Planet maemo: category "feed:f306d38a63078c6d4b1ba0eef5fce639"

Let’s play by the rules:

Who? Havoc and some other guys. And myself. And some other people without a blog (hello jobi).

What? I’m joining LiTL.

Where? Ye Olde London Town.

When? Next week, actually.

Why? To do The Right Thing. Or maybe it was the other way around? For the details you’ll have to wait, but I hope it’ll be worth it; or better yet, you could join the company

P.S: ¡Feliz Día!

When I said a few weeks ago that an important announcement would be made about the future of Epiphany some people told me it was really obvious what was coming. Seeing the reaction of some to the now public announcement, it seems there’s still some room for disbelief. Maybe the date didn’t help too much, but hey, the whole point of April the 1st is to make you doubt. If all the news are obviously false it’s not really that much fun.

So, yes:

• Starting from now Epiphany trunk is WebKit only, and we’ll slowly get rid of the abstraction layer.
• We aim to release an usable browser for 2.24, but if we can’t make it the 2.22 branch will be released instead. The 2.22 branch will be maintained as long as it’s needed.
• We have started (thanks Diego!) a TODO list for the WebKit backend. I’ll try to work more on this in the coming days.
• Help, as usual, is welcome!

I should have blogged about this before, but I spent the whole week abroad working on some world domination stuff. Should blog about that soon too… (guys, nudge nudge, wake up).

I’ll be leaving Nokia by the end of next. It’s been a sometimes fun, sometimes strange ride, but it’s time to move on to new and bigger (or maybe not so big?) challenges.

Long live to the three-letter toolkit team! (fer, mdk, tko, luc, xan).

 Update:  Now, that’s a coincidence

Already back from the Berlin GTK+ Hackfest (managed to not blog even once from there, a bit lame). All the awesomeness that happened has been covered by our fantastic hackers, so I’ll focus an what happened in the ”Web Room”, where hacking on webkit/gtk+ and epiphany with tko, alp and chpe went on all week long.

It’s been almost 5 months since the last time I blogged about Epiphany. Attentive followers may have noticed that there hasn’t been any Epiphany releases in the 2.21.x cycle so far; why? I’m glad you ask!

I don’t really remember how we got there, but a couple of days ago at the office we ended up talking about the complexity of the codebase we have to deal with. Tommi mentioned the McCabe cyclomatic complexity, “which may be considered a broad measure of soundness and confidence for a program“. According to the Wikipedia article it “directly measures the number of linearly independent paths through a program’s source code“. And there’s this little table, with some pre-defined thresholds:

As others have alread commented, the new tablet is now out. But I’m a software guy, so I’ll talk about the software it runs and let others dissect the hardware.

As Michael says we had to break the API to unfuck cleanup the mess that was our stack until now. This sucks, but I think the benefits are worth it: we now use a slightly modified (but ABI compatible, unlike before) GTK+ 2.10.12, the most egregious crack is gone from Hildon, you have cairo, which is used to render almost all the text you see on the device (but use it with moderation please, it’s not a speed demon yet :)), the theming infrastructure is greatly improved, etc.

The differences in our GTK+ are documented for a change, and there’s an on-going effort to provide a coherent start page for the platform at live.gnome.org/Hildon. Now we need the validation of the community, so please port your apps and write new and excellent free software for Hildon.

I always like to read others people hacking tips, mostly because I suck a lot at using any tool correctly and I am almost always enlightened by them. Today I’ll try to contribute one small trick to the pool.