I could not attend GUADEC last year for a very good reason. So I’m really happy that I’ll be able to go to Berlin for the second Desktop Summit this year! This is my first GNOME conference without holding any official roles in the project since 2007. This means I’ll hopefully have more time to just hang out with my fellow hackers. I’ll arrive on the 6th of August and leave on the 10th.

I guess it’s a good time to announce that I’ll be giving two talks this year. The first one is about GNOME development in JavaScript with Gjs. It will be on the 7th of August (Sunday) at 9h40 in the morning. Hopefully, a few attendees will wake up earlier for this talk!

The second talk is about The Board, one of my current pet projects, which you have probably heard about. I’ll demonstrate the current features and talk about the future plans for the app. I hope to finish some awesome new features in time for the conference. Let’s see. This talk will be on the 8th of August (Monday) at 14h40.

This is also my first open source conference as a Mozillian. So, if you want to know a bit more about Firefox Mobile, just find me at the conference venue for a chat. All in all, I’m very excited about the conference this year! See you all there!

Monmouth Coffee by Erik Hartberg (CC-BY-NC-ND)

As a good Brazilian, I love good coffee. Here’s a short list of my favourite coffee shops in London. Most of them are in central London because they are close to litl’s office in Tottenham Court Road, where I worked for more than two years.

Monmouth. I usually go to their Covent Garden branch at Monmouth Street. Small, cosy, and earthy. They have two other branches. They import and provide coffee for restaurants too. For instance, my favourite pizza place in London serves Monmouth’s coffee. Perfect combination!

Milk Bar. Tiny coffee shop at Bateman street. Young and indie atmosphere. They expose art work from local artists in their shop, pretty cool.

Tapped & Packed. They are at Rathbone Place, number 26. Keep the street number in mind because the name of the shop is not shown anywhere—as far as I could see. They serve the tallest Victoria sponge I’ve ever seen!

Sacred. This is a little coffee place inside the Westfield shopping centre in Shepherds Bush. They have the creamiest flat white. Delicious!

If you have any other suggestions, please post them as comments. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing about other good coffee places in the city!

I’m really excited to announce that I’m joining the Mozilla folks to work on Firefox Mobile! There are several reasons why I’m excited about it, here are a few of them.

Big Challenges. All major mobile platforms have their own built-in web browser. Being a third-party browser in the mobile space means that you have to offer an extremely compelling product in order to convince users to switch. And I do believe Mozilla can make it happen. Allowing users to seamlessly go from desktop to mobile without interruption is a major step on the right direction. I’m sure more compelling features will come out.

Space for innovation. The web browsing experience on mobile devices carries much less legacy than on desktop. This means there are less barriers and constraints for innovation and a lot of space for experimentation. For instance, tablets bring a whole world of possibilities in terms of new features and interaction models for larger touchscreens.

Public benefit, Open source. It feels good to work for a public benefit organization that is fully committed to improving the web. Mozilla is also a huge open source community. I’m sure it will be a great opportunity to meet new people and make new friends. As a long-time open source contributor, I’m eager to learn more about the Mozilla community and hopefully be able to contribute in a meaningful way.

My first day at Mozilla will only be in July as I want to take a well-deserved break between jobs to clear my head a bit before starting. It will be good to spend more time with my girls, travel a bit, and maybe work on some of my pet projects.

Exciting times ahead!

After three years at litl, it’s time for me to move on. Writing a blog post to announce that you’re leaving is always a bit tricky. In this case, it’s because the experience at litl was so rich in so many ways that to it’s hard to know where start from.

Back in the beginning of 2008, I had already decided to leave the Maemo team at Nokia and started looking for my next gig. I heard about litl for the first time from OpenedHand’s Matthew. He said Havoc was working on something pretty cool there. I had started conversations with a couple of prospective employers but I thought it would be cool to talk to Havoc and get to know a bit more about the company’s plans anyway. I honestly thought it was very unlikely that litl would be my next thing mostly because I was under the impression that they were only hiring in the US.

Fast forward several weeks, I accepted an offer and started working at litl—a few months in Helsinki waiting for my UK work permit then finally in London. And I was not alone, the whole Maemo UI framework and toolkit teams—Tommi, Xan, Johan and I—got hired at the same time! Interestingly, this was not a collective move in any way. We only found out about each other’s interest in litl once we started having our first interviews. It was funny to see the rumors that were founding a Maemo-focused company of some sort.

The first two years at litl were quite intense! Each of us would be working on something totally different each week or month—cache management, webcam, photo app, contacts app, sync protocol, web browser, core UI, plugin framework, etc. All this while we were still trying to finalize the design and interaction model for the product. We finally released the litl webbook, our cloud-based computer, in November 2009. This is, by the way, long before Google actually released Chrome OS.

litl’s team is just awesome, full of extremely talented and generous people—quite a few of them are well-known for their contributions to GNOME and other F/OSS projects. Throughout those years, the team gradually grew on all fronts with people coming from Amazon, Novell, Red Hat, OLPC, US startups, and many others.

I’d like to make a special mention of a few people with whom a worked more closely since I joined. First of all, it was a great pleasure to work with Johan B. and Tommi for almost 5 years, both at Nokia and litl. I learnt a lot with them. Secondly, working with Havoc was an awesome experience. He has this huge talent for solving complex problems besides being simply a nice guy. Last but not least, I loved working with Marco. He is, with no doubt, one of the most passionate developers I’ve ever met.

A lot has changed in the company since the release of webbook. litl is now starting to explore new areas and markets. I feel that I have now ended an important career cycle and it’s time to move on to something new. All in all, I can only thank everyone at litl for the great time I had!

What I’ll be doing next? I guess that’s a topic for my next post :-)

Dreyfus Night in Paris

The magic of jazz comes mainly from the fact that it’s fundamentally built around improvisation. Reinventing the same tunes over and over again is a core part of the culture among the jazz musicians. This is maybe why I find it so cool to track all the ways by which certain tunes have been performed at different gigs in various moments of jazz’s history. I talked about my favourite performance of the classic So What in a previous post. Now I’d like to talk a bit about my favourite Tutu.

Tutu was composed by the genius Marcus Miller in 1986. It was originally recorded as part of a Miles Davis’ album with same name that was all composed, arranged, and co-produced by Miller. What I find special about Tutu (the tune) is that it shares a lot of the qualities of So What by working as a sort of minimalist platform for great improvisation. The core foundation of Tutu comes from the 3-note bass line with a chord progression that provides the perfect ground for intense solos. My favourite performance of Tutu is in an album called Dreyfus Night in Paris recorded in 1994, three years after Miles’ death.

So, what makes this specific performance so cool? The personnel is fantastic: Marcus Miller (bass), Michel Petrucciani (piano), Kenny Garrett (sax), Bireli Lagrene (guitar), and Lenny White (drums). White and Garret have played with Miles and other giants, Lagrene has a very interesting work with Pastorius, and Petrucciani is just legendary. If you haven’t heard of some of those guys, you should definitely go look for them. You won’t be disappointed!

The solos are fantastic! All of them start setting a quiet atmosphere, with sparse notes and rhythm then go into more complex rhythmic and melodic explorations until reaching a climax with high-pitched notes full of energy. Garret’s dissonant arpeggios are overwhelmingly cool. Lagrene brings in a highly melodic solo full of tempo-bending riffs. Petrucciani has such a Hancockian precision in his solo that it almost feels like he’s composing a new tune while improving. Finally, Miller turns his bass into a percussion instrument while still playing the bass line.

So, in summary, Tutu in Dreyfus Night in Paris is 16 minutes of pure energy with remarkable solos. Other people have positively reviewed this album before—good reads if you want to know a bit more about the album.

Exposure by Eugene Yurevich (CC-BY-NC-ND)

After some consideration I decided to simplify my photographer life and sell both my DSLR and compact cameras to get one of those simpler yet fancy micro four-thirds cameras. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll get a GF-2 or a E-PL2.

The reason is very simple: even though I have a pretty good DSLR camera, I rarely use it because it’s just too inconvenient to carry it around. It just doesn’t work well for casual photography—at least for me. The reason I bought a compact was simply to have a decent HD video recorder. Anyway, here’s what I’m selling.

Canon 50D with 2 lenses. This is a just over 1-year old body that came with a Canon 17-85mm kit lens. I’m also including my 3-year old 50mm 1.8 lens and a 4GB compact flash. I guess I don’t have to say that this is an excellent DSLR camera, right? Price: £830

Panasonic Lumix TZ7. This is a point-and-shoot camera with an impressive 12x zoom. Definitely one of the best compacts I’ve ever used. Records 720p HD video with fairly good quality. I bought it less than a year ago. Price: £100

Both cameras are in very good shape. No scratches or anything. If you’re interested in buying one of the cameras, please contact me. I’ll give preference to buyers living in UK for practical reasons.

Unboxing a Partner by Stéfan Le Dû (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Being the (mild) technophile that I am, getting a new gadget is a special moment. I usually do quite a lot of research, compare loads of competing products, and read a bunch of reviews from different sources before reaching the point of actually purchasing a new gadget. At the moment I receive the shiny new package, I expect an ideal first boot experience comprising no more than 3 steps:

1. Unbox
2. Connect
3. Enjoy

The “Connect” step might be either cable connection and/or network connection. Unfortunately, the first boot experience of many gadgets don’t follow this simple 3-step process. Some add more steps, others simply offer a lame first time experience. Here are some of the common mistakes.

Battery. Your new gadget has just arrived. You want to start playing with it as soon as possible, of course. You try to switch it on but nothing happens. You realize that you first need to charge your gadget. Epic. Fail. If your product runs on battery, it should be at least partially charged to be ready to use just after unboxing. Apparently, this a common mistake on mobile phones.

Connection. You unbox your new gadget, plugs it to power source, but then you realize you don’t have the cable to connect the gadget to your TV, or your laptop, or whatever. Uh-oh. Products should come with all necessary equipment for optimal experience. My current printer didn’t come with the necessary USB cable and my PlayStation 3 came with no HDMI cable. Very frustrating. Oh, and I’ve heard that the iPhone 4 doesn’t come with the bumper for optimal signal performance… Ok, never mind.

Defaults. The default layout, settings, and content on the gadget should give a strong clue on how cool the features are. Default settings should feel right. For example, if there’s a weather feature, it should show the weather for the user’s current location by default. You should be able to play with all features with default content or through a minimum setup. RSS reader should have a few in interesting feeds by default. A microblogging widget should have an über simple way to get started.

The underlying message from the defaults should be something like “Here’s how cool this device is, now it’s your turn, make it yours”. Galaxy S gets defaults totally wrong. It comes with 7 home screens (!?), either empty or with widgets using lame default content.

I’m pretty sure this list is much longer than that. Those mistakes might seem obvious but they still happen very often. The goal of any first boot experience should be to reduce the process between unboxing and enjoying the product to a minimum and engaging users from very first second they start using the device—with sane and compelling defaults.

The more the product requires just to get started, the more reasons you’re giving users to get frustrated. First impressions matter. A lot.

Back in 2006

It turns out that today is a special date which I almost forgot. Back in 2006, on this same date, 14th of October, Carol and I took a flight from Rio de Janeiro—where my parents-in-law live—to Helsinki where I started working for Nokia as a member of the Maemo UI gang. Today we complete 4 years living abroad.

Since then, I participated on the development three great gadgets, left Nokia to join my current gig at litl, went through a rather painful process to get our UK visa, moved to London, we became parents of the most beautiful little girl in the whole universe, met a lot of awesome people from all parts of the world and a few very special friends, learnt more about other cultures and about our own, and more. Much more.

What an awesome journey!

Oven-baked Tortelloni

A couple years ago, Mariana, a very close friend, invited us for lunch at her house. This was the first time I tried this tasty oven-baked tortelloni with mascarpone, Greek-style yoghurt, and Parmesan cheese. We don’t have it for lunch as often as the spaghetti with salmon and the chicken with soy sauce but it’s definitely in my top list. Here’s what you’ll need to serve 2 people:

• 500g of fresh tortelloni
• 125g of mascarpone cheese
• 250ml of Greek-style yoghurt
• 60g of grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano cheese
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 spoon of olive oil

That’s all! Very simple, right? So, How do you do it? Here are the steps:

1. Boil water in a big sauce pan with the 2 garlic cloves and olive oil. This is the same water you’re going to cook the tortelloni with.
2. Once water boils, add the tortelloni, cook it for 2 minutes, and drain it. Business as usual. Leave the tortelloni in a medium glass roaster.
3. Crush the now cooked garlic cloves into a bowl. Add the mascarpone and the yoghurt to the bowl and mix them thoroughly until they become a homogeneous cream.
4. Spread the cheesy cream on top of the cooked tortelloni in the glass roaster.
5. Pour grated Parmeggiano-Reggiano on top of everything.
6. Put it in the oven (200°C) for about 15 minutes until the Parmesan looks toasted (see photo).

I use fresh tortelloni with garlic and herb filling. The cool thing about this fresh tortelloni is that it only takes a couple minutes to cook – as I mentioned above. I prefer to use fresh Parmeggiano-Reggiano and grate it myself instead of the usual grated cheese packs because I can choose a better cheese and make it more chunky.

Voilà! The mix of the stuffed pasta with the cheesy cream with a touch of garlic is delicious! Enjoy!

My Kindle

I decided that I wanted an e-book reader several months ago but wasn’t fully convinced about any of the available options. Until now. I’ve just bought a Kindle 3 and I really like it! It fixes most of the issues I had with previous Kindle versions (price, size, screen, connectivity, etc) and it’s by far the best e-book reader around. It’s light, small, beautiful, and it has a very good e-ink screen. It’s exactly how Robert Love described it: “the small improvements add up to a significant improvement in usability”. Some more reasons I like Kindle 3 and e-book readers in general:

The screen. I don’t like to read books and long texts on computer screens. It’s just a tiring experience for my eyes. So, I like the obvious fact that e-ink screens look very similar to the usual ink on paper. Kindle 3 has an especially good contrast.

Ergonomics and focus. A couple things really annoy me about the usual printed books. The first one is ergonomics. With the usual books, you end up having to hold them with both hands to keep them open and in a good position for reading. The second is that you always see two pages at the same time. It’s a bit distracting. Kindle 3 is small and light enough to allow you to hold it however you feel more comfortable – including holding it with only one hand. And you only see one page at a time allowing a more focused reading experience.

Fonts and spacings. It’s very frustrating when you buy a book you’re eager to read but the actual reading experience turns out to be quite bad because the publisher chose a too small font and too tight line spacing. That’s especially frustrating if you usually read books while in a bus or tube. With Kindle – and with most e-book readers I guess – you can set the font size, word and line spacings that best fit your personal preferences. I read slightly faster on the Kindle because of that.

Online experience. I buy the great majority of my books (and MP3s) from UK’s Amazon. Hence, having a device that is tightly integrated with my favourite online book store makes the experience of buying books much nicer. It sucks that Kindle is Amazon-specific with an awful DRM but this doesn’t affect me much in practice. I hope Amazon ends up doing the right thing and offer DRM-free books in the future – just like they did with their MP3 store. Charles Stross wrote some interesting notes on why the commercial e-book market is broken.

I know: those are all old news for Kindle and e-book reader owners. But it was good to have such a good feeling about my first e-book reader. It does only one thing and it does it very well.