Open source is a huge part of Facebook engineering. Whether we’re building new data infrastructure tools like Corona and Presto to manage our warehouses on Hadoop, releasing a new mobile build tool like Buck, or improving PHP runtime with HHVM, open source projects are integral to our operations.

The hypothesis Facebook is exploring with Open Academy (I love the fact that we have Akademy already :P)  is that the best way to learn about software engineering is to do software engineering. As simple as that sounds, we have not traditionally done a good job with this in academia. CS departments may provide a project experience as part of the curriculum, but it typically does not map well to a real world software engineering experience. Facebook and the partner universities wants to do better.

To help bridge this gap between school and industry, last spring Facebook teamed up with Jay Borenstein, a computer science professor at Stanford, to launch Open Academy. Open Academy is a program designed to provide a practical, applied software engineering experience as part of a university student’s CS education. The program works closely with key faculty members at top CS universities to launch a course that matches students with active open source projects and mentors and allows them to receive academic credit for their contributions to the open source code base.

The idea is that partnering with selected open source projects holds a great deal of promise on a number of levels; it will give students exposure to learning how to come up to speed in an established code base, revision control, project estimation and access to examples of good software engineering practices beyond what we are able to provide inside university walls, among many other things.

One question that might be on top of your mind is: “how is this different than Google Summer of Code?” One key difference is the tight integration with universities. Facebook OpenAcademy runs as a university course offering for which a student receives a grade and academic credit. It also allows the university teaching staff to stay very involved and work in tandem with the open source mentors to give students good support for their software development efforts. Another difference is the team element. This course offering partners students from around the globe on teams that work together, which IMHO is exactly the way KDE works.

In a nutshell, the program works like this:

• A student team of 3-8 students, potentially spanning multiple universities, is formed
• A matching process is run that puts a student team with an open source project
• The team and a “mentor” from the open source project are flown to a location for a weekend ramp up hackathon (the location is Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, CA). The students can work on improving the project in two ways: by knocking out low hanging fruit issues that already exist or by identifying and pursuing new functionality
• The students will work on projects for between 8-20 weeks depending upon the schedules of the universities involved Univerisity faculty will be closely involved and consult with the mentor when determining final student grades. Expectations will be set with the students that states the coding contributions they make – the quality and ambition of them – will be the main factor determining their grade
• Start date: January-Feb depending on university
• Feb 7-9 Hackathon at Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park, CA
• Midterm Acknowledgment (tbd)
• End date: Mar – Jun depending on university

Summary of expectations for mentors:

• Attend Kickoff Hackathon at Facebook HQ Feb 7-9, 2014 (your flight and hotel will be paid for)
• Meet the students working on your project(s)
• Help the students select project goals and develop plans to achieve them
• Set expectations for how you like to communicate with the team
• Be responsive to requests from the team during the course
• As often as possible, attend weekly, 30 minute remote team meetings (IRC, Hangout or equivalent)
• Be prepared to provide the course instructor with a grade recommendation at the end of the course.
• Overall time comittment: You are obviously in control of this and it is also proportional to the number of students you decide to have, but not counting the hackathon, 3-5 hours per week is our expectation

I am asking every interested mentor to fill in project proposals here: http://community.kde.org/Open_Academy . I am excited that KDE can have some slots in this program and as with every other program out there that brings students to open source I am sure KDE is the best place for a student to learn more about software engineering.

If you have questions, feel free to email me.

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This doesn’t mean that I will go away from KDE, neither from Qt. It just means that I will contribute more on my free time (as it was before Nokia acquired Trolltech) than during working hours.

I am thrilled with this opportunity and I am sure that all of you who know me are also happy with this announcement.

I will be a little bit offline the next days due to my move, but I will be checking emails regularly

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Meanwhile, we finally released a game that I’m really proud that is called “Incredible Circus”. It’s the kind of game that is really addictive :). In three weeks we achieved 200k downloads on Nokia Store and today is available for the N9. It’s also a really good showcase for Qt. If you have a Symbian^3 or MeeGo device, just follow the link to try the game.

You can also check it out on the video below.

Apart from that, I’m updating my machine and as soon as I have a developer environment again I’ll start hacking on Plasma again. Probably fixing some bugs, right Aaron?

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Picture by The Rocketeer

You can find kdeplasma-addons on https://projects.kde.org/projects/kde/kdeplasma-addons and you can easily clone the repo using:

git clone kde:kdeplasma-addons

Assuming that you did the trick below in your ~/.gitconfig file:

[url "git://anongit.kde.org/"]
insteadOf = kde:
[url "ssh://git@git.kde.org/"]
pushInsteadOf = kde:

I have been working with git for almost four years now and I used a lot of tools to create projects and help with visualizing repositories. With ReviewBoard and RedMine all integrated, the commit mails, integration with BKO and other features (a lot of them were already present with svn) I can say that KDE’s git infrastructure is one of the most complete and professional that I’ve ever seen. It’s really very “PRO” and I would love to have any of our sysadmins working on my IT department. Guys, you really rock! (besides doing an amazing work).

I think that it’s fair also to thank KO that sponsored Ian to work and do the conversions of kdelibs and kdebase. This was not an easy job and it’s really a pain to do the conversion *right*. Of course we may find some rough edges right now as we still need to get used to new workflows and new tools but IMHO we will overcome that and soon we will feel the benefits of git

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Invest in sharing! by Toban Black

Following the awesome work done by our sysadmins, I implemented a backend for the share data engine that supports the use of KDE’s official pastebin service: http://paste.kde.org .

This way people using trunk will already have this support upstream and people using earlier versions (which includes 4.6 !) can also use the script provided by Andrea Scarpino thanks to the brand new Get Hot New Stuff support that I integrated into the Pastebin applet for 4.6

Today I also signed up to Flattr, in order to test this micropayment service that sounds like a great idea to donate small amounts to people that do great work and create awesome content. I must say that I signed up after wanting to Flattr the work done by Lydia (aka Nightrose) and Tom Albers (aka toma).

Of course I don’t expect to earn a lot of money this way, but It’s awesome to be able to help some great workers and also add the possibility of earning a little bit of money, specially in the year of your wedding

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The Cloud - by web@kstp.com

Since some time ago I started to worry that some “vital” information for me was on the “The Cloud” and that most of the service providers didn’t provide a way to retrieve my stuff or a support line.

I started to worry also about privacy for the first time in my life: what if companies suddenly becomes evil? Hmm. That could be bad. The “big players” are able to know everything about me: the email I read, the news I read, who are my friends, my family, my pictures….and much more! They could relate all this information to know what I like, what I dislike and so on.

Of course there are benefits. By knowing me more, they can offer better services that could be refined search, special advertisement or even make it easier to find that friend from kinder garden that I’ve never met after I was 4 (?)…

But what is the problem if they turn evil or decide that I do not deserve anymore these goods?

Some months ago I started to “migrate” at least some of my important stuff to open source and “controlled by me” services. I’m now sharing a server with one of my friends where I have my own email service for instance. I also contributed some patches to Akregator to let me share my news with my friends. I started to just use identi.ca and let Twitter “replicate” that, so my friends from Twitter get my thoughts. But in worst case I can just install Status.net on my server and voilà. I’m also looking forward ownCloud.

Yesterday and today I had the proof that I’m not (completely) paranoid (and trust me, I’m one of the last ones to be paranoid about subjects :P).

Starting from yesterday: after getting an invitation to try Diaspora (thanks Lydia!), and linking my twitter account there I discovered that my Twitter account was “suspended”. Ow great. I was supposed to get an email when this happens and there was nothing on my inbox neither on spam. I tried filling a support request and I always get the “Could not perform the task. Wait a few minutes” message.

I don’t know how but I finally received an automatic email from one of this support tickets that actually managed to be sent (all the time I tried I received an error…). I followed all the guidelines and answered the email asking for my account back. Tom pointed out that twitter had some security issues…but it has been already 24 hours that they disabled my account without sending even an email. If it wasn’t Diaspora I would never discover that it was suspended.

Today, while reading my morning news, I discover that Richard had a problem with Google and can’t solve that. He tried email, forums and everything else he could. Ah, great! He even has an Android phone that is pretty useless without a Google account. I’m sorry Rich

“The Cloud” is awesome, isn’t it? That’s why we need projects like StatusNet, Diaspora, ownCloud and Open Desktop (UPDATE: thanks to the ones that pointed out that open desktop isn’t actually open source).

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However, just to keep everybody updated before I do a full post or read an article on the dot here it is a simple video that means a lot!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdLCGCTu8w

Basically we put Plasma mobile to run on top of MeeGo and thanks to a lot of Marco’s work we already supported screen rotation! Besides the “fail” that drivers don’t properly report that the screen is being rotated on this device, pressing some keys we can make the view rotate and then comes the magic

Of course we also put the Plasma netbook to run on the device but the mobile one was really nice to play with our hands Keep your eyes on the Planet as I think more people have news to share

More about the sprint and the conference after the break

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You may be asking yourself: “why the heck is this useful?”. The answer is: everytime you share some article on Akregator it publishes the title of the article, the link to the article and put’s a tag “#share”. This way you can use the tag feed to retrieve the news that your friends are sharing: just add the RSS feed to your feed reader and voilà This provides a feature that looks like the one that Google Reader provides, but in completely open environment!

If you are interested in reading my shares, just add this to your reader: http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share/rss .

I’m on vacations so it has been hard to keep doing any development as I’m busy traveling with my fiance but I can post about some stuff that I’ve been developing before my vacations!

See you!

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The “Join the Game” campaign was launched to create another way of contributing to the project: you donate some money to the project in order to help organizing developer sprints, to represent KDE on conference and trade shows, maintaining the current infrastructure and help the e.V. to legally represent the project in different manners.

As soon as the campaign was launched I wanted to be part of it too because I know how hard it is to sponsor all the activities that we have and how important the activities are. Some weeks after joining the game I received this awesome gift from the KDE e.V. It came in a simple box and when I opened I could find a blue box (no, it’s not a T.A.R.D.I.S. :P) and a letter.

It was really a nice emotion to read the letter that was sent to me, signed by the president of the KDE e.V. (really signed, not that image of the signature that organizations usually use). Opening the blue box another surprise: a nice silver card with my name, the KDE e.V. logo and the number of my membership: 0006! It was a surprise and I am very very happy to be an early adopter of this! And the cherry of this awesome cake: a playing piece (the same that you see on the posters), made of wood and with the KDE logo painted on it and also my membership number. Just great! Congratulations to everybody involved on this campaign! Check below some pictures:

The Letter - really signed

You can see the KDE logo in the center of the box

What you see when you open the box

The Membership card

Playing Piece - front

Playing Piece - back

And you? What are you waiting for? Help KDE and be part of it: Join the Game!

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I started to hack on this new dataengine and now it’s ready! Since some weeks ago I moved from kdereview to kdebase and now you can write plugins for your favourite services using any of the scripting languages that Kross supports today. Later I will enable GHNS on the pastebin applet so if you have a special service that you want to write a plugin you don’t have to wait for a KDE release (that’s what happened with the old dataengine), you will just write it using JavaScript/Python/Ruby/etc and upload to kde-apps.org . Neat! I hope that a lot of users will use this feature and that this dataengine will be specially useful for mobile devices.

To complete the cycle, yesterday I finished the port of the pastebin applet to use the new dataengine and I advice everyone out there that is using the “pastebin dataengine” (I really don’t think there is anybody, but….) to change your plasmoid to use the new one. People running trunk are already experiencing the new dataengine Ah, almost forgot: now it supports remote files because I use KIO for all the file operations. So just grab your samba/nfs/webdav files and share them using your favourite text/image service!

Playing with dataengines I started to hack on another topic: sharing of articles on Akregator. I started to feel too much dependent on Google’s infrastructure and decided to move some of my stuff “out of the cloud”. I started with Google Reader and put all my feeds on Akregator. Kudos for Google for allowing me to export my list of feeds and kudos to Akregator that imports the file. Everybody is happy and Google is not evil trying to hold my data.

The next step was the “share” feature of Google Reader that I like very very much. First, to read my friend’s shares I could just get the URL from their “details” on Google Reader and put the URL on Akregator. Kudos for Google again for using rss feeds into this “share feature”. It made my life easier and I could subscribe to my friend’s shared items.

The missing bit was my shares! How could I share with my friends articles that I wanted? I started playing with Plasma’s  Microblog dataengine and successfully started sharing articles using my microblog account on identi.ca. Thanks to identi.ca the shares also went to my twitter and could also go to facebook!!!!! When I shared an article it made a post with the title of the article plus the URL to access the article and the tag “#share”. People interested in reading my shares can subscribe to my dents or tweets or go to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share or even subscribe to http://identi.ca/morpheuz/tag/share/rss on their feed readers. Identi.ca did a great job here providing feeds for everything. I couldn’t find the feeds for my tags on tweeter but maybe it was just me lacking knowledge. By the way, thanks to Lydia for helping me to figure out this URLs. I couldn’t have done without her hehe

Update: to have feeds synced between my different computers I’m using automated scripts with unison. Every time I login and logout unison syncs the feeds with a server. So I just need to login on a different computer of mine and I have the same “status” for my feeds.

Right now I started to move all the code to a proper Akregator plugin and I hope that soon it’s finished and merged into trunk so everybody can enjoy this feature!

As I was playing with dataengines I decided to fix some bugs on the weather dataengine as one of my friends (Aloisio) just migrated to KDE and faced this annoying bugs related to network and retrieval of the weather. There were a lot of small issues here and there but at the end of the day (after a lot of hours hacking and not so much lines of code =/) I could fix the problems and some others that I found on the way.

Summary: 5 pastebin bugs/wishes closed + 3 bug fixes on weather that were not reported yet (I couldn’t find them at least).

Busy, busy, busy day!!

Next post: a little surprise that I received for joining the game

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The Bug - watch out the way it looks to you!

To be honest I wasn’t expecting anything “technical” in the sense that I wasn’t expecting a technical explanation to the problem itself (you can find it in numerous places on the web) or for a possible solution, but I wanted to watch how Jobs would deal with with the situation.

Being honest again, he did what he does best! At first, he acknowledged the problem as it couldn’t be denied. Then he said that actually they did a favor to the smartphone’s industry because there were other phones with the same problem (showed pictures of other phones having the same issue – what doesn’t prove much, but…) but instead of “hiding” the antenna and hiding the problem, they actually put a big “X” on the problem (see picture below).

iPhone4 antenna

From my point of view it was just what we would call a “n00b” mistake . I mean, Apple is doing phones since not so many time ago. It’s their 4th device (iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone4 now), and they just didn’t face this problem before and had the brilliant idea. The problem may show up on other phones? Sure, but I’m sure that the other manufacturers know about the problem and try to “fix” it, being that hiding the antenna inside the case or whatever.

The next steps were just the table’s “turn over” (not sure if this expression exists in English, but it works pretty well in Portuguese ): some (small) numbers about the how many people were actually affected by the bug. It was less than 1 in a 100 users (a beautiful way of saying less than 1% hehe). They get these numbers from the people that actually complained at Apple Care about the issue so those out there that just reading Engadget and Gizmodo about the issue were not counted of course.

But besides the number being so small, Apple does care about it’s users. All of them. See the kind of words used here? This is the place to do the magic trick. This is the place where you say that you’re not evil or bad but you actually care. Just after stating that you human enough to make mistakes, you ensure your “human position” showing that you care about others. Genious! It’s a statement that just makes the others stronger .

In order to take care of those 1% Apple will give for free cases for the iPhones, what prevents the bug and users will even be able to choose colors! And if they do not want the case, then a refund is offered. In Brazil this would be something that they would need to do because of the law: if you sell something that doesn’t work, you need to refund. I’m not sure how this works out on US but anyway, he transformed the user’s “right” into a company’s “feature”. Points again for Apple and Jobs for playing nice with the words.

After that, it was just more slides about all the nice features of iPhone4, why you should have one and more and more statements that Apple loves it’s users (yes, the word love is used in all the slides).

Apple and Love

Summary: from the technical point of view it was just “we don’t have a way to fix this as this is a hardware problem and it’s a huge problem then.”. But saying so is the same as pushing the picture of our fellow bug in every user’s face.

Instead of doing that, they will solve the issue by giving the users a rubber case that costs less than 1 dollar and then create a link between the users and the company that is: “we are all humans. have you ever made a mistake? this is our first mistake. sorry. take this gift. ah, by the way we love you.”. This creates compassion (every human did something wrong once in his life) and then people stop bashing the company and it’s product. This “love history” also reinforces that they are humans, enabling them to screw things eventually. So with a few minutes, Jobs got our fellow and dressed him properly transforming The Bug in a Feature:

The feature - not so ugly anymore!

From my point of view, the truth is that Apple is a company with a product that costs you some money and just like any other company in any other industry, the products should be properly tested and should not have this kind of problems that are not solvable (what if they didn’t have the luck of the case solving the issue?). The good about open source products is that at least from the software side we can fix stuff as quick as possible. So please vendors: pay attention to the hardware you manufacture and leave them as open as possible to software that we want to put into that!

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Instead of doing a technical blog today, I will just say that during this aKademy KDE ‘called home’ for the first time. This means that for the first time in history we had KDE running on a mobile phone and we made a call with it! This was AWESOME! Just a summary: Plasma-Mobile and a plasmoid that worked as a dialer did the work, using the phone API of Maemo5 on a N900.

As Aaron noticed, our first call was a little bit more “interesting” than Graham Bell’s one. The first words on a telephone in history are:

Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.

Interesting…..but you may think that the transcription below is a little bit more interesting. I will also omit some context that would explain some of the questions/answers during this talk as I think that it may turn this more…let’s say…special Enjoy!

My phone rings (for the sake of curiosity, my ringtone is “Snow” by Red Hot Chili Peppers) and the ID of the caller is “+41″. I answer and the call drops. I tell Helio that it should be some company from Brazil during TeleMarketing. While we walk to the bus for aKademy’s day trip it rings again. Alexis Menard is the caller this time:

Me: Bonsoir! er, Bonjour Alexis!
Alexis: Guess what?!
Me: hhmm, you’re going to miss the dray trip because you just woke up?
Alexis: NO! Guess what ‘amiguinho’!? (note: ‘amiguinho’ means ‘little friend’ in portuguese)
Me: Oh, I got it! You’re the guy! Your bed is warmer than it should be?
Alexis: What?! No, no, no! Come on! GUESS WHAT?!
Me: I don’t know then! Let me think….ow yeah! GREAT! This phone call was made through the Plasma-Mobile stuff that we did yesterday?!
Alexis: Yes!! Finally!! I’m turning off my computer and meet you at the bus!
Me: OK! See you!

And then I tell everybody that was by my side that it was the first KDE phone call in history! REALLY GREAT! The conversation above may seem non-sense but all the questions had a reason and the answers too

Soon we should post some more technical bits about Plasma-Mobile and also I plan to talk a little bit about KDE-Pim-Mobile, the new Sharebin engine (that will support scripted plugins and GHNS) and if you want to contribute to some use cases of Plasma-Mobile take a look at this link.

As a kind of “sad note”, I would also like to tell you that the QEdje scriptengine was removed due (my) lack of maintenance of the QEdje project.

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During what I call “bad days” I focused on writing the new Plasma data engine for the pastebin services. Actually, I decided to call it “sharebin” as pastebin remembers about just one service and doesn’t mean too much for the end user, while “share” is a great word to describe what this engine actually does. Basically it will be plugin based and the plugins (backends for services) can be written using JavaScript.

The benefits? It’s easier to extend and support new services so no more bugs on bko asking for this or that service (you can *easily*  implement it and provide it through kde-apps.org). Because of that, applets using the new data engine will be able to use GHNS to extend the amount of services that it uses.

As soon as we unfreeze trunk, I’ll send the engine for review and then update the pastebin applet to support it. Ah, we are also using KIO inside the data engine now! So, we also have support for “remote shares” (remote as in getting a file that is in the network – samba share for example). Good news right?

Now, I started to help the KDE PIM dudes and KDAB with their mobile version of the suite and anything that is related to it. So, I’m really looking forward having a great PIM suite for mobile devices. It uses all of the KDE infrastructure and the brand new Qt technology for creating rich UI interfaces: QML. It’s important to say that everything is being done on the open and upstream. Take a look at kmail mobile right now:

At the same time I’ll be in touch with the guys working on the Qt Components project, to provide feedback and use the stuff they are getting done. This is a really important project for QML and if you ever played with QML you know what I’m talking about .

I’m also going to Akademy this year thanks to the help of the e.V. and it’s sponsors (special thanks to Claudia that helped me with the booking ). I’ll have a talk there with my fellow Alexis Menard about Plasma mobile and I hope that everybody that will be there enjoy the talk and the paper that we are working on! I also recommend the talk about Qt Components from Eduardo Fleury! If you want to talk about KDE Mobile, any other mobile subject (MeeGo, Maemo), anything KDE related, just about soccer or say hello…just do it I’m too small to prevent you from doing any of the above listed things

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And if for some reason you are wondering about the future of the netbook project, don’t worry Plasma Netbook and Plasma Mobile, besides being oriented for smaller form factors than a regular Desktop / Notebook, have different concepts as they’re serving for different purposes.  Marco (notmart) and all the Plasma team will still keep working on the netbook shell and if you read this post you can see the netbook shell running on Intel’s Jax10 devices. This was done to  give us an idea about how the netbook interface would behave on touchscreen devices and helped Marco to do a lot of bug fixing and improvements.

Back to the mobile shell, this interface presented here was created for the same Jax10 device but the architecture was designed to support different “Views” (as in MVC) for even smaller devices (N900 anyone?) , while still sharing the same concepts though. Even if the interface was not designed for the N900 for example, we were able to run it with great performance and the usability was very good. What means that we’ll just need to slightly tweak the view to make it perfect for the N900. And all of this can be done by designers as the View is 100% done in QML

So our first step was to brainstorm about launching menus (and how regular grid views seems to be so boring) and how different contexts affects the way you use your mobile. I mean, we are making desktops aware of contexts more and more and it’s silly to think that you don’t use this concept on your other devices.

We thought about having regular activities so the user would be able to have different set of plasmoids for each context that he’s working on. However it still needs to be very easy to do some stuff like:

• Going to your dialer if it’s a phone;
• Change between activities (later we can make the shell location aware so it’s possible to auto switch);
• Launch applications easily and context aware (presenting the applications related to that context);

In order to achieve these goals we came with this idea: having a regular containment and a kind of panel that auto hides itself after some seconds. Important to say that right now this panel is 100% QML and is not like the desktop’s panel (that is a containment in another view). This makes the shell use less memory and be faster as it’s just playing with pixmaps in the end. After hiding, it shows a collapsed representation of the panel at the bottom that the user can either click on it or drag it up to show back the panel. This makes it really easy to change between one activity to another one while keeping the user interface clean enough so the user can play with his applets

First Mockup by Nuno

The panel while in it's collapsed mode

But then you ask me: “I want to launch applications ? How can I do that ?”. One solution is to add an application launcher as one of the main activities and the other one is to enable context aware application launchers. So, looking at the pictures above think that you are at the “Internet Activity” and you want to launch your applications. You can always launch the application related to one plasmoid from it so if you have an RSS Feed plasmoid you are able to launch your feeds reader using this plasmoid.  But if the applications doesn’t have a related applet, in our concept you can just flip horizontally the current activity and you’ll find on it’s backside a context aware launcher that have shortcut icons for your applications and it’s size is proportional to the times that you launched the application and how much related to that activity the application is. This way it’s easy to find the most important applications for that activity.

Activity flipping to show...

...the context aware application launcher that right now is just a gradient

It’s not there right now but the idea is that at the top we will have this small bar (that will be a containment) to show the status related widgets like battery, signals strength and other stuff very plasma, like clocks! It’s not there yet, but it will be!

Regarding the transitions from one activity to another we thought about sliding the activities up and down so there is the idea that we are throwing the current activity somewhere else and bringing the new one.

Throwing away the current activity....

...bringing the new one and fading out the panel....

...and the switch is done!

\Basically this is the concept behind the Plasma Mobile shell and after this it was just a matter of thinking about nice animations that would make sense, tweaking it’s timers and polishing icons It’s clear to us that during the development we’ll find flaws in this ideas and we will need to fix them, as well as that the implementation right now is a little bit dirty due to time constraints (Tokamak doesn’t last forever unfortunately). Next steps ? Fix all the ugly code, finish implementing the launch menu, polishing and bug fixing…what means that we just bootstrapped!

Ah, if you are wondering: the Plasma Netbook project still keeps up to speed and is not sharing this backend (besides sharing a lot from libplasma). The deal is that the Netbook really needs it’s own concept and implementation while Plasma Mobile is really meant to be used on smaller devices than netbooks

Plasma Mobile before deploying

Plasma Mobile on Jax10

I would like to thanks all tokamakers for providing great ideas and also INdT’s designers that gave me great ideas along the last years that I could apply for this concept.

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First of all I would like to thank Will Stephenson, openSUSE and KDE e.V. (and of course everybody who supports the KDE e.V.) for hosting this developer sprint. It was awesome to put together people from three different teams that develop stuff that have a huge overlap area (Plasma + KWin + Oxygen). Really, thank you very much. I’m proud that you’re part of the KDE community!

Weather has been good (compared to Oslo and Finland where I was spending the last weeks) and the office is really good to work on. We have a lot of different devices to hack on (big computers with touchscreens, small devices from Intel and Nokia and the regular notebooks and netbooks) and we were able to expose a little bit more of our work to the local community (as well as see some old pictures of a sprint that happened at this same place in 2002).

From my side I was planning to bump the Pastebin applet with some new ideas and work on Plasmate and shell mobile but it seems that in the end I was able to just stick with one of these three targets. Anyway I hope that I can finish at least one more of then until the release of KDE SC 4.5.

Here is everybody that joined our developer sprint and keep watching this blog because tomorrow I’ll have some cool stuff to show everybody! Again: thanks to our hosts and to the Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams for being so great!

Tokamak Group Photo: Plasma, KWin and Oxygen teams

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First of all, during Camp KDE it was awesome to talk to people like Jos, Celeste, Alexandra, Till, Leo and Jeff (and many others). It’s good to share your thoughts with many people that you just don’t have this big bandwith for chat that you have when you’re physically together

Our awesome dragons

I spent last month studying and working with QML, trying to get the most of it and I think that I (and the team that I work with of course) reached a very good level of knowledge regarding the new Qt’s declarative language. We have some expertise with declarative languages for some time now (started with Edje three years ago) and went through QEdje and now we have a proper Qt solution for this that will probably be released with Qt 4.7.

QML is awesome. Big tip: just try to avoid “leaking” code from your c++ controllers and models and you’ll get any interface that your designers want for free . We achieved very good results working with this architecture for software and I really recommend it for everybody (I’m not talking about this right now as it can be a whole paper – hmm, maybe a paper for next Akademy ? ).

Alexis showing QML mobile shell on N900

Ok, so after studying QML and talking a lot with Alexis and others (like Helio) we had great ideas to try out on mobile devices (read N900 here). Let’s see what we can do during tokamak 4. Good to read Aaron’s post about it and to know that he’s excited with this possibility too. I talked about this during my talk at Latinoware conference and right now we can expand and make “my dreams” come true. We have really good use cases for this and we should really focus on this at first. We need help from designers (Nuno and oxygen team?) and usability experts (Celeste, here I am again – I know you should hate me every time I say your name under this circumstances hehe ). The design of this kind of product should be the first step after studying technologies.

Talking about KDE: for KDE 4.5 I’m really going to change the pastebin applet. Feature-wise it’s really in good shape but it’s not very healthy code-wise and we can really improve it and it’s data engines to something more user friendly and also that can be easily improved with the use of plugins (anybody thinking about service providers and GHNS ?). First of all, it’s not user friendly to call it “pastebin”. My mom have no clue what pastebin is. For sure she knows what “Share it” means and we can make use of KIPI plugins to allow it to export things to Flickr and other services too. So, for 4.5 expect some big improvements on the developer side of pastebin. From a user’s perspective it should just have a better config dialog, interface and will have support for much more services (at least I hope so).

Just upgraded to trunk (KDE SC 4.5) and it already looks awesome: from the KDE theme to the new notification messages that Marco is working on. Amarok (as always) had (good) surprises for me and this “Photo” widget is awesome. It ties together the awesome experience of one of your senses (audition) to another sense (vision) and it’s awesome. Great pictures from my favorite artists and songs. Amarok++.

Amarok and new Photo Widget

Right now, I want to work on so many cool stuff and I just don’t have the time. Probably work is going to consume most of my time for the next 2 months but I’ll make it work and will help KDE to get even better and to start working on Maemo for example. Konquer the world!

Ah, as a simple tip: if you own an N900 just install the “Angry birds” game, it’s awesome hehe

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It all started when I received my N900 from Maemo’s developer program that is just awesome as it gives the opportunity for developer to have access to the platform and keep developing for it. Comparing to other options: for some fruit company’s platform you have to pay to develop for a closed platform and for other you receive devices to develop to an open platform.  Big kudos to Nokia for everything it’s doing with Maemo.

Regarding Maemo, I used my N900 in the last month on all business trips that I did and the vision of having contacts instead of accounts really made a difference. It was so easy to use Skype or my SIP provider (Inphonex) while I was out of the country that my mobile phone just worked as it should always work: as a personal extension of my home phone. Perfect.

So, the trips began with Camp KDE and I went to Los Angeles one week before the conference itself as I had some days to take as vacations. It was really great, from watching a live record of one of my favourite TV shows (Two and a Half men) to watching all the amazing talks during Camp KDE it was all great. I would like to also send some kudos to Camp KDE organizers. I know how hard it is to actually make an event like that happen.

The gate where the show was recorded

After Camp KDE I just had three days at home and then went to Oslo/Tampere for Qt work and it was really great to actually see snow for the second time. First time I’ve ever seen it snowing actually (the first time I needed to go up to a mountain last Tokamak hehe – thanks Marius for the chance!! it was awesome).

During this trips I had some ideas regarding mobile platforms and discussed a little bit of it during my talk at Camp KDE and also with Alexis Menard (former Troll). I think that for Tokamak 4 we’re going to have some nice ideas to work on for mobile platforms. It’s important to say that this is all at “pre-pre-pre-pre beginning stage” and that we have a lot of work to be done on the Netbook effort for example that Marco is taking care in an awesome way

Back to reality I have some work to be done and we are already setting things up for Bossa Conference. So I have Carnival, Tokamak 4 and Bossa Conference in a row. And still job to be done…well, I think I can handle that

Bossa Conference

So, this is all that happened last month (trust me, a lot happened) and next post will be a little more technical or at least more KDE related and for sure I’ll have some more Maemo related posts in the (very) near future (specially after Tokamak 4).

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Basically we have been working with the trolls in this release for a year now and it was awesome to see how we got from 4.5 to 4.6. All the work done on the APIs, bug fixing, the release process and also making it more open. The LGPL license, the opening of repositories and bug tracker.

I’ve been advertising about a little piece of this game that is QGraphicsAnchorLayout that is where we spent most of our efforts for this release. We hope that this will help people out there working with rich UI applications and in the need of better layout classes.

Sometime ago I also wrote about some demos for the Maemo and Symbian platforms showing the power of Qt Animation Framework and Qt 4.6 itself as it improved a lot in performance (besides the fact of integration with the platforms as we have the same code for both platforms).

You can take a look at the demos at the video below and try on your mobile phones downloading the sis/deb files from this place. Remember that these are UI demos and some of them are not fully implemented like the Hyper UI not doing real phone calls or not being able to add items to the shopping list (however the Weather and My Budget are probably very, if not 100%, functional).

If you want to take a look at the demo’s code, be my guest and check gitorious for it . Ah, for those that missed the link above for the download, here it is again: http://qtlabs.openbossa.org/mobile-demos/4.6.0/ . Summary of Qt 4.6 ? Ow !!!

Take a look at the official Qt 4.6 pages too:

• http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/downloads

• http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/symbian

• http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/maemo

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Some people talked about it but I usually don’t pay attention or even read some articles but unluckily I was doing some reviews of Palm Pre, the new Zune and other devices and it’s software and for some reason I landed in the article of Free Software Magazine regarding Google Chrome OS and how KDE and GNOME shot each other on the head. I really don’t pay attention to any flame wars or trolls and usually just ignore these topics as they don’t take us anywhere. But this one got my attention (unluckily, again).

I’m writing about it for a few reasons: first the (lack) of technical background present in the article (I really don’t know the author and I’m not judging his technical skills besides the ones shown in the article), second due the fact of being a “Free Software” magazine (as it points out in the domain name at least) and third due the fact that people just love hype .

First Act

Let’s talk about technical facts. If I remember correctly the author says that Chrome OS will use a “GNU/Linux” kernel. There is no such thing. The kernel is Linux: period. If it will use a GNU/Linux system is another history. Then there is this talk about Pulseaudio and this is a “hot topic” in the Linux audio system world.

There are people who like it and (from what I hear everyday in mailing lists and IRC channels) more people who doesn’t like it. Personally I don’t use it as I don’t have the need and my distro (slackware) does not ship it by default. The excuse of the author for the fact that Chrome OS was not using GNOME/KDE and/or GNU Linux was that none of them provides what Google wants and because there were too many options and none of them was good enough. If none of them is good enough I’ll let for the reader to decide about it but that is not why Google didn’t use it.

First of all Chrome OS will have the help of Canonical to build it’s stuff so probably behind the Webkit stuff that the user will see as the “workspace” it will just be a regular Linux distribution (probably Ubuntu based) behind the scenes. In the end it is a GNU/Linux based system.

One could argue about Android not using a GNU/Linux based system and people often confuse Android with Chrome OS (even Google doesn’t have an answer for it yet and Googlers says that probably in the future they will converge to the same thing). Android not using GNU/Linux is true and they don’t even use some common systems like HAL to handle hardware making some (ugly?) hacks to do what HAL would solve out of the box for them. But I understand their side and probably they had reasons to do that (dead lines, licenses, etc…).

Well, I’ll not talk about Google’s work right now. They are doing their job in the sense that they are presenting the world a new way of looking at the desktop. But some arguments like: “there are too many ‘desktops’ libraries” and this is due the fact GNU/Linux has two different desktop environments are just…how can I say…ah! these are arguments that comes from people with no technical background. I don’t write about economic stuff, do you know why ? Because I surely have an opinion, but I don’t have the technical background to write about it and I’ll probably just create more noise and confuse people instead of helping them understand something.

I’ll not extend myself more on this section as it can get too long: but arguments saying that applications have dependencies of .so and this is harmful to the user and proposing solutions that are already out there in ANY Linux distribution (bundle of libraries are packages and it’s dependencies if anybody has questions regarding this), etc.. just make noise and have no technical background.

Sometimes journalists/bloggers are the ones that write about everything without knowing anything and this leads to at least confusion.

Second act

I’m not sure if everybody knows that but Google is just arriving at Free Software world (as much other companies, like Nokia for example). The first approach of Google was being open source friend but not free software. And there is a huge difference.

Thanks to many people Google is changing this and becoming closer and closer to free software with initiatives such as Google Summer of Code, when they fund students to work on free software projects and much other initiatives.

But the point is that a “Free Software” magazine has an article attacking the free software community (I say attacking because there is no constructive feedback or review inside an article without technical background). Ok, you may be thinking that I’m beating too much in the “technical background” key, but even from the user’s point of view there are almost no valid arguments there besides the fact that we need to improve sound on Linux (big news here ).

So, we have a free software magazine, pushing a non free software initiative and talking about non sense stuff. Google has a great product on it’s hands and no doubt about it. But come on: if you want to compare KDE, GNOME and Chrome Workspace do it the proper way.

Third Act

Hype. It’s all about hype. Google Wave was the brand new silver bullet in the world. Everybody that is not a fan boy and seriously tried to used it know what I’m talking about. But the hype was so big because it was a Google’s product (and usually Google has great products) that everybody started creating use cases, theories and etc.. just due to that. No real use case, no real innovation. Just hype.

Again, Google has great products: GMail, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Google AdSense/AdWords, etc… But sometimes people start talking and expecting things just because of the hype. Trolls and fan boys are species that walks together in the world.

The same is happening with Chrome OS here. It’s not ready yet but people are already saying that it will be the best thing ever. Or even that very solid COMMUNITIES and the software around them are dead just because in one year somebody will bring a new product.

Examples from the past ? ‘Virtual reality’ (being used on browsers with VRML and videogames with those horrible goggles), ‘Java Applets’ (who don’t remember it being the final solution for dynamic web pages ???) or even ‘Director’ who was the killer application for multimedia stuff and would kill Flash ?

Final Act: Summary

Let’s just calm down and learn with each other. Gnome and KDE learned a lot of things with each other and with it’s own communities, Linux and the GNU/Linux distributions too.

Google has great products and can really create expectations on it’s users. Google search, maps, Android…all great products but all of them (as any other software) have problems and bugs (anyone using GMail’s imap?).

So please, for the next ones writing about the brand new thing that will kill all the others out there, calm down, write your opinion but just don’t start saying that projects are going to die if you don’t have any clue about it and don’t start guessing stuff. Want to write a user review ? Write it as a user review and about what is bad (maybe what is good too). But writing guessing articles tending to be a user review but pretending to be a technical article is not good for anybody.

Avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

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