For this one I worked really hard. Buddy breading, relaxing people in panic at 20 meters deep, keeping yourself cool. And that in Belgian waters (no visibility and freezing cold). We simulated it all. It was harder than most other things I did in my life.

Matthew gets that developers need good equipment.

Glade, Scaffolding (DevStudio), Scintilla & GtkSourceView, Devhelp, gnome-build and Anjuta also got it earlier.

I think with GNOME’s focus on this and a bit less on woman outreach programs; this year we could make a difference.

Luckily our code is that good that it can be reused for what is relevant today.

It’s all about what we focus on.

Can we please now go back at making software?

ps. I’ve been diving in Croatia. Trogir. It was fantastic. I have some new reserves in my mental system.

ps. Although we’re very different I have a lot of respect for your point of view, Matthew.

While Nemo Mobile OS doesn’t ship with udisks2 nor with the GLib/GIO GVfs2 modules that interact with it, we still wanted removable volume management working with the file indexer.

I will be doing a presentation about Tracker at FOSDEM this year.

Metadata Tracker is now being used not only on GNOME, the N900 and N9, but is also being used on the Jolla Phone. On top a software developer for several car brands, Pelagicore, claims to be using it with custom made ontologies; SerNet told us they are integrating Tracker for use as search engine backend for Apple OS X SMB clients and last year Tracker integration with Netatalk was done by NetAFP. Other hardware companies have approached the team about integrating the software with their products. In this presentation I’d like to highlight the difficulties those companies encountered and how the project deals with them, dependencies to get a minimal system up and running cleanly, recent things the upstream team is working on and I’d like to propose some future ideas.

Link on fosdem.org

Dear Mark,

Your team and you yourself are working on the Jolla Phone. I’m sure that you guys are doing a great job and although I think you’ve been generating hype and vaporware until we can actually buy the damn thing, I entrust you with leading them.

As their leader you should, I would like to, allow them to provide us with all of the device’s source code and build environments of their projects so that we can have the exact same binaries. With exactly the same I mean that it should be possible to use MD5 checksums. I’m sure you know what that means and you and I know that your team knows how to provide geeks like me with this. I worked with some of them together during Nokia’s Harmattan and Fremantle and we both know that you can easily identify who can make this happen.

The reason why is simple: I want Europe to develop a secure phone similar to how, among other open source projects, the Linux kernel can be trusted. By peer review of the source code.

Kind regards,

A former Harmattan developer who worked on a component of the Nokia N9 that stores the vast majority of user’s privacy.

ps. I also think that you should reunite Europe’s finest software developers and secure the funds to make this workable. But that’s another discussion which I’m eager to help you with.

(Or why our project’s name wasn’t wrong after all)

As I got contacted by two different companies last few days who both had questions about integrating Tracker into their device, I started thinking that perhaps I should illustrate what Tracker can already do today.

Recapping from my last blog article; I worked a bit on this concept during the weekend.

Hey former Harmattan peeps. How about we do a little bit of this Jolla stuff after our hours and see where it goes? You never know, and neither have any of the technologies and improvements that we did for Nokia harmed us. It’s at #jollamobile on FreeNode. Btw. Ping me if you are going to FOSDEM. Maybe we can discuss how we can revive some of our Harmattan projects? Personally, I’m thinking about reducing the role of Tracker’s FS miner in Jolla by first refactoring libtracker-extract and adapting buteo to call for metadata extraction instead of letting miner-fs pick the newly added files up. Dead to file system monitoring on phones!

At the same time I’m also working with Calligra a lot lately. Which is by the way awesome stuff. Can’t choose.

Hey Aaron. I mostly agree with your post. I don’t fully agree, however, with “We needed Android because we couldn’t do it ourselves”:

Mostly Qt (and also KDE) developers, and some GNOME developers who where still left developing for Nokia since the N900 and earlier, made the Nokia N9 Swipe phone. Technically the product is a success; look at the N9′s reviews to verify that. Marketing-wise it’s sort of a failure due to, in my humble opinion, a CEO switch at the wrong time and because he didn’t have enough time to learn how good the phone actually was. But even without much marketing, the product is being sold as we speak.

I do agree if you mean with your blog post that for example the N9 happened thanks to local leadership. The leadership that made it happen was employed at Nokia though, and not really a person in either the Qt or the GNOME camp. Rather a group of passionate leadership-taking people at Nokia.

It might have contributed that these technical leaders didn’t see how strong they could have been together during the CEO switch, at the time when Ari Jaaksi left Nokia as soon as Stephen Elop’s plans became clear. I’m not sure.

I think what we can learn from the episode is to put more trust in the person, and the leadership-taking people, who lead the next product developed the way the N9 was developed. Give those people more time onstage at open source conferences.

I’m also sick and tired of Free Software being inefficient and self-destructive due to internal schism. It’s one of the reasons why I’m not working much on Free Software nowadays. As I’m not much of a leader myself, I silently hope some local leader would change this. Maybe somebody at Digia? Jolla? If I can help, let me know.