Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Over the last months ProFUSION worked hard on building Memphis, an in car entertainment system. Now we can finally publish the first preview of it, it is real and runs on couple of hardware we will demo later, including Nokia N810 (OMAP 2420) and Freescale iMX27, iMX31 and iMX35 with displays ranging from 4 to 7 inches, from 640×480 to 800×480.

The product is based on free software Canola2 platform, which we support as well. While some parts of it were made available over these months, including our optimized thumbnailer “Ethumb”, some parts will be available later, under the same license. It’s not an issue as you’re unlikely to get it from Volkswagen and running it BMW, what matter for clients is the product as a whole, not just software interface.

Work done so far is not just a face lift of Canola, it goes deeply in optimizations, platform roots and changes plugins as well. The roadmap includes fast UPnP server and control point, as well as GPS/maps and other car useful services.

Theme is just a demo, we call it “ProFUSION theme” as we use our own colors and font. Clients will get an unique look and feel as well as custom changes, such as integrating with real panel keys, text to speech and voice recognition systems.

Read more at http://profusion.mobi/node/17.

So here I am at Chicago attending at PyCON USA where I’ll present how Python enabled the development of mobile media center (Canola2) in record time. So far it’s being an amazing conference, lots of interesting talks but more MacOS-X than I’d like to see in a conference about a free software technology (at least we seem to have more Linux than Windows).

As for freedom, free software, mobile media centers and specially Canola2: as announced previously at Maemo community, Canola2 is now opensource (GPLv3)! That’s amazing news, specially to me as I have Canola2 as my baby and would like to have more people involved into its development. It’s not just a great end-user software, it’s an amazing Python platform where you can build all kind of rich user interface.

As you might know, ProFUSION is working with INdT to improve Canola2 and we plan to keep supporting it, starting with some instructions and scripts, see our post for more details. As we want to build a community around it, don’t miss the mailing list and our IRC channel #canola at irc.freenode.net.

Now that the list is published I can announce that my talk was approved and I’ll present at PyCon US 2009!

My talk Python enabling mobile media centers will tell you all how Python made it possible to finish Canola2 in record time and how it does not suck performance wise in mobile devices as the Nokia N800, N810 and it is even acceptable on 770! I’ll quickly cover how painful development of first version in C was, how we profiled, tools we used to write Python-EFL bindings and more.

For my beloved Brazilian friends, I plan to present it (or a similar talk) at Bossa Conference ‘09 and possible present it in Portuguese at PyCon-Brazil later this year.

Wow! Making it stronger WOW to let you all know how I did feel when I received the excellent news: Qt 4.5 will be LGPL 2.1 (see official here).

I still remember myself talking to Mark Shuttleworth about possibility of Qt going LGPL and I was saying that it would never become LGPL since it was an excellent thing for Nokia, keeping adversaries away.

It turned out that I was wrong… “never say never!” they say. Nokia is seems so confident, or Motorola so non-intimidating, that it believes that doing the right thing and moving its product license to more commercial friendly will bring more developers and thus more applications.

Mark was wondering about GNOME goals could be delivered on top of Qt if this was LGPL. Well, in my opinion it is possible, but very unlikely. I dare to say GTK will get going along Qt and it will never go away. It’s about passion, not technology there.

Talking about technology and this concerns ProFUSION, I really like Qt, always did. As most of you know I hack using Qt, GTK and EFL for a long time, Qt is the easiest to use, largest and most complete library out there. And following their progress with 4.x versions you can see they’re heading the right direction, heading where EFL or MacOS libraries are today. ProFUSION will now be able to recommend Qt to a broader range of clients, those that wanted LGPL licenses to avoid licensing fees.

I’m still surprised! I expect Nokia keep doing these great surprises, the next being the next internet tablets (with $99 developer program ) and maybe a Linux phone later this year!

I like them and I see why they’re the next big thing in hardware. They fit a nice spot, possible a better one than mobile internet devices/internet tablets: while they’re not as portable, they have a bigger screen, (almost) usable keyboard, more powerful cpu and bigger memory.

For geeks like me I guess it can easily replace laptops: I mostly use terminal with ssh + screen to our server, e17 as window manager (very light and fast), emacs for anything that requires me to edit, icecream/distcc to compile. Of course Firefox still don’t play well with memory and cpu, but I still have hope this bloat will go away some day. Since these netbooks have VGA port, we can easily simulate dockstations with usb keyboard+mouse and a bigger monitor. Long battery lifes are also a great thing to me. I still want to get one, but maybe I’ll wait one with ARM cpu (hopefully even longer battery life) and possible 3g as well, then let’s see if I can forget about my laptop as I did with my desktop some years ago.

But this post is also meant to highlight that non-geeks also like them! I was walking at a Brazilian mall the other day and spotted more than once some old women (the less tech-lovers out there) pointing eeepcs and saying they’d love to have those: they’re white, they’re small, “they’re soooooo cute” in their own words. Needless to say men of all ages and younger girls like these kind of toy too.

In my opinion Netbooks area is where Linux can gain great market share. Actually the market is still very small, but growing fast and Linux is there from beginning. Netbooks are not restricted to x86, so Linux can show its flexibility running on ARM and MIPS, areas where standard Windows does not play. Applications are not the same, or expected to be the same, people are not demanding heavyweight office applications, but they do demand excellent internet experience, and Firefox/Webkit technologies (not the apps!) do great there. Pidgin (libpurple or Telepathy) and other tools will help there, as well as our great multimedia platforms with MPlayer, Xine, GStreamer, VLC…

Another great thing about netbooks is that they’re cheap. Even in Brazil where everything imported is overtaxed, they’re acceptable. So people are willing to get one without fear of wasting too much money on something.

And  let’s remember we’re talking about a new product! So it’s more expensive than what it will be in few months, you don’t see internet addicts using it at the mall and here in Brazil you see no advertisement about them, expect more buzz when this happen. It’s a exciting technology, stay tuned!

Today I finished integrating some cool code into Evas: box and table. These utility smart objects are now in Evas for good, we can stop replicating those in many projects and people who just want to use them and not a full featured toolkit like ETK or EWL are now free. More importantly: we can now expose these in Edje, making all layout elements dependent on theme, not having to rely on SWALLOW slots!

The integrated code is very flexible, it make use of the recently introduced “size hints” and also postpone heavy calculations to pre-render time with calculate smart callback. Table has three modes: regular, homogeneous based on table size and homogeneous based on largest minimum item size. Box, since it just represent a sequence of items, is more extensible and allows you to specify a layout function, we provide some like vertical, horizontal, stack, homogeneous based on box, homogeneous based on the largest minimum item size, etc… but you can easily write your “snake layout” and use it. If you need more option details than “size hints”, you can extend the class and implement options_* virtuals.

These code were integrated by me, but not totally written. Gustavo Lima, from ProFUSION, wrote the box for their sequence_box.c (it was relicensed to E’s BSD with permission) and Rasterman wrote table for his elementary “toolkit for mobiles” els_table.c.

On the pleasure and work side, I’ll fly to The Netherlands next Tuesday so I can attend ELC-E 2008 where I’ll present a talk about Rich Graphical User Interfaces on mobile systems, covering Evas, Edje and the new kids on the block Elementary and Guarana.

Last but not least, due trip and other stuff to do I’ll not be able to integrate table and box into Edje soon. If you always wanted to help E17 and EFL, now it’s your chance! See my mail to the list and start hacking, I can reply to you by mail and IRC (when I’m online). We will also need Python bindings for those, so patches to python-evas and python-edje are also welcome!

Next week Ulisses, Luis Felipe and I will be at “Semana da Mobilidade” (Mobility Week), to be held at USP São Carlos, Brazil.

This is a great thing because we’ll be able to talk about Maemo and Python to undergrad students and try to show there is life (and paid jobs/work) beyond Windows and Java, .Net and Delphi. We already did a talk similar to that for UNICAMP students (although it was an informal talk) and attendees liked it.

I’ll present both a talk and a training. I plan to show how GNU/Linux development happens on desktop, how it needs to be changed for manual cross-compiling and how Maemo (mostly scratchbox) helps with that, then cover other changes, like Hildon-ization and hints on how to change user interface to make it usable for high-dpi but small screens, then say how Python can cut to the chase and avoid most of these troubles. This is a talk, so nothing will be in-depth. As for the training, I plan to go step-by-step scratchbox on the first day, cross compiling and port on the second and Python development on the third (4hours/day). Any ideas or suggestions?

Ulisses will discuss more generally life outside Windows-Java environment, trying to get students willing to work with GNU/Linux and open source in general. I’m not sure about other countries, but here in Brazil lots of students completely reject learning these Free/Open Source technologies because they think there is no opportunity to get paid to do such thing, so they focus on proprietary world, mostly on Windows and Java or .Net.

Luis will run the “Python for s60″ training, a hands-on training, covering the basics, how to send and run scripts on the phone, then go through some API to demo capabilities, then some real development.

Last but not least, this mark the start of a great partnership between INdT and ProFUSION.

Although I’m very busy these days getting ProFUSION up and running, I managed to be accepted by two excellent events:

• Maemo Summit and OSiM world September 16-20th, Berlin (Germany). I’ll do a lightning talk about rich graphical user interfaces with efl and try to setup a bof about rich/alternative graphical user interfaces for maemo. Kindly sponsored by Nokia, thanks!
• Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2008 November 6-7th, Ede (The Netherlands). I’ll present about rich graphical user interfaces using efl and guarana (more to come about guarana later!). Still looking for a sponsor

The ELCE presentation will continue from last year talk, with more demos and also covering real world use cases. It will also be the first presentation to cover Guarana, an open source framework on top of EFL developed by ProFUSION to aid development. I’m sure you’ll like it. [Guarana is to be released soon, stay tuned!]

If you plan to attend these events, please let me know so we can schedule some beers.

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