Category: gnome

GNOME + Summer of Code + Thanks

Google Summer of Code 2007 is officially over. I think it’s a good moment to give a summary of the participation of GNOME in SoC this year.

  • A pool of SoC project ideas was brainstormed and triaged in l.g.o. The triaging and prioritization of the pool improved a lot the quality of the information we provided to the interested students.
  • We received 174 proposals. Lots of duplicates but quite many good quality proposals.
  • 29 proposals were accepted. Of those, 2 were dropped in the middle-term evaluation. The final evaluation hasn’t been done yet but I’m quite confident that almost all projects have succeeded in different ways and levels. Some projecs were about development of new applications and others about new features on existing software modules. Some projects results will be available very soon in GNOME 2.20!
  • The students were requested to send weekly progress reports to gnome-soc-list. If you want to check how the projects evolved, have a look at the mailing list archives.
  • Some of the SoC students had their blog feeds added to Planet GNOME. Their blog posts had a special SoC mark.
  • Around 14 SoC students attended GUADEC this year.

My big and special thanks go to…

  • the GNOME SoC admins (Vincent, Behdad and Christian) who contributed as much as they could to make SoC happen in GNOME.
  • the project mentors who did an excelent and important job on helping the students to achieve their goals and to get involved with the GNOME community.
  • the SoC students who gave important contributions to GNOME in terms of code, time and passion. I really hope to have all of them as active GNOME contributors from now on.
  • the Google SoC organizers who made all this possible.

Being a SoC admin this year was a very nice experience for me. So, thanks to everyone involved! Let’s make GNOME SoC rock even more in 2008! Woohoo!

Life + GNOME + Music

For some reason, It’s been about 2 weeks that I feel very tired all the time. I guess this is a combination of work load and post-mastering. Unfortunately, because of that, I’ve been a little bit away from my usual GNOME activities. I guess I’ll be 100% back from next week on.

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Congratulations to all GNOME contributors for the project’s 10 years anniversary! I consider myself a quite recent contributor. IIRC, my first contribution to the project was in September 13, 2004. It was a small patch that added save support for the file selection dialog in zenity. Glynn was zenity’s maintainer at that time. Actually, (I don’t know if he knows that) Glynn is definitely my primary GNOME hero because it was him who brought me inside the project and the community. Without his support in my first contributions, I don’t know if I would be so active (and passionate) to the project today. Thank you dude!

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As a relaxing activity, I’ve been making some sort of research on the roots of jazz and funk. So, on the jazz side, I’ve been listening to the fundamentals of Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Haynes, and others. On the funk side, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool and the Gang, Funkadelic, Parliament, and others. I’m really willing to buy the Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary DVD box. I’ve watched some episodes some time ago and it’s just amazing!

GNOME Roadmap – Call for Update

As you probably know, according to our development schedule, we are officialy feature-frozen now. Therefore, it’s time to cleanup and update our Roadmap to reflect the actual result of our development work in the 2.19/2.20 feature set.

We kindly ask you check the roadmap[2] of the modules you maintain. If there are features that were not implemented for 2.20, please move those to GNOME 2.22 section accordingly. In case there are some features missing there, please add those to the respective section.

You can either directly edit the wiki page or reply us with the new roadmap information.

It’s very important to cleanup and update the GNOME Roadmap as soon as possible so that it can be used as a reliable source of information for writing the GNOME 2.20 release notes.

Update: If you want to update your module-specific roadmap wiki page as well, feel free to do so. This will save you some time later for sure.

It’s over!

Yestarday, I defended (via audio-conference) my mastering thesis entitled “Software Livre e produção colaborativa na Internet: um estudo de caso dos instrumentos de comunicação no Projeto GNOME” (in english it would be something like “Free software and collaborative production in Internet: a case study of the communication instruments used in GNOME Project”). I was approved! It’s over! Now I have master degree in Contemporary Culture and Communication. Wohoo! :-)

Post GUADEC notes (aka GNOME in revolution mode)

This GUADEC brought a lot of momentum to GNOME: fresh new ideas and nice discussions and plans about our future platform and desktop. For the first time in the last 2 years, I have the strong feeling that GNOME is about to switch to a “revolutions mode”. This means that several small and big revolutionary things will start to bubble inside the project from now on. I’m really excited about it! (Obviously, I’m not saying that nothing interesting happened before this GUADEC. It’s just that now I see more cohesion around some goals inside community.)

The Online Desktop

The Online Desktop is something that, if done right, can bring a big and positive impact on the GNOME user experience. What I like about this idea:

  • It takes advantage of the whole world of cool web services out there
  • It makes the GNOME Desktop much more fun (I remember Vincent commented about it 2 years ago… He is totally right!)
  • Consequently, it brings GNOME much closer to the user who uses the computer to strengthen his/her social and emotional ties

I don’t think we should work on an “online mode” (with a special UI) for GNOME Desktop though. IMO, the way to go is to turn GNOME into a “web-aware” desktop environment. some examples:

  • If you’re viewing some photos or watching a video, it should be easy and seamless to upload them to your favorite photo/video sharing web service
  • It should be natural to keep track of what your friends are doing on web (what Mugshot does)
  • When you import some photos from your camera, it should be possible to upload them straight away to the web

Bringing web-awareness to GNOME involves creating a basic platform (mostly a set of D-Bus services and GTK+ widgets) that could be shared by any desktop component who wants to be web-aware. This way those bits can be used on GNOME Mobile as well.

We should not limit ourselves on the data sharing on web services because, in essence, what we want (as users) is to share media with other people. We should consider having an integrated communication framework as part of the Online Desktop effort. Some examples:

  • If you’re viewing some photos or watching a video, it should be easy and seamless to share them with one or two friends (via messenger, e-mail, local network share, etc). If your friends are online you can simply start chatting with them after you shared something with them. Something like Web Swarm (in Mugshot) does for links but for any shared media
  • There should be some central place to start communicating with someone. it doesn’t matter if it’s via e-mail, messenger or whatever else
  • It should be easy to make collaborative work on the same content (documents and media). OLPC is doing a great job on this subject

We already have a lot of code available for covering some of those use cases. Some of them: Conduit for easy syncing with web services, Empathy and Mission Control for a Telepathy-based integrated communication in the desktop, Mugshot (server and client) stack for web services activities tracking, Soylent for “people browsing”, and so on. There will be this big effort to add the “online” bits to applications and other desktop components.

“Bling!” on GNOME

There were some nice talks about adding more “Bling!” to GNOME. It was nice to see things like Clutter, Lowfat, GTK+ 3.0 (oops, 4.0!) discussions, compositing, etc. There two things I’d like comment on:

  • We have this challenge of making GNOME sexier. Ok, cool! But let’s keep this in mind though: we should not make GNOME unusable on a computer without 3D acceleration. At the same time that we want to impress the user with cool effects (which should improve the usability btw), we need keep in mind that there are lots of people using low-power/old computers with GNOME on social projects out there (Brazil has many of those).
  • In order to bring “Bling!” to GNOME in a consistent way, those bits should be in the platform level with components that could be easily reused among applications. Also, we would need to have clear guidelines in HIG. Otherwise we’ll end up in a “Bling!” hell!

GNOME Platform

It was nice to see that important changes are about to come in our platform. Most of them I’ve already commented before: GVFS, GTK+ 3.0, New applet API, GSettings, Mallard and others. Next year will be really nice for GNOME Platform!

People

That’s GNOME: a bunch of extremely talented and generous people working on the common goal of creating free, easy-to-use, and innovative technologies to everyone!

Quick idea for a revamped HIG

I just wanted to blog about it before I forget. I had a nice chat with Andreas and this idea came out.

Well, everybody knows that our beloved Human Interface Guidelines (aka HIG) needs an update. There are some missing bits for new use cases and the current content needs to be updated for the current desktop (although most of the document seems to be still quite valid). I guess I don’t need to argue about the importance of those guidelines to GNOME usability and UI consistency, right?

My main use case as an user of HIG is to open its table of contents and search for a section related to the topic I’m trying to deal with in my UI. So, would it be nice if the HIG became some kind of a UI guidelines knowledge base? This way we can easily keep the guidelines updated and evolve it every time we find out about a new use case.

Each entry in this knowledge base would provide guidelines for a specific use case or behavior (keyboard shortcuts, search, zooming, drag and drop, etc) or UI element (statusbar, toolbar, menubar, dialogs, panels, etc). Entries could be marked as deprecated and have different versions. Of course, entries could be tagged as well. The initial webpage could have just a search entry and a sane topics tree, tag cloud (or a kind of table of contents). The entries could be submitted by anyone but it would be moderated and improved/fixed by the GNOME Usability experts.

Well, this was just a random idea. I don’t really plan to work on that. I hope it can be an inspiration and bring some motivation to update our HIG and make it rock even more! :-P

Python in the Eye

As I’ve announced before, the development version of Eye of GNOME, your beloved image viewer, features a new plugin system which allows you to extend EOG’s UI and behavior. Now that I added python support to the plugin system, the only thing is missing is a bunch of cool plugins! :-)

I’ll pay a beer (at GUADEC) for each one who develops a cool plugin and helps us to improve our plugin system. I have some ideas for a start:

  • File browser pane: something like the File Browser Gedit plugin;
  • Flickr Uploader (aka Postr integration): I have a prototype ready for this one;
  • Photo feed viewer: add support for adding, removing, and viewing photo feeds;
  • Blog This Image: this one could be done by integrating with good/old gnome-blog app;
  • Add watermark to Image: you would be able to add the watermark from a text or from an existing image;
  • Location on Statusbar: show a statusbar icon with a tooltip showing location info (city, country, neighborhood, street, etc) embedded in the image;
  • Creative Commons Licence: show a statusbar icon with a tooltip showing the license embedded in the image;
  • Add your suggestion here!

Volunteers!? :-)

The Side Pane problem

I want to allow plugins to add functionalities to a side panel in EOG. As you probably know, there’s no such side panel in EOG yet. Considering that currently you can place the image collection pane on the top, bottom, right, or left side of the window (a feature requested by several users), how can I have the (left) side pane (for plugins) and allow the image collection pane to be on the left side as well?

In the case of Gedit, the side panel has a documents list (the equivalent UI element of EOG’s image collection pane) and other “pages” can be added to the panel by the plugins. In the case of EOG, this would not be a good approach because the image collection pane is something that you want to keep visible all the time and the side bar should always be on the left side.

Any suggestion?

On GNOME 2.22: the rise of a revamped platform and desktop

We’re now in the middle of the development cycle for GNOME 2.20 and our plans were already published in our RoadMap page. Of course, there are some very nice stuff coming for the next GNOME stable release as you can see there.

I’d like to bring some attention to an important thing that can make a lot of difference for GNOME next year. We have a very good opportunity to make big, necessary and important changes in our desktop and platform in the 2.22 release. Why am I saying that?

From the roadmap process we’ve kicked off in the 2.20 development cycle, it’s perfectly clear (to me) that several important changes are coming (potentially for 2.22). Here are some of them:

  • Revamped session management: headed by Dan Winship. Recently, a branch has been created with the new code.
  • Next iteration of the GNOME Configuration system: headed by Emanuelle Bassi. Possibly, an initial code will be shown and discussion on this topic will happen at GUADEC.
  • Revamped VFS API: it’s called GFVS and is being headed by Alex Larsson. Current code resides on a git repo. For a good overview on GVFS, read this message Alex to gtk-devel-list some time ago. Current status and discussion will be take place at GUADEC.
  • New documentation technologies: it’s called Mallard and is being headed by Shaun McCance and Don Scorgie. Current code resides here (Mallard) and here (Rarian, replacement for scrollkeeper). We have 2 Summer of Code projects for the development of a documentation editor for GNOME which uses the new infrastructure. Some of the new stuff will probably be used in 2.20 already. Talks about related topics at GUADEC.
  • New applets API: developed by Ryan Lortie. Current code resides on git repo (I don’t remember where it is). Talk and discussions on this topic will happen at GUADEC.

There are others: GTK+ additions and more widgets consolidation (Project Ridley), SoC projects (some of them could possibly land in GNOME 2.22), Bugzilla 3.0, and so on. Also, there are some important topics which needs to be seriouly and objectively discussed like web services integration, better desktop integration with instance messenging and voip, search engines and metadata, and others. A combination of effort, time, manpower, good communication and community cohesion will decide if those goals will be achieved or not.

Let’s keep those goals in mind for 2.22 and try to stay focused as much as possible so that we can make them a reality. GUADEC will be a wonderful time to discuss those topics.

GNOME 2.20 will rock a lot! Let’s make 2.22 a 23 release!

The GNOME Journal, June Edition

The latest issue of the GNOME Journal has just been published! It features an article about GStreamer audio effects, an interview with Ken VanDine about GNOME 2.18 Live Media releases, an introduction to Accerciser, and a summary of GNOME.conf.au 2007. Writers in this edition are Stefan Kost, Paul Cutler, Eitan Isaacson, and Davyd Madeley, respectively.

Big thanks to the editors of this edition: Stephanie Watson and Laurie VanDine.

The GNOME Journal features original content and commentary for and by the GNOME community. All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Read now: http://www.gnomejournal.org

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