Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri

Wow! Just after my last week post about companies supporting EFL, we were pleased with two more announcements:

• Ardy, a tool that brings together EFL and Arduino using Python
• Free.fr, the second biggest ISP in France opened up the development of their Freebox HD set-top box using Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and Mozilla JavaScript library. This is pretty amazing as it’s the biggest deployment of EFL out there, an uncertain number that ranges from 2 to 3 million devices.

Hey all,

Yesterday we started to see some announcements of companies backing Enlightenment Foundation Libraries development. Of course, INdT was pioneer in that since it was decided to use it for Canola2. Later on I created my own company and we officially support EFL as GUI alternative (together with Clutter, GTK and Qt), being the first company to do that.

While there are speculations about which company is it, what I can assure you is that this company is serious and is not alone. ProFUSION itself worked on EFL on behalf of various clients and you may expect another press release about a big French internet and telecom company deploying a massive number of units with EFL pre-installed. Not accounting various community driven projects that choose it and E17 as its base platform, such as OpenMoko and OpenInkpot.

Bottom line? While EFL does not get the same amount of marketing and visibility as Qt and GTK counterparts, it is playing fine enough to be considered to ship in dozen million devices in the next year. Why don’t you consider it for your project? Be open minded and try it out

This is a followup of my previous post, but now running on Nokia Internet Tablet N810 with Maemo. We interleaved it with parts of screen casts so you can note it’s very close to the desktop edition, even animated video thumbnails works fine:

We even managed to convince Mariana to do the initial talk!

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!

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!

We’re proud to release a new version of LightMediaScanner, the fastest media scanner for your embedded device

This version now adds the direct relationship of audios and artists table, this will allow album-less audios to have an artist as well as have collections audios to display their artists. Yes, Canola will behave better now.

Also new are the often requested single-process scan and progress reporting.

Progress is reported using callbacks. Since it is impossible to know beforehand how many files will be in the directories before walking them, there is no “total” item reporting or percentage, this is up to you if you think it is worth to pay such penalty. Check also does not report so it’s uniform, but number of items to check is easier to discover, just check the database. These callbacks will also report the state of such file, so you can notify user if some files were skipped because they took too much to finish (more than slave_timeout).

Single process scan is now available, but it’s mostly there to aid debugging. While it will speed up scan on single-CPU machines (ie: Nokia N810), it is less safe and if it breaks/hangs (ie: due MMC being removed during parse, or bad FAT filesystem) it will bring down your whole software, so be aware of that before using.

Last but not least, our GIT moved from http://staff.get-e.org/ to http://gitweb.profusion.mobi/ (Gitweb) with repositories being cloned from git clone git://git.profusion.mobi/$PROJECT

Please report any bugs to our project at garage.maemo.org!

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.