GNOME 3 is out! Go and try it!
As some of us said back in 2008: Take that decadence!
Congratulations to everyone involved, this release is probably one of the finest pieces of work in the open source landscape. I am so proud to be part of it and work among the most talented hackers in the world, you all rock!
I find the recent posts from Jeff quite entertaining, it's actually pretty good exercise to sometimes stop and look back to see the path you've done instead of focusing on the path you have ahead. It makes you think about why are you here and where you want to go. Besides, I always find Jeff writing quite entertaining and motivational, I miss it.
Motivated by a tweet from Miguel I am going to try to explain why I got involved in GNOME and why I am still excited about what this community is trying to accomplish. I am not sure Miguel is going to like the length of it :-)
Just a month before I started university, I attended my first major FOSS event. The HispaLinux congress in 2003. HispaLinux was the main Spanish FOSS non-profit organization and it was very active, this was at the same time that Extremadura and Andalusia made the move to Linux for their IT deployments in education. FOSS was a hot topic in Spain.
During this event Miguel gave a talk on GNOME and Mono, to be honest I didn't put much attention on the Mono stuff, I was quite new to software development and I didn't quite understand the point of it at the time.
On the other hand, I fell in love with the values and goals of the GNOME project as he exposed them. Usability, design, accessibility... computing for everybody. At that point it became clear to me that GNOME was to free software what Apple was for computing back in the 80s. It was a truly open community. It was a project worth contributing to.
In this congress I was also introduced to the GNOME Hispano guys by Juanje Ojeda. The names are familiar and still very relevant: Alvaro Lopez, Carlos Garnacho, Carlos Garcia, Alvaro del Castillo, Roberto Majadas, Rodrigo Moya, Chema Casanova, Jose Angel. How can you not want to spend more time with them?
I had such a great time with that bunch. They were not only cheerful and fun but passionate about trying to push FOSS mainstream. They were geeks indeed, but a special breed of geeks anyway.
Since then, I've been following d-d-l and Planet GNOME daily, blog posts from Jeff, Vincent, Federico, Elijah, Carl, Seth made me excited about the future of the project, and eventually I started contributing code.
So this is my story, what's yours?
Canonical has kindly sponsored some of my time at Codethink to bring one of the major missing pieces of the Unity user experience in Ubuntu. As you may know the Unity features a global menubar for applications. Integration with standard Gtk+ applications and Firefox/Thunderbird is already in place.
LibreOffice is the default office suite for Ubuntu 11.04 and its menus were not shown on the Application Menubar... until now:
I just rolled the first release. It has plenty of bugs and memory leaks, and kenvandine just told me it crashes on 64bits, but it's a start and the basic info publishing and command dispatching is there.
I expect to get it into shape in the upcoming weeks. I'm focusing on avoiding memory leaks and covering some corner cases with window handling at this point. Then I'll take care of shortcuts and getting some missing information of each item.
Hacking with UNO has been... interesting... the one good thing is that pretty much everything is either documented or there's some code around to look at. I had some deja vu moments when I worked on StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Firefox extensions for APOC. Thanks god for Google Codesearch.
I also hope this code becomes useful for environments other than Unity such as GNOME Shell. If you have any questions about it just ask!
Today we received our first batch of Codethink branded MoviePegs courtesy of Magnetic North, a really cool design house based in Manchester. These little cute devices are a simple way to stand your smartphone and hold it in a table to watch a movie or use them as a table clock. There is an iPad version as well.
We will be giving away a bunchof them in our stand at OSiM in London next week, make sure to pop in and ask for yours!
There were a few talks at GUADEC that were around the topic of web and trying to figure out ways to build bridges to the web world from the GNOME community and technologies.
It was praised by some, most notably Luis Villa, that HTML/CSS/JS was the way to go. However I think that this is grabbing the stick from the wrong end in many ways.
The interesting parts of the web are not its front end technologies as such (the fact that they are standards and you can assume everybody has a browser is though). The interesting bit of the Web as a platform is the ability to syndicate, publish and aggregate content.
I actually think that the so called fact that people love HTML+CSS+JS is sort of a myth. The reason there's so many people doing stuff with it is not because it is a great technology, it's because:
People go through the pain of building apps with these technologies because it's worth the pain, and actually, for a lot of applications it's the better option. But it's still a pain.
However, suggesting that this is how GNOME should move ahead is in my opinion not the fastest path to provide a great user experience. Which is what GNOME is all about.
In my opinion, what we really fail at is at providing tools to create rich user experiences for data driven applications, and ways to feed data from the web more specifically. This has a lot to do with the poorness of our platform when it comes to ways to talk HTTP, libsoup for example is not such a great API for application developers for many reasons.
Then there's Gtk+'s lack of proper views for large datasets and GtkTreeModel is not necessarily a general purpose data model API. This is why, by the way, we developed libmodel at Codethink and created a GtkTreeModel wrapper around it.
I think the ones really pioneering in this field are the Intel guys with libsocialweb and Adrien Bustany on online providers for Tracker. But we still miss the "glue" for our great front end technologies (Gtk+/Clutter/MX) so that application developers can put together apps consuming and pushing online data real quick.
There is a reason why Google, one of the main pushers of the web technologies, still have Java based apps in the android platform. There is a reason flash is not going away and Silverlight and JavaFx are here to stay as well. The closer you are to the hardware, the better the user experience can be. The quicker you can put together your apps, the better.
Pushing the boundaries of HTML is a nice thing and I'm happy to see Flash, Silverlight and JavaFx going away as substitutes of content that could be deployed as web content in the first place, but innovation and design by committee are not real good friends. We need a platform that can move as quick as hardware does, as much as we need a web platform as well that can cherry pick the innovations
There is however a huge opportunity for the GNOME community, if we start making steps towards a better toolchain for data driven applications, I think building bridges with the Mozilla community can be a major win. I know what you're thinking, Gecko. No, I actually think WebKit is the way to go as our rendering engine, Gecko is there to follow Firefox's agenda. Fair enough.
There's a space in which building bridges with the Mozilla community can be even a biggest win for both ends, the web services space. Mozilla is creating amazing web services and tools, Firefox Sync, Bespin, Contacts.
GNOME seriously lacks of a community of people dedicated to build web services around the platform, and Mozilla is has that sort of focus. Together I think we can join forces solve this ongoing problem of closed source web services and all the privacy concerns around them by building a truly rich and open ecosystem of server and client side technologies.
I thought I should share a sneak peak on a small patch I've been working on to add support for markers support in GtkScrollbar, the idea is to add support for hints in things like search matching, or where in the backlog someone named you in a chat dialog. Here's a screenshot of the result in the default theme:
This should bring Google Chrome-like search functionality to gEdit and Epiphany! Now if only I had some time to work on a set of standard inline dialogs to avoid windowed ones :-)
The patch, against Gtk+ master, is pretty much done, waiting for a reviewer to point out any pending details. If everything goes alright it should land for 3.0, subscribe to the bug if you want to track its progress. :-)
This is a reminder for the London Beer Event v2.16 next Friday, if you want to come and not registered yet, just put your name in the wikipage!
Update: Usual attendants, beware! Notice that this time we chose a new venue, The chamberlain, 130-135 Minories, London EC3N 1NU.
