Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Had the Thank deity it’s finally shipping! party yesterday. Interestingly enough the place was a greenhouse. (Gardenia)

I got a reward (framed board with a picture of 770 showing an older UI mockup that everyone signed) for trying to drive people crazywork more in the open. While it sometimes takes a long time to see changes happen concretely I hope this says something about where we’re heading.

Feeling kind of tired still. I wonder if I forgot to wake up today. Wonder when I get around to reply to all the mails, blogs and comments that keep piling up.

Erm… instead of having one ApplicationCatalog there’s now another one. What a wonderful way of guaranteeing neither one is going to be complete or up to date as their roles don’t seem to be complementing each other but are apparently completely overlapping.

And same goes for the maemo wiki – instead of using the (more or less) well known wiki there’s now a new wiki on the block, ironically to collect all how-to’s, tips and tricks from various sources (forums, blogs, web sites… funny that wikis weren’t mentioned.)

I’m all for having complementary sites (like maemo vs. Nokia 770) as it helps everyone to maintain focus in their own areas. But doing overlapping work without coordination is at minimum duplicating effort, but at worst fracturing the user base (think IM protocols) when no one knows for certain where to find all relevant information.

Personally I’m anticipating confusion. Where can I find all announced applications in the future? ApplicationCatalog used to be that place. If there are two wikis collecting tips and tricks from different sources, could someone set up a third one to collect them all in one place?

Note: after re-reading the original announcement more carefully it seems that maybe the focus is on the Nokia 770 and its users and not the development platform, but the relationship to maemo.org wasn’t explained too clearly. (Software Section as an alternative place to post their application to inform the Maemo community confuses me…)

So maybe the ApplicationCatalog should be moved to ITT, and keep moving applications from the ApplicationCatalogWip when they reach user friend maturity?

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I think we’ve sold somewhere between one and two billion 770’s by now.

(with apologies to Dilbert)

philipl, have a look at
hello-world-app (user: guest, pass: guest – *sigh* that mandatory guest login is starting to annoy me) It might miss the more deep philosophical points (no updates when in background, etc.) but should be enough to get a plugin running. The tutorial should of course have more substance about everything. Bit weird to omit home (and apparently TN) plugins from the Maemo tutorial but include status bar and control panel plugins, but I guess there’s a reason.

Is it just me or shouldn’t all the How to … chapters in the tutorial be available in the How-To’s section in the website?

Hmm.. the return value for hildon_home_applet_lib_properties differs between the hello-world-app (void) and the API docs (GtkWidget*). Marius, your example code is broken!

Last week we finally got a clear yes-no decision regarding publishing more stuff. After fighting with the legal department about a wrong shade of pink etc. we got green, or pink, light to publish UI performance results comparing gtk+ 2.6 and gtk+ 2.8 on 770, as well as the postprocessing scripts that are generating the reports. (The code that measures and generates the data are already available in the tools repository on stage.)

Now just need to find someone who knows how the website templating system works in order to get the stuff uploaded. And find the latest revision of the scripts and put them in the repository. I think a warning is in order: do not look directly at the code, you might go blind…

Update: The UI performance measurements are now published.

Halfway to the work I get a flat tire, and when I finally get there I notice I lost a glove. At least I got blisters to compensate the loss. And the mudwater^Wcoffee seems worse than usual. Yeah, it’s Monday alright..

Had father’s day lunch at parents house today. My brother cooked eggrolls and something wok-ish. Quite interesting taste, pretty mild, almost tasteless at first, but some spices kick in later. And the cake was great as usual, self-made of course.

Watched Ocean’s Twelve, what a waste of potential. I think the basic idea was rather clever, but the delivery falls short. Too little depth in characters and plotlines made the whole thing too confusing. Few good bits here and there, but also some events were completely predictable. I liked the original (remake) better.

Between here and there I rode past a company called PGP-putki (PGP-pipe for the Finnish challenged) … wonder what they’re selling 🙂

Finally took the time to redo the gtk+ packaging to be buildable directly from the code tree. The original Debian packaging contains the pristine upstream tarball and a set of patches to apply on top. This is of course fun to maintain as you have to update the packaging separately from the code, but it wasn’t (too) broken so… This setup makes sense when the patches are split by feature, but umm…

In the process I decided to cut down half the build time by removing the separate static build no one is using.

While trying to do the build outside the source directory (cd builddir && ../configure ...) I learned that gtk-doc or the way it’s currently set up for gtk+ rather sucks. Even in non-srcdir build files are built into the srcdir, except for those that end up in the builddir and fail to be found by gtk-doc or whatever. Can’t quite figure out why building the docs touches the (SGML) source files either. And FAQ and tutorial seem to built only during make dist.

Oh well, at least it builds now. And I didn’t see anything obviously wrong when testing it quickly in scratchbox. Minor version upgrades never broke anything, right? Sure… Need to get some serious testing done.

Old habits and processes die hard. While we’re working with open source (which is quite exceptional for a product) there’s still a long way to working like open source. Yes you can see the commits going into the repository, but the whole shebang is driven by internal processes using internal requirements, internal design documents, internal bugzilla, etc.

When you have a process that kind of works already, it’s hard to change to something new. We’re looking into making more technical documentation available after updating them and removing all naughty words first. Personally I’d like to see more planning and everything done in the open beforehand rather than after the IT-2006 release has been made, but that would be clashing with current policies. And we’re not entirely organized to truly handle outside involvement in bugzilla and mailing lists, it’s rather ad-hoc currently but we’re doing what we can.

Hope we get things sorted out sooner rather than later. I’m sure there are lots of areas where everyone would benefit from having more transparent processes. Especially comes to mind the Application Installer and what 3rd party applications can and can not do without resorting to binary patching framework components.

The work never ends. Though the devices are now shipping we didn’t close down and send everyone off for holidays, except for those sensible ones who went on to have their holidays anyway.

Bugfixing and optimisation work continues in the IT-2005 branch and eventually there’s going to be a new, better than ever, software update image made available. The gtk+ builtin stock icons will be there as we figured a nicer way to implement the memory savings. It just took longer and turned out to require additional changes elsewhere.

In related news Matthias Clasen took note of our optimisation effort and turned the builtin stock icons into a builtin icon cache, saving much of the memory overhead even if you do use the icons. It’s a big and untested change so we won’t be using it this time around. (Our change is much more localised, but works only if you don’t try to use the icons, which happens to work for all the 770 apps.)

In the meantime we’ve had Imendians bravely dig into the codebase and merge in all the changes from the gtk+ 2.6 branch. Subversion trunk is now up to the latest release, gtk+ 2.6.10. We’ll be sticking with gtk+ 2.6 for now as 2.8 and/or cairo are a tad slow in their current state. OTOH there are some nice things in newer releases and CVS HEAD we’ll consider cherry picking; icon data cache, stock icon cache, new g_sliced_bread memory allocator in glib, and other miscellaneous optimisations and bugfixes.

There’s also work ongoing to get our massive patch for gtk+ digested, split up in manageable pieces and committed upstream. Current status is being tracked in the Maemo Wiki.