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vendredi 30 juillet 2010

Final day at GUADEC

Par Stéphane le vendredi 30 juillet 2010, 17:07

Yes my friends, every good thing comes to an end. Today was the last day of GUADEC, and I won't be any different than the other attendants, it was awesome.

Back to the conferences, another impressive day, which started with the "GNOME 3 the Telepathic destop" talk by Collabora's Guillaume Desmottes, who talked about the future of Empathy, Telepathy and how this would fit into GNOME. Excellent features landing soon :

* File-transfer for GTalk/MSN ;
* Logging daemon moved to Telepathy (i.e, you can get your chatlogs from any app using Telepathy, without launching Empathy) ;
* Muji, the multi-participant audio/video call ;
* New API to get notifications about new messages and mails (not sure about this) ;
* Contact capabilities and retrieval of vCards ;
* Encrypted logs, encrypted calls, certificates checks ; 
* Proxy support (finally) ;
* New high-level API for Telepathy (read: faster development and deployment) ;
* Improvements to Wocky, the Gabble library ;
On the Empathy side :
* Better components separation : audio/video, logging ;
* Meta-contacts, with the new Folks library (yaaaaaaaay!¡¡!!!¡) ;
* Actions directly into notifications (answer/reject call, for example) ;
* Inline chat of GNOME Shell ;
* Search of contacts right within the Shell! ;
* Teamgeist, a project to share data and events with your contacts ;
* XZibit, a Mutter plugin to share (not show, _share_) a window with your contacts ;
* Ssh-contact, allows you to chat through SSH (you couldn't guess that) ;
* Integration with Banshee (share your music), Tomboy (share your notes) and Epiphany (share your bookmarks), GEdit and more...

So yeah, I might not have gotten it 100% right, but hell yeah it's going to rock! Go on Collabora, make my desktop even cooler.

Right after, I went to the talk by Gabriel Burt about Banshee, and cool things are happening there too : along with the UI improvements and HIG compliance, they have a nifty duplicate artists/songs/genre detection, you can create an extension with their extension creator (bce), it takes about about 20 secondes to get the sample running, they have a huge community and a bunch of developers (~1 new developer every week, \o/) and their 1-month release cycle allows quick release of fixes and new features. They also worked on Amazon integration, you can browse/listen/buy right from Banshee, and the best part is that they get 10% of the sales, and give it away to the GNOME Foundation, that's very, very nice of you guys.

I could stop here and it would already be sweet, but no, we still got some amazing news coming (why do I suddenly sound like Steve Jobs?).

Next talk was by some more Intel smart people, about a new, amazing (can't help it) product, ClutterSmith. Remember that name, it's going to kick *ss. So basically, it's kind of a freeform Glade for Clutter. You put actors on a scene, you move them, link them, hyperlink theme (jump to a different scene), live animate them, edit properties on the go, put Mx widgets, scale them, and do all kind of crazy stuff with it. Makes me think of Adobe Flash for Clutter, which gives us a powerful tool to design UIs, and demonstrate interactive, good-looking mockups.

ClutterSmith

But wait, after that I went to the "Embracing the web, web services in GNOME" by Meego's Rob Bradford, who introduced us to libsocialweb, a nice library with a powerful API, strong DBus support that allows you to query many popular websites feeds, FlickR photos, Identi.ca and Twitter notices, and they gained Facebook support recently. This is going to be a key component in the sucess of a web-enabled GNOME.

libsocialweb overview

Walked back to the auditorium to hear Fabrice Mous about "Changing the desktop game", but unfortunately I was busy with some compilation issues, so the main thing I remember is : Fabrice is a proud member of the KDE community, and politics are willing to move administration-ware to open-source. Sorry.

Then Igalia's Xan Lopez and the Collaborian Gustavo Noronha walked in to tell us about GtkWebkit ; providing a much tighter integration with the GNOME platform, GTKWebkit also offers extented theming capabilities, as demonstrated in Gwibber and Empathy's Adium themes. Yelp 3 will also make use of GtkWebkit, to display nicely formatted source code (and other things I guess). Their point was to make GNOME part of the web by installing our libraries and toolkits at the core of browsers : Cairo, GStreamer, GTK+, etc, and I think it's a good way to go.

Ended my conference program with the "Cairo 2D in a 3D world" by Christopher Paul Wilson, a lot of tech stuff, so the only thing I remember is that Cairo is switching to a new 1-month release-cycle and got some love in the past months that allowed performance improvements and a clear plan for Cairo 1.10.

Closing talk was a great moment (I'll post a video later) next year the Desktop Summit will take place in Berlin, so hopefully see you there! Great thanks goes to all the people that made this happens, volunteers, companies, and of course the GNOME Foundation. Let's rock!

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jeudi 29 juillet 2010

Second day at GUADEC

Par Stéphane le jeudi 29 juillet 2010, 18:42

Some more awesomeness, live from GUADEC! Today was the second day of the main track, and we have some more cool news about the future of GNOME!

I started my day by the "Cairo <3 GStreamer = awesome video" presented by Benjamin Otte, which basically explained us that video under Linux could benefit of great improvements, but because of the lack of trust between the communities that the patches are affecting (GStreamer, Cairo, Mesa, browsers), they're still not merged, and poor Benjamin is spending more time talking to one or another community to agree on code and push them upstream. He insisted about the importance of a "bridge" between developer communities so that patches can flow both ways.

Alex Launi - How to be cool

Then came the Summer of Code students lightning talks, which I was part of! It went very well for all of us, we've showed off our cool projects, and everybody looked please with them. Make sure to check them at : http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Projects. Above is the awesome Alex Launi teaching us how to be even cooler with Banshee, and below is me pretending I prepared something for my talk (did my slides at 4am, after winning the GUADEC dance contest, yay, ahaha).

Stéphane Maniaci @ GUADEC

Right after jumped into the "Furture is Javascript" by John Palmieri, who demonstrated, again, how Javascript combined with GObject-introspection allow any developer to run the app on both the desktop and a web browser. Showed us the web interface of the Palm OS development center, which is close to an online WYSIWYG IDE : you just drag buttons around, click a lot, and there you go, a web app (very few memories of the talk, sorry).

Got lunch with the nice crew of Yorba, had a very nice time with them and a free computer history class. Went back in for the "GNOME 3 and your application" talk by Colin Walters et Dan Winship, who described the new concepts introduced with GNOME 3, such as the Application Menu of the Shell, the GtkApplication API, the cleaner system tray, which will contains _only_ system icons, the message tray, and a few changes to edit in the .desktop files of applications.

Heading into the Seville room, I listened to the talk "GNOME, linux mobile stacks, and you!" by Andrew Savory, who pointed out the importance of Linux in the mobile market, and how there's an increasing number of companies involved in handheld software development. Reminded us of the alliance between LiMo (The Linux Mobile foundation) and GNOME, and insisted on the fact that we need to enable more developers to dive into GNOME development, and allow faster deployment, demonstrating Canonical's Quickly framework along, which turned out to be pretty effective. He ended with a fair comparison of the GNOME vs KDE toolkit from a newbie developer point of view, typing into Google "GNOME sdk" and "GNOME developer" then doing the same with Qt. Definitive win for the KDE camp. Let's unify our developer doc very soon.

Finished with the GNOME Foundation talk, I didn't attented all of it, and it would be too long to recap everything, in one sentence :

We're doing great.

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mercredi 28 juillet 2010

The coolest roadmap I've ever seen

Par Stéphane le mercredi 28 juillet 2010, 13:51

First day of the GUADEC main track, and we already have some great news about the future of GNOME. Below is my version, which means that it presents only the conferences I've attented. Lot of cool stuff is also happening in the other rooms!

Opening talk of GUADEC

Luis Villa started this morning, with a very nice conference about what is GNOME made of, the people behind it, and the way it's going. To keep GNOME the best great platform it is, he suggested to move toward the web technologies, and embrace the web as much as we can, demonstrating the capabilities of Javascript to execute the same app in a browser and on the desktop. So the whole point I got was that wild idea that we should develop toward the web and focus a lot more on that. It is definitely a good idea IMHO, but that also suggests that we should drop our "traditionnal" tookits to develop new applications, which is scary, but makes sense since HTML + CSS + Javascript are also capable of great things, as long as you know how to use them. Whatever I got wrong or right, Luis is open to criticism and questions, feel free to contact him if you have constructive feedback about that.

GNOME + Web

Then came the GNOME 3 Shell talk lead by Owen Taylor, demonstrating the progress made by the Shell since last year since he initially introduced it at GCDS. So we really realized how many improvements landed in just a year, with the new dialogs, app menu, looking glass, and the overall greatly improved appearence. They still have some nice items left on their roadmaps (some work on the tray is expected), but it's already pretty usable and has some cool features in (the inline Empathy integration is changing my life).

GNOME Shell message tray

I attented right after the "Shell Yes!" talk by William Jon McCann, with some very nice, philosophical introduction, and he had chosen some very nice quotes to explain how we must focus on the beauty of our software, and bringing better applications the world. Then he gos us by surprise, and revealed a terrific roadmap :

GNOME OS!

Yep, you can read too, they're thinking about making GNOME 4.0 a GNOME OS. And now I'm getting +3000 visistors cause I both mentionned "GNOME 4.0" and "GNOME OS" (and twice more now). Note that this is just their personnal vision, and it not approved anywhere else, and I believe the idea hasn't spread yet. Anyway, we got some cool mockups after, which I believe are maintainted up here : http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/, make sure to check it out, it looks very nice and keeps being improved.

This afternoon I attented the "GNOME State of the Union" talk by Fernando Herrera and Xan Lopez, which was an excellent, hilarious presentation about what happenned to GNOME in the past 10 years, from the death of CORBA, Bonobo, GNOME Panel, to the new dconf, Clutter and all the shiny stuff. Make sure to check the videos when available, you're going to have a great time.

The "Clutter : State of the Union" by Emmanuele Bassi was very instructive, introducing new features for Clutter 1.4, constraints, actions, effects, plus COGL and performance improvements, which means that Clutter is going to get even more awesome by the end of the year, definitely an excellent toolkit.

Clutter State of the Union : they have a new logo!

The last talk was by some more Intel folks who demonstrated their pet projects : Dax, a Clutter-based SVG library, Mash, a library to use 3D models right inside Clutter (3D models + 3D lightning + animation = ❤), and finally another smart guy from Intel taught us the basics (and great rules) of real-time small game programming.

That was an excellent day at GUADEC, make sure to watch the live VP8 stream by Fluendo, and maybe follow me on identi.ca, which is the compressed, real-time version of my daily GUADEC reports. Tomorrow, we're doing the Summer of Code projects talk, don't miss me us!

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mardi 27 juillet 2010

First day at GUADEC

Par Stéphane le mardi 27 juillet 2010, 09:47

GNOME banner

So I just finished my first day at GUADEC, so far so good! People are really nice, it's really cool to see "famous" hackers around, and sitting in the middle of people running only Linux (even greater, running only GNOME!).

As the main conferences don't start till the 28th, today and tomorrow are used for BoF sessions and workshops, so I attended this morning a very instructive workshop lead by the nice team of inventedhere.de, who introduced us to "Open Design Thinking", which, from what I've understood, is a set of practices and methods to design solutions to concrete user problems (I just won a Worst Meaningful Sentence Award).

In practice, we tried to solve the file management problem. Splitted up in four teams, we followed that process :

  • Listening to real users interview about how they manage their files ;
  • Throwing posts-it all over the whiteboard to identify what problems they encounter at doing it ;
  • Creating a fictive character to "work for" ; as an example, my team came up with Anna, a 25 y-o medical student who just can't sort her documents (photos and audio are OK thanks to tags) ;
  • Brainstorming a bunch of ideas about how to solve/enhance the situation, another good occasion to have fun with posts-it ;
  • Voting the best idea in that pool and iterate over and over it ;
  • Presenting some kind of prototype/mockup to the rest of the room.

Post-it fun

And we did a great job! Each team got really cool ideas, combining meta-data, face recgonition, audio annotation, handwriting, chronology, file context, and a bunch of useful things. Too bad we didn't saved any prototype on paper or something, hopefully the mighty Tracker coupled with Zeitgest might achieve that in a not-so-far future. Personal conclusion of the workshop : if you use the good design process, you can come up with very creative (and effective) solutions in no time (was only 3 hours long).

« What I'm saying is Anna should definitely drop out of school »

Great thanks to the inventedhere.de crew! (picture) The invented-here.de crew

I'm going to be faster for the end of the day, that's already a long post, I went to the HIG 3.0 BoF, where Calum Benson told us about the pattern we should follow on the GNOME wiki to describe new widgets : tags / status / description / when to use / current usage / user guide / specification / terminology and some other fields I don't remember. No new widgets for now, but now we know how to report them.

Finally, tonight was the Summer of Code students dinner, was really nice to hang out with them, dinner was good, mentors are fun, so yeah, I'm having a great time. See you tomorrow for another GUADEC report!

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lundi 19 juillet 2010

Ease : weekly report #8

Par Stéphane le lundi 19 juillet 2010, 06:54

Available as PDF : Summer of code, weekly report #8

1 What I have done

  • Turned 20 year old.
  • Started implement interfaces for theming purposes : Shadowable, Outlinable (can be useful for reproducing the Apple way of doing text, with the inset), so you can have nice text-styling capabilites (but it also applies for images and other elements) ;
  • Ported all the UI to Gtk.Builder, fixed some weird segfaults ;
  • Made a first release for Ease, which can be found at http://live.gnome.org/Ease/Releases, but note that the tarballs are not definitive, this is more an attempt to learn packaging than an actual release. Ease 0.2 will be a much stronger release ;
  • Reported some feature-tracker bugs, and especially the theming architecture, which will copy a lot the CSS way, and eventually be done with only CSS.

2 What’s next

  • Finish the interfaces for easy element cutomization ;
  • Build the nice UI that goes with them ;
  • Learn to draw with Cairo ;
  • Integrate the unittests with Autotools ;

3 Timeline

I could still do more, but it’s getting faster, don’t worry... I didn’t finish some of last week objectives, and started working on some new ones instead. There’s a lot of equal-priorities items on my list, but this week’s list should be pretty accurate.

4 Issues/Other news

  • Got my ticket for GUADEC! If anyone is flying via Iceland and/or arriving around  1p.m at Amsterdam, let’s meet up!
  • Pulled my right quadricep, because I’m freaking dumb and didn’t warmed up at my weekly soccer game. I don’t know if I’ll be able to play the FreeFA at GUADEC. I’ll take photos if I can’t.
  • I also screwed up my F13 clutter-gtk installation. For some reasons, a program using Clutter only with work perfectly, but any GtkClutter widget won’t redraw properly. I’ve reinstalled clutter-devel, clutter-gtk-devel, gtk2-devel, and a bunch of other things, but it doesn’t work yet. My Ubuntu partition still works, but I’d rather stay on Fedora...

See you next week!

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mercredi 14 juillet 2010

Packaging Ease, round 1

Par Stéphane le mercredi 14 juillet 2010, 04:07

Hey folks,

I finally got a Debian package of Ease, can some people try it out and just tell me if it installs correctly (about Ease itself, you're welcome to report bugs, but we know it's unstable).

Ease - package 1

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lundi 12 juillet 2010

Ease : weekly report #7

Par Stéphane le lundi 12 juillet 2010, 04:58

As usual, available as PDF : Summer of code : weekly report 7.

1 What I have done

Week 5, I was traveling around and week 6 I got very little time to work due to visiting and such, so I decided to sum it all in that seventh weekly report, my apologies for the lack of work.

  • We’re still very late for Ease 0.1, I guess this is because of life business on both sides and because we’re new to releasing. Anyway I packacked Ease for Debian, the last standing point is a “missing dependance information” about clutter-gst-1.0, it should be ready very soon ;
  • Fixed “distcheck” once more, someday I’ll master Autotools... ;
  • Added some error-handling to my Flickr fetcher, when you’re offline, when the request fails, etc... ;
  • Added a focus feature on the player : click a point, and the whole screen shades gracefully except for the area where you clicked. An ugly rectangle at the moment, but it’s still cool ;
  • Nate ported the editor window to GtkBuilder, I’m doing the same for the welcome window, but have a few issues.
  • Bug fixes.

2 What’s next

  • Finally release that Ease 0.1 ;
  • Write a mail to the GNOME UX team (the usability list) about the presentation tips : what’s the best design to inform the presenter about remaining time/slides, time elapsed, etc... ;
  • If they’re not too busy, also ask for a global review of the app ;
  • Move all UI to GtkBuilder ;
  • Some more plugin infrastructure ;
  • YUM packages ;
  • Some more unittests ;
  • Drawing with COGL.

3 Timeline

I’m late on my personal expectations, but regarding my proposal, I’m pretty much on time. I still want to speed up a lot, and hopefully that should be easier now that I stopped traveling and moving around.

4 Issues/Other news

  • Still looking for a cheap ticket to Amsterdam.

See you next week.

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lundi 21 juin 2010

Ease : weekly report #4

Par Stéphane le lundi 21 juin 2010, 01:48

It's available as PDF : Summer of code, weekly report #4.

1 What I have done

This week went well, a bit slow though, but learnt a bunch of things aside.

  • Got that Flickr fetcher up and running. Still left a bunch of do, but it already looks like a cool feature I would use when I create presentions. Please have a screenshot:
    Flickr fetcher, version 1

  • Nate (mentor), also did a cool fetcher for OpenClipart, so we’re probably going to split out some common code in a abstract class that will serve for all online-resources-fetcher-based plugins ;

  • Still tried to fix “distcheck” but I get some problems with that nasty intltool-merge failing everytime. This wasn’t worthless as it already had me to remove some useless/wrong macros out of the Makefile.am, with the help of the very nice people of #gnomefr soon. I also started reading the Autoconf manual. Started.
  • Set up a roadmap for 0.1 which will hopefully get approved by my mentor. It includes the basic set of features you expect from a presentation editor, but all of those have to be rock solid and user-proof ;
  • Started writing some unit-tests for Ease, still a beginner at this but it’s getting better ;
  • Reported some bugs and the associated milestone, this helps to keep track of development.

2 What’s next

  • Finish the Flickr fetcher in every part (make it perfect) ;
  • Once it’s done, split out in some abstract class ;
  • Have a plugin infrastructure (Vala’s TypeModules) ;
  • Ease 0.1 is set for July 1st (at the moment), so it would be good to split a 0.1 branch in Git and polish every aspect of it ;

3 Timeline

Regarding the past week, I’m in the timing, but I could have done a lot more, so I’ll speed up and hope to get a lot done by next week. I got the Google package a few days ago, made me reconsider how lucky I am to be part of this.

4 Issues/Other news

  • Had a hard time with asyncing and Vala. Thanks to the nice people of #vala (hey Adrien), I understand it better, but I still need some more experiment with that ;
  • Lost 40 minutes trying to get signals connected correctly with Glade, *then* I realized I was editing the wrong UI file ;
  • Is there like a student room at the GUADEC :) ?

See you next week.

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vendredi 11 juin 2010

Ease : weekly report #3

Par Stéphane le vendredi 11 juin 2010, 11:23

Here's my third weekly report for Ease. It's also available as PDF : Summer of code, weekly report #3.

What I have done

As I explained last week to the mailing list, there wasn't any report #2, for the good reason that I had exams and academic defense till Monday. It went well overall, so I'm back at coding, and here's what I've done :
  • I started building my stock image fetcher, which as the moment works well, except the fact that it doesn't retrieve anything online. I've looked into how to leech pictures from FlickR, also wondered if it would be a good choice to use Grilo, so now I just have to implement it, and this should be done very soon!
  • Tried to port Ease UI to GtkBuilder, I'm getting closer but I still have a bunch of warnings and some non-functionnal UI. Again, I think this will be finished soon.
  • Started investigating packaging, in the perspective or releasing a super-bleeding-alpha Ease 0.1 in the upcoming couple of weeks, for the moment I'm stuck at making ``make dist'' work.
  • Thought a lot about that plugin infrastructure and even after reading the Vala online tutorial (http://live.gnome.org/Vala/TypeModules). , it's still not crystal-clear, so I plan on spying other cool projects like Grilo or GTG (this last one helps me a lot to organize, go Paul, Lucas and Karlo).

What's next

  • Finalize all the previous stuff.
  • I still get a bunch of warnings when I run Ease, so I'd like to investigate this and fix it as soon as possible.
  • Learning how to draw with Cogl (so I can haz gradients and curves).
  • Shaping Ease 0.1, and getting out of the ``it has to crash'' phase.

Timeline

I'm a bit late regarding my timeline, due for various reasons such as :
  • My network connection broke for the past two weeks ;
  • School sucked most of my time last week ;
  • Other bad reason goes here.

Anyway, I'm back at coding, enjoy it a lot, so that should be fixed soon!

Issues/Other news

  • I found a very cool tool to draw UI mockups : it's called Pencil, it's a very nice Firefox-addon that you can also use standalone, give it a try : http://pencil.evolus.vn. Just noticed their website is down, I have a very strong problem with the whole Internet thing those days...
  • I started writing my Vala tutorial. Would be nice to host it somewhere on git.gnomeorg (with vala, gnome-web, itself?), so that other people could write/update/correct it.
  • Early birthday, I got a new laptop! Actually, the family had gotten me one of those big Asus tanks/laptops, with dedicated graphics card, wide display and such, but I politely declined and asked if I could pick my own machine, and here landed the HP Probook 5310m : minimalist, slick and powerful, love it. This isn't the point of that report, so I'll make a separate review on my blog.

That's all folks *warner cartoon music*.

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samedi 29 mai 2010

Ease : weekly report #1

Par Stéphane le samedi 29 mai 2010, 19:16

Previous report was #0, actually.

It's available in PDF : Summer of code, weekly report #1.

1  What I have done

Actually, this report takes into account the last past two weeks, because I already had started a bit of work before the official coding starts (like every Summer of Code student). The list looks like this :

  • Autotools stuff : took me a while, but finally got it working, thanks to the help of the Sampala project1, a project to help you familiarize with Vala + autotools + gettext, the Vala project generator vala-gen-project, other Vala programs like gnome-scan, and some nice people on the #vala channel. First time I’m happy to use ./configure ;

  • We finally moved to git.gnome.org2 ;

  • Sent a mail to the GNOME Bugzilla people, and we have our bugtracker!3 ;

  • Last but not least, checked around for good translations platforms, had started working with Transifex but finally turned to GNOME Damned Lies, and we have our module4 there too! Now we have a German, French and Spanish translation. First time I’m happy to read Spanish ;

  • Walked around the code, and sent a couple of mails to my mentor regarding coding style and general design of the app. Noted that a 7 hours difference doesn’t really help communication ;

  • Got the nice people (they really are) of the #vala channel to upgrade the librest bindings, as well as the librest-extras one (thanks Adrien BUSTANY!), which now allows me to start toying with the Flickr API and build my stock images fetcher.

2  What’s next

Actually, my final exams are next week, so I’ll be a bit busy. But I’m going to try to build my image fetcher, as I think it’s a cool feature and that it won’t be much work to integrate it into Ease. Especially since I didn’t finish talking with my mentor about Ease design and directions, I’m not going to hack on the “core” at the moment.

3  Timeline

Even though I didn’t coded a lot, I’m quite satisfied with all the infrastructure work, as it was one of the “features” of my proposal.

4  Issues/Other news

  • I was quite impressed by the progress of the other GNOME SoC students. Congrats guys! ;

  • Considering the hard time I had to find the right way to use autotools (not using recursive Makefiles, Vala project, l18n, outdated documentation), I’m thinking about writing a dead-easy-but-not-stupid Vala tutorial, to bring more people into GNOME, once I’m done with my summer of code, right in time for GNOME 3.

That’s all for me. Cheers!

1 http://github.com/tadeboro/Sampala

2 http://git.gnome.org/browse/ease

3 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/browse.cgi?product=ease

4 http://l10n.gnome.org/module/ease/

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vendredi 21 mai 2010

Dans le port d'Amsterdam

Par Stéphane le vendredi 21 mai 2010, 09:04

Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah !

In other words, I'm going to GUADEC! Thanks to the awesome people from the GNOME Foundation who sponsors me, otherwise I couldn't do it. I'm really excited about it, I'm sure it's going to be another amazing experience as a student.

So again, great thanks to the GNOME Foundation, can't wait for July 26th!

I'm attending GUADEC

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mercredi 12 mai 2010

Summer of code : weekly report #1

Par Stéphane le mercredi 12 mai 2010, 20:34

Hi,

My summer of code implies a weekly report, well here's the first one.

Right now we're still in the "Community bonding" period, which means getting in touch with the community and getting familiar with your tools and such.

As far as I can remember, here's what I've done :

  • Introduced my project : mailing-list post ;
  • Got my feed on planet GNOME (hi again) ;
  • Created a GNOME Live wiki page ;
  • Had a long talk with my mentor about the project, was pretty cool (he had been busy with exams since then). It was the first serious discussion about Ease design.
  • Toyed with Keynote, a friend of mine showed me some killer-features I should implement, more about those extra features soon.
  • Tried to find what's the best unit test framework to use with Vala : GLib framework isn't optimal according to that blog post, but I think I'll stick to it.
  • Asked on GNOME-related IRC chans about the development method of people, was pretty amazed that some serious GNOME hackers just throw a few sketches then just dive in the code (and make it awesome). I'm still going to draw some UML diagrams before but I'm still opened to suggestions, please comment!
  • Was bored in class one day : tried to copy the awesome Chrome Experiment , Chain Reaction, with Clutter. Didn't went too far, but I still have to take that class a few weeks...
That's it for now. For the next time, I'll try to :
  • Set up a Remember the Milk public TODO list, as seen on a report of Yuvi (have to get in touch with you by the way, can be helpful as we'll both have to code some Vala GTK UI at some point).
  • Provide a hackergotchi to the planet.
  • Create the Ease repo on git.gnome.org (no news of my account application yet).
  • Start coding a bit.
  • Get more inspiration of Keynote and other various tools.

To conclude on something else : today I was in class, laptop on, and talking about modem-capabilities of the friend sitting next to me's HTC Hero, running Android. Of course, the whole row seating behind me starts laming about Linux = SH*T, and defies me to make it work on my poor Fedora 13. So what ? Plugged the thing in, couldn't even click anything, ten seconds later I was connected on my GMail with no lag, epic win. Kudos to the NetworkManager team (I guess), this is going to keep them quiet for a few weeks!

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mardi 4 mai 2010

Hi Planet GNOME!

Par Stéphane le mardi 4 mai 2010, 08:42

Hi!

I'm Stéphane Maniaci, one of the lucky GNOME students for this summer. I live in Montpellier, France, I'm currently finishing my associate degree/higher national diploma in computer sciences, and I'll turn 20 in July. Things I like include programming, skateboarding, kite-surfing, reading and photography.

This summer I'll be working on Ease, a presentation authoring tool for the GNOME desktop written in Vala/GTK/Clutter. This project is driven by Nate Stedman, my mentor, and here's my feature list on the original proposal :

  • Plugin infrastructure
    • Export plugin (PDF/PNG/OGV)
    • Stock images fetcher from different (free) online sources
  • Presenter tips : chronometer, progress bar, spotlight (as seen in Impressive)
  • Simple effect format (XML/JSON based)
  • Integration with other applications (GIMP/Inkscape/PiTiVi/F-Spot/Jokosher)
  • Translation/Packaging/Documentation
  • GNOME infrastructure tasks : use git.gnome.org, set up a mailing list, a wiki page and such.

Note that this list might slightly change (for the better), as my vision of the project evolves.

Well, that's pretty much it for now, this was just an introduction note, I'll post some further info about this very soon, stay tuned ! Hi to all the GNOME people, to all my fellow GSoC students, and great thanks for letting me in !

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