wasn’t an arbitrary decision on our part.  As we developed Geary 0.4, we learned that more and more components that Geary relied on were changing or simply unavailable in 12.04/Luna.  There’s a tangible engineering cost to maintaining backward compatibility.  At some point this summer we realized it was too much work to maintain support for 12.04/Luna as well as newer versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the other distros out there.

But Ubuntu 12.04 and elementary Luna (which is based off of 12.04) has a steady fan base who would really like to run Geary 0.4.  What to do?

We have limited resources, but we don’t want to leave users out in the cold.  We believe this is a problem both Yorba and the community can solve.  So we’ve created a bounty for the problem — if someone out there (or a group of people) solves this problem for us (and therefore everyone else!), they’re rewarded with cold, hard cash.  It’s that simple.

If you’re interested, read on:

There’s two pages you should read: the issue ticket at Yorba’s project server (which details the problem and the stipulations for collecting the bounty) as well as the bounty page at Bountysource.com (where the promised funds are listed).

If you want to see Geary 0.4 work on 12.04/Luna, you can help.  Go to the bounty page at Bountysource.com and pledge what you can.  The more the community offers, the more motivation developers have to take on this challenge.  It’s not easy what we’re asking for — whomever takes this on deserves a reward for their time, energy, and expertise.  What’s more, if no one solves this problem, you get your money back (minus Bountysource.com’s fee).

If you have the right stuff to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna, dive right in.  Make sure you read the issue ticket first for all the stipulations.  This isn’t a simple matter of getting Geary to compile on 12.04.  You have to make sure anyone running 12.04 can install it via their package manager.  Yorba’s developers are willing to guide you along, offer advice, point out resources or commits that you might be interested in.  But you need to make it happen.

Just to show that we’re serious about this, Yorba has already pledged $500 toward this bounty.  We’re hoping the community will toss in more money to further sweeten the pot.  If everyone who has asked us to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna offered $10, $25, or $50 toward the job, there would be no problem finding someone to do the work.

(Note: Yorba employees are prohibited from collecting any bounty money for Yorba-related projects.)

GNOME, Shotwell, Yorba

GIMP meets gexiv2

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CC BY 2.0The past couple of weeks we’ve seen new interest in gexiv2, the photo metadata library Yorba developed specifically for Shotwell Photo Manager.  The reason?  GIMP has adopted gexiv2 (and therefore Exiv2) for their photo metadata needs.

So what is gexiv2, and how is it related to Exiv2, beyond the name past the initial “g-“?

In 2010, as Yorba was adding features and expanding file format support in Shotwell, we realized its photo metadata support was lacking.  Shotwell was using libexif, a workable but spare library that only offered support for (surprise) Exif, one of three major photo metadata formats.  The other two (IPTC and XMP) are not nearly as widely-used as Exif, in particular with JPEGs, but are still out there and needed to be supported.

So we started looking around for alternatives.  We found our solution in Exiv2, a Swiss army knife for photo metadata.  There was a problem: Exiv2 is written in C++, a language we can’t directly call from Vala.  We needed an adapter of some kind, a C-to-C++ bridge.  It would be even better if that adapter spoke GObject.  We began to hash out how such a wrapper might work.

It turned out someone was one step ahead of us.  Mike Gemünde had started a project called gexiv2 that wrapped Exiv2’s C++ with a C GObject interface — perfect!  (The original repository is still available here.)  It was incomplete, so we contacted him asking if we could contribute.  Mike was focused on a C# photo metadata library and suggested we take gexiv2 over.  We’ve been developing it since.

It’s been great working with the GIMP developers so far, in particular Michael Natterer and Jehan Pagès.  We’ve received two significant patches from them, including a rework to move gexiv2 to autotools.  This in turn allows gexiv2 to build on Windows, something we’d not targeted at all when we began development but is obviously a hard requirement for GIMP.

I’m certain there are a lot more work and improvements to come.  Shotwell has gotten plenty of mileage out of Exiv2, but GIMP will definitely exercise all its control paths.