Long time no post

It's been quite a long time with not even a update in my blog. Shame on me!!! Since last December, lots of things happened and if I tried to tell everything, you would be surely bored to death. So here goes some highlights of the last 3 1/2 months:

• Canola2
  
  We're now on the version 7 of the beta series and we're working really hard to release the final version, which should come really soon. Besides the name "beta" it is pretty much stable and in each new version released it becomes better and better. Many thanks to the users who provided useful feedback (specially on ITT forums) and to Marcelo, who is being patient enough to provide the answers to almost all users questions.
  
  I have been maintaining the packages for both Canola2 and the Maemo port of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries for each and every one of the Nokia Internet Tabled devices and ITOS releases, not including ITOS2005 here. It has been a very time consuming task and I have not been able to code much since then.
  
  We've opened the gates for 3rd part plugins releasing the youtube plugin for Canola2. It's only in its very first version and users seems to like it a lot. The source code is availabe under the GPLv3 and can be used as base for development on new plugins. The next one in the line is the last.fm plugin.
  
  New themes were released and the source code for them are going to be released as well.


• Toys
  
  Found a 1GB iPod shuffle *inside* an ice cream. Literally.
  
  
  
  
  
  Sold my old car, a Fiat Palio (1998 year) and bough a Peugeot 307 (2002 year), previously owned by Renato Filho. All I can say is it was a great acquisition. I'm very happy with it. By the way, Renato bought a newer Fiat Palio (2004 year) but I'm not pretty sure if Renato can tell the same though. :)
  
  Got a Nokia N95 phone and gave my N73 to my girlfirend. Another huge improvement here. How could I live until now with a phone without WiFi and GPS integrated?
  
  Bought my Nokia N810 with the discount code I got back in November. Many thanks to Hallyson and Tapani who brought me the device from Finland straight to Brazil.


• Bossa Conference '08
  
  It was a really great conference this year. If last year was good, this one was even better! We had some high level talks and lots of free time to meet and talk to the guys about problems of using new technologies in mobile devices and possible solutions for them. I really enjoyed Clutter, Webkit and PulseAudio talks among others. Congratulations to the organization crew who worked hard to make it happen.
  
  I took some pictures with my N95 and uploaded them to my flickr account. The photos are basically from the after hours parties and can be seen on this set.


• Google Summer of Code 2008
  
  I'm willing to help the BlueZ and Enlightenment guys by mentoring projects in this edition of GSoC. More details on this subject later.
  

Geeks!

56 geeks poster complete
Originally uploaded by ExtraLife

View the complete set.

Packaging Madness

We're running against the clock to get the Canola 2 release ready by the 12th. It has been a week since I'm working on providing the proper debian packages for all the dependencies, so the installation process can be as smooth as possible. After having coded a monster script that automatically builds and signs the Maemo-EFL packages (including sources) for Gregale, Bora and Chinook on both x86 and armel targets, I started to upload the packages to the extras-devel repository.

If you follow the maemo-efl-devel mailing list, you may have noticed an unusual traffic on the past few days. If you don't follow that list, I strongly discourage you to do it. Things will only get worse until Wednesday, when the final packages will be uploaded to the extras repository.



But it is not just building the packages. We also need to test them to ensure they're working on the devices. As you can see in the picture above, packages for Bora and Chinook are OK, but the Gregale ones aren't. Time to go back to work and figure out what I'm doing wrong...

Canola 2.0 running on Nokia 770

A while ago we were curious about how would be the performance of the new version of Canola running on a Nokia 770 device. After a whole day building packages and compiling stuff, our mate Renato Chencarek was finally able to make it run on the device. We thought it also deserved a video, just like others we posted.

It's a Nokia 770 device running OS2006 (gregale) and you can see it performs surprisingly well! Actually, it feels like the performance is better than on N800/N810. As we don't have that damn tearing effect, you can see the UI elements just move smoothly. Unfortunately, the screen is not as sensitive as the N800 or N810, so some tasks like dragging and panning will demand more effort than in the other devices.

Reinteract News

It seems lots of people got interested in Reinteract. Owen Taylor has started a new project page and integrated the patches people sent him. Guess what? The maemo patch was integrated to the branch master as well. It was slightly different from the first patch I provided in my previous post since I had forgotten to add support for hildon file chooser dialogs. We also agreed provide a way for the user to select which UI to run, the standard or the hildon one.

I was able to run Reinteract in a N800 device and it performs really well. In a small talk I had with Osvaldo and Luciano, they showed interest to provide packages for Reinteract in next PyMaemo releases. Great news!

By the way, I have to say: Python rocks! Git rocks even more!

Reinteract on Maemo

I followed a couple of posts today in Planet Gnome and read about Reinteract. This project is freaking awesome!!! Watch the screencast. It worths every minute. Reinteract is something that fits like a glove in Maemo. I've started playing with it a bit and a few minutes later I got something really interesting:



Wooohooo!!! The patch is really small, about 60 lines. I have not tested it a real device, but it should perform well. Any one would like to try??

Ubuntu Cola

It seems the OS wars has been reaching new levels. After Windows Vista soft drink, we have also Ubuntu Cola.



More pictures on Flickr.

Maemo Chinook SDK Final Released

I've just read in the Maemo site news The final Chinook SDK has been released, what means the N810 device is shopping in the next weeks. I haven't noticed it in the moment I received the email about the N810 discount program. Great news!!! I have already downloaded and installed the rootstraps which can be found here.

Personally, I prefer a manual installation, so it's just a matter of creating and setting up new targets, downloading the i386 and armel rootstraps, run a couple of simple apt-get commands and you're done.

We already have the new version of Canola running on Chinook. It is unbelievable how beautiful and delightful the new UI feels, thanks to our design team, which has been doing an excellent job. I can say it brings a totally new concept and you'll certainly enjoy it *A LOT*. We'll bring other hot news about Canola really soon!

Meanwhile, I encourage everybody to try to learn how to develop applications using the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, specially Evas and Edje.

N810 maemo submission accepted

N810 maemo submission accepted

Congratulations! You have been accepted to the N810 maemo device
program. We will send your discount and instructions as soon as the
device is available in your selected shop (soon).

Thanks Nokia!!! I can't wait to receive the discount code!

Maemo - code in your hands

Maemo - code in your hands
Originally uploaded by Setanta!

Trying Chinook

We can't have one of those cool N810 yet, but we're already able start developing/porting applications to the new API. Renato kicked off the ball and updated the Abiword patch to make it compatible and also removed the code which used so long deprecated HildonApp and HildonAppView API. Some days ago I set up the Chinook SDK environment and decided to start with something simple or, in other words, Leafpad.



Packages coming soon.

Linux is everywhere

Linux chair on sale for R$ 169,00. I wonder if it includes the source code. :P

QoTD: Michael Mace

Nokia's phones often appear as if their hardware and software were designed by completely different groups and slapped together at the last minute (because, in many cases, that's exactly what happened).

Advised by Marcelo, I've just read Michael Mace's post about the imminent "war" between Nokia and Apple. It's really worth reading.

Gnome-Mobile

Daniel sent us the following image of a product he found in Amazon:


Link for the IMDB entry.

Capoeira Videos

I recorded these videos yesterday at the gym using the camera of my N73. They had the baptism and belt change ceremony, which is, for those of you who don't know about capoeira, the equivalent to graduation exams in any other martial art.

New stuffs

Here it goes another post with various topics and bullet lists. I realized I really appreciate this style of writing.

• Project
  
  As Kenneth already posted, I've joined the Canola team since last week. I'll be working mainly in the infra structure code, dealing with ETK. It's API is quite similar to GTK+ but it's far far away in terms of maturity. I'm still getting used to it and I already have some ideas to improve it.



• Cellphone
  
  After two years, I decided it was time to replace my good ol' Nokia 6170 cellphone. Besides being a very good device, solid (and heavy) as a rock, it lacks of some features considered basic nowadays, such as bluetooth and expandable memory. So I bought myself a brand new Nokia N73 phone. I've not even got the chance to explore all its features yet, but the very first thing I got impressed is the quality of the pictures taken with this phone.
  
  
• Plush penguins
  
  During my trip to europe to attend GUADEC, I had the opportunity to buy another four penguins for my collection. One was a talking Pingu and the other one was that crazy Mexican penguin from the happy feet movie, called Ramon. The other two I bought at Lisbon Oceanarium shop. I'm now getting afraid there won't be room over my desk for the ones I may buy.
  
  



• Hackergotchi
  
  Thanks to Hub, I've got a new hackergotchi from the picture he took at a pub in Birminghan. After clicking that special "I'm feeling lucky" button in Picasa and some Gimp work here is the result:
  
  

300

From this day on, I'll never play Wii Sports Bowling anymore.





Thanks Vivi for playing as my sparring. :)

Maemo related news

There are guys at INdT who have been doing wonderful jobs but they still don't have their blogs syndicated in any planet. This way, I thought it was a good idea to have a post with some interesting news and links:

• LLVM performance tests
  
  Lauro has been working on the ARM backend of LLVM for quite some time. It's been a year since the backend was included in the project. After lots of improvements, tests and bug fixes, it's now possible to compile complex programs and libraries.
  
  Lauro has just started his blog and has already published quite impressive results of tests comparing programs built with GCC and LLVM. I just can't wait for whole distro built with LLVM. :)


• Hildon bindings for Vala
  
  Marcelo Lira (aka setanta) introduced this brand new language called Vala for us some time ago. He's been posting about it since then, including the following diagrams illustrating the basic differences between Mono and Vala.
  
  
  Mono
  
  
  
  Vala
  
  
  Vala bindings are growing really fast. One of the latest additions were the Hildon bindings Marcelo has provided. It's approaching the day we won't need to code GObjects in plain C anymore.


• Maemo SDK Applicance
  
  Marcelo Lira (again) has published a cool screencast of Maemo SDK appliance running. The video is on YouTube but I'd recommend you to download the Ogg/Theora Version available in Maemo garage project page.

That's all folks! (At least for now). ;)

Yet another post on "Kinetic" scrolling

Renato Filho has just uploaded a video to youtube showing the MokoFingerScrool object, developed by Chris Lord, integrated with his Maemo Myth application running on the N800 device. Cool stuff.

Cleaning the dust

Time for some update in this blog. I've been trying to do this for quite some time, but I've been too busy and lazy to do it.

• Carman
  
  Last month I spent most of my time fixing a bunch of those small and annoying bugs in Carman that sooner or later block us from implementing new features and releasing our software. We released some release candidates and thanks to the feedback received from our users, we could release the final 0.6 version. Check the home page for installation instructions and links.
  
  This new version is a complete rewrite, at least in the Hildon/GTK+ UI, in which we dropped all the use of Glade. Glade is a great tool when you're developing static windows, which is not the case of Carman. The resulting code was an huge mess. We now implement (a sort of) the Model View Controller design pattern which make things a lot easier to maintain. Of course there are many other improvements in the current code, specially in the performance. I'll keep blogging about it as soon as I get interesting things done.
  
  
• GUADEC
  
  It was not only the development on Carman that was keeping me away. I also had to prepare everything for my trip to Birmingham, UK to attend GUADEC this year. It was the very first time I participated and I regret I had not been in any other edition before.
  
  At first I felt a little bit unease as I didn't know almost anyone personally, except for some guys that attended the Bossa Conference earlier this year. I found myself many times trying to associate the hackergotchis to the person and the work in the GNOME project. I still think some people should update their so they can be identified easier in those cases. Big thanks to Lucas for introducing me to most of the guys there. The GNOME people really rock!
  
  We had seven intense days, loads of great talks, meetings and discussions about what is GNOME now and paths to follow towards a 3.0/4.0/Online/whatever version. I won't talk about this here as there are already lots of blog posts about it in planet GNOME.
  
  In a point of view more focused on the Maemo platform, the conference was very productive as well. Some great news were announced there such as the first alpha version of Chinook, the new version of the communication software with SIP support and improved UI and the mozilla engine for the web browser. We also had many interesting talks about Maemo development and discussions on the GMAE subject. I had great chats with Nokia guys, specially Lucas and Quim about what can be done to improve the platform and open it more to the community.
  
  My talk was quite good. The audience was small but we had a very interesting discussion in the end. During those crazy hack sessions at Etap Hotel I was able to build some dependency packages for GNOME applications that are coming soon.

I think it's enough for one single post. That's what happen when you don't blog for a while... I still have more to talk about, but lets just leave this for other posts.