Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

I was invited to come to FOSSCamp this year, and of course I accepted. Travel from São Paulo to Prague was quite long (home to hotel time around 20hs), but it paid off: hotel is great, (un)conference is nice and lots of hackers to talk. It was great to discuss how your desktop and mobile device will work in future

Unlike other events, this is not a conference, thus the name “unconference”, instead of fixed schedule with talks, we have lots of meeting rooms with good infrastructure (wifi, enough power sockets, tables…) that we can use to discuss about various issues.

Yesterday (Friday, May 16th) was the first and I participated in some desktop-oriented discussions. Some highlights:

• shorter release cycles: as was said everywhere last weeks, Mark pushed for shorter and coordinated release cycles (around 3months), so everyone can benefit;
• kde-gnome integration: there was various KDE-Gnome integration meetings with people from KDE (Lubos Lunak), Gnome (Vincent Untz), Amarok guys and others. I liked these meetings since still use KDE applications on my desktop and also because I want to represent E17 there, and then help Enlightenment to behave well. Discussios ranged whenever and how to integrate components like: bookmark format and location (XBEL?), Keyring & passwords, URI schemes and how to avoid fish:// vs. ssh:// problems, session management and trying to figure out a set of settings (double-click timeout, fonts, colors) that should be moved to a common place (X Settings?). After some discussions I’m skeptical of what will really happen: technologies are almost the same, but no group want to give up on their baby. I think it will require a 3rd party to develop or isolate the base (non-GUI) technology and then have both to use them, it make no sense to have 2 keyrings, virtual i/o, …
• desktop search: I learned about XESAM and also raised some concerns about its use in embedded systems, that Jos van den Oever (vandenoever) wants to take a look. My initial hope was to provide some lightmediascanner (LMS) utility to integrate with XESAM, but their specification is based on DBus, XML and RDF, things that not couple well on small systems. IMHO XESAM should specify an API, a library to be used and if appropriated one can implement that library to use DBus and XML to forward it to some other daemon (like Beagle, Tracker or Strigi). Systems like Maemo or OpenMoko could just use simpler methods like LMS + SQLite. Having yet-another-process and possible transferring lots of data between processes on devices with very slow memory is not good, you gain nothing, just loose;
• inkscape, swfdec, svg, flash: another interesting meeting with Company (swfdec), Ted (inkscape) and others. Discussion ranged from why current toolkit sucks to cairo, x11, filters and more. Most problems are due the lack of people, both in X11 (to provide good drivers), GTK (to rework the widget internals), Cairo (to provide filters and optimizations)… I have to agree to the lack of people: while lots of companies invested in server-space, almost no investment was made in GUI, it’s most about some individual efforts, and if you take into account the lines of code that both GUI and server requires, you’ll see that GUI needs more. Mark asked us what we should use to develop an application like Canola, of course I said EFL, but others said “choose what you feel better, all the tools suck and you’d have to rely to some dirty tricks”. With regard to effects/filters: unfortunately none of us have find “the magical solution” to make filters fast, so it boils down to lots of hand work to optimize some cases, cache others and avoid doing them often.

So it’s that time of the year again, almost summer in North, winter here in South and Google helping free software projects with its Summer of Code. I’m glad some projects I’m involved were accepted, including: Enlightenment and BlueZ.

I’ll be a mentor for Enlightenment and we have great ideas, if you’re interested in them, mail me or go to #edevelop @ irc.freenode.net so we can discuss your ideas, experiences… It’s a great way to get involved in computer graphics and a platform that is growing everyday on mobile systems, with adopters like Canola2 and now OpenMoko!

As for BlueZ, I’m not mentoring, but some friends are, they also have great ideas, things that will benefit every GNU/Linux bluetooth user, from mobile to desktops to laptops, some are really interesting like better audio support. It’s a way to get into kernel and low-level user space world, and get paid for it

So BossaConference ‘08 is over, what a great conference! Lots of great people, some are still around, doing some hacking with us at INdT office, it’s really great to have some time to discuss new ideas, drink some beers and play jokes

Let’s hope next year we can keep it to the level! Congrats to all the organization members.

My old website http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/ is now dead and points to this blog. It was ugly and hard to keep updated, using wordpress blog is much easier than hand editing HTML and provide lots of useful features, like rss feeds.

If you need some of the files hosted there, please use http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/old-website, although I did keep the links to most useful folders, like http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/eagle, http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/jogos and http://www.gustavobarbieri.com.br/python

After another heavy working week, we managed to deliver a new beta of Canola2, this time with lots of bug fixing (thanks for reporting!), features and optimizations. Also features 770* support, a new tool to merge albums (collections or albums with similar name) and lots of new media formats (wma/wmv and real media included!).

UPDATE: Since we replaced our download manager, previous packages conflicts! Please remove Canola2-beta1 before installing the new one. If you got it wrong, apt-get -f install from Xterm should fix it.

Hope installation will be smoother this time!

More information at: http://openbossa.indt.org/canola2/

* 770 support: gregale is regular install, but for Hacker Edition (bora ported to 770) you need a special proceeding (ain’t you hackers!?):

1. disable all repositories
2. add the repositories:
   1. deb http://repository.maemo.org gregale free non-free
   2. deb http://repository.maemo.org/extras gregale free non-free
3. update list
4. install canola2
5. remove gregale repositories

These steps are required because Hacker Edition kernel doesn’t provide inotify and we compile bora EFL packages optimized for n8xx (omap 2420, arm1136jf-s).

And so the time has come, almost 1 year since the first Bossa Conference 2007. That was an amazing conference, with exuberant place near the beach, great speakers and lots of time to enjoy both. Since the scope is well defined: Linux and other Free Software in mobile devices, the speakers are really well selected, we could manage to have free time to talk to each other, without going from one side to another, running like crazy and if you have attended conferences before you know what I mean: these casual chats are the best way to know about new features and plans (maybe unofficial or secret ;-)), elaborate new ideas, etc.

That conference was so great that INdT is now promoting another, actually much improved:

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16^th to 19^th of March at Summerville Beach Resort. The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let’s go! We’re waiting for you.

Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.

After many, many… did I say many? sleepless nights finishing the new Canola version, some guys at the office were like this:

The actor is Kenneth, our little danish fellow.

Ok, it’s a long time since my last post, but I’m really busy improving EFL, developing Canola (the whole team is, that’s why you see no posts from them either) and also with some presentations about EFL.

Today I’ve presented at CELF Embedded Linux Conference 2007, Linz, Austria, the title was “Fancy and Fast GUIs on Embedded Devices” and is now available online at http://talks.gustavobarbieri.com.br/efl/elce2007/Fancy_and_Fast_GUIs_on_Embedded_Devices.odp Maybe it’s useful to you (trying to get your managers to use something else than GTK/SDL for embedded devices?).

The conference was really great, I’ve met some great hackers that I just know from mail/IRC and could talk again with others that I already knew from other conferences. Free software hackers are usually very kind.

People’s reaction was quite positive, most people realize that trying to modify GTK to fit desired effects or building on top of SDL are both way too painful. I’m not saying that these are bad and nobody should use it, but that they have their own niche and trying to have them to cover the whole word is a bit difficult.

Related to this, Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) (EFL lead developer) was officially announced as “Lead Architect - Graphics” at OpenMoko, a previously GTK-only device. He will not vanish with GTK, but instead create nice native applications, full of special effects and so, that’s cooperation, each technology doing their best to achieve the final goal: usable interfaces.

UPDATE: Video (OGG/Theora) is now available:  http://free-electrons.com/pub/video/2007/elce/elce-2007-gustavo-sverzut-barbieri-fast-fancy-gui.ogg, http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2292516949813732934&hl=en

Marcelo got an iPhone and I could use it for a while, my initial idea was to compare my virtual keyboard with their (mine is “better”, easier to type, because the screen is larger!), but I also paid attention to graphics effects, and other things that I could use to improve my own skills… BUT what impressed me most was the number of 3rd party applications already available for it!

Apple has invested no money to create a public development infrastructure, community resources and not even a cross compiler toolchain. Actually, they tried hard to avoid people writing native applications, but even with these factors they got to the point they have more useful (IMO) applications than N800, with Nokia creating Maemo, funding scratchbox, tons of resources to improve Gnome and related tools.

Sure, they already ship with great apps by default, as an excellent media player and browser and simple but good enough mail client, maps, PIM… but you can already install game emulators that works (I’m talking about on screen controls, due multi-touch) and even some web applications through Python/Django. See some apps at http://iphoneapplicationlist.com/.

Although there is no documentation on HIG or even widget API, these applications look integrated, they benefit from graphical/physics effects, support screen rotation and more, and if you consider the timeline, it is 2 months old and the cracks to install home brew software is even newer!

I still have no conclusion on what we did wrong and they right, but IMO things are more favorable for them. Maybe it’s about they touching the hackers egos (forbidden is always cool), maybe it’s about better infrastructure, … What’s your opinion?

PS: the device is neat, things seem well integrated, they did just the simple things, but did they right, really. Their attention to details, not just for user interface, is incredible.

After 24h travel (Recife to São Paulo, then to Toronto, then Ottawa), Marcio, Aldenor and I arrived. We plan to join other attendees at Vineyards bar tonight, let’s see who we find there.

They say it’s hot, but Recife, even in winter, is much more hot than here, at least here is kinda dry.