This is my first post aggregated on both Planet Mozilla and Planet Mozilla Mobile. I guess it’s a good time to introduce myself to the Mozilla community. I joined Mozilla about a month ago to work on Firefox  Mobile. I’ll be mostly focusing on UI-related bits and pieces of Fennec as part of the front-end group—which is in fact what I’m most passionate about.

Before Mozilla, I worked for three years at litl—a Boston-based startup—where I hacked on the cloud-based OS that powers the webbook. The litl OS is almost entirely written in JavaScript and it was while working on it that I really got hooked into the language. Before litl, I was part of Maemo’s UI framework team at Nokia where I worked throughout the entire development cycle of  the N810 internet tablet.

I’m also a long time GNOME contributor. I’ve done all sorts of things in the project such as being a member of GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, being part of GNOME’s release team, and maintaining a few official modules. I don’t hold any official positions in the project anymore but I’m still working on a cool spare-time project based on GNOME platform.

My first month at Mozilla has been great overall. To be honest, I felt a bit overwhelmed in the first couple of weeks. It’s a quite humbling experience to join such a large community full of extremely talented and passionate contributors. It’s a whole new world to me and I’m learning quite a bit everyday—which is the very reason I joined Mozilla anyway. I hope to be blogging soon about the latest news on Fennec development. For instance, there’s some really exciting work being done on the tablet UI for Fennec now! Stay tuned!

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 :-)

Back in 2008, when we started writing the initial infrastructure for the litl OS UI, Havoc added a way to run the whole thing using uninstalled files in the source tree. Back then, I was so blindly used to the “make → make install → run” cycles that I didn’t think this would be especially useful. I was obviously wrong.

litl’s UI shell is a relatively big component comprising our window and compositing manager, UI shell, plugin framework, a few highly integrated apps—online photos, video chat, settings, friends, etc—among other things. Having to install all that for every change in the code would be time consuming and utterly distracting.

I added support for uninstalled run in The Board a few weeks ago. It’s an separate executable that allows you to run the app using fonts, images, icons, plugins residing in the source tree. The only missing part is being able to use uninstalled translations from the source tree—any good ideas on how to do it? GNOME Shell also allows you to run it from source tree inside Xephyr using a wrapper script.

The bottom line is: any step between a code change and running the software is a distraction. If you can make your app run using only uninstalled files from source tree, do it! This is especially important in complex code bases using lots of different assets—icons, images, UI definition files, translations, fonts, etc. This allows you to test your code changes without much hassle. And it saves you precious time.

webbook by litl (CC-BY-NC-ND)

The GNOME event boxes have been flying all around Europe and North America helping our community to promote the project, demonstrate the beloved desktop, and show off all the cools things that can be done with the GNOME platform in gadgets like the OLPC XO and Nokia N810.

litl is now donating two webbooks, one for each GNOME event box. We’ve already shipped one for the North American box. I’m still waiting for the European box to be found before sending the other one. The litl OS is fully based on the GNOME platform using GObject, GLib, Clutter, GTK+, Gjs, GStreamer, and others. The webbook is a good example of the strength of GNOME’s platform. We hope this is a useful addition to the event boxes. Enjoy!

Webbook by litl (CC-BY-NC-ND)

We at litl had to skip last year’s GNOME Summit in Boston because we were too busy releasing our first product, the webbook. But we wanted to contribute with something this year. So, we’ll doing something similar than we did in 2008.

For the Boston Summit attendees, litl is buying coffee, soft drinks, brownies, cookies, and a cheese plate on Sunday afternoon from a fancy French restaurant. We hope you all enjoy it!

A few litl people will attend the Summit this year—Brad Taylor, Sandy Armstrong, Johan Bilien, and maybe others. Brad and Sandy will participate on the Snowy hackfest. Johan will be giving a quick technical presentation about how we’re using GNOME platform maybe followed by a UI demo—surely a good opportunity to know a bit more about what we’ve been hacking on.

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!

Next Product

Last time I blogged about litl was back in November last year, when we released our first ever product: the litl webbook. I thought it would be a good time to post some news, now that we’ve announced our next product: a Web-connected TV box with an awesome remote – see the news on Engadget, Gizmodo, Fast Company, and others for more information and photos.

Since the launch of the webbook, we’ve done a few releases of the litl OS – the software running in our products – with major improvements in existing features, new features, and important bug fixes. Those updates were automatically downloaded and installed on all webbooks through all neat update system. Let me highlight some of those.

Mediawall major improvements. Mediawall is litl’s signature channel that aggregates photos and videos from several online services and show them in a nice timeline. We spent a couple months improving Mediawall by refining the user experience, redesigning and simplifying the timeline view, improving video playback stability, making some important performance improvements, and fixing a lot of bugs. Getting the Mediawall user experience right is quite challenging as its implementation involves a tight integration between the litl OS and our server side bits.

Photo & Video upload. One common comment from users and reviewers of the litl webbook was that even though the product allowed you to view photos and videos from several online services, it didn’t support media upload. A few months after the release, we added super-simple upload support to the litl OS. Users can upload photos and videos to Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, and Shutterfly from the webbook by just following the very simple process of plugging your camera in, selecting the online service to upload your media to, and starting the upload. The new content appears in Mediawall after just a few minutes.

More services in Mediawall. By the time we launched the webbook, Mediawall supported photos and videos from Flickr and Shutterfly. On a later release, we added support for Picasa and SmugMug. More services will be gradually added in the future.

Chromium-based web browser. The latest litl OS release features a re-implementation of our web browser’s guts based on Chromium – instead of Mozilla’s Gecko. That doesn’t mean that gjs is now based on V8 engine or anything. The main UI shell is still running on Spidermonkey engine. The new Chromium-based browser allowed us to have more control over the life cycle and resource usage of the browser cards and we now have a much smoother and integrated web browsing experience.

New channels. Several channels have been added to our Card Catalog. Facebook, BakeSpace, and NPR are some of the cool channels we’ve released since launch. The first ever litl SDK has been announced a couple weeks ago. We hope this will boost the development of new channels for the litl products from now on.

Misc improvements. Besides the big features above, a lot has been done on several parts of the OS: Card Catalog now has a much nicer UI, news channels are much cleaner and stable, remote BIOS update proceduce, overall UI performance has been improved, faster full-screen video performance, initial browser page has been simplified and enhanced, battery status is now visible in the Settings card, and much more.

I worked on three of those areas: Mediawall, Photo & Video upload, and some of the Misc improvements. We have already started working of some major new features for the litl OS which will be released with our next product. Expect some exciting news from us! For those interested in the webbook, we have recently reduced its price from $699 to $399. Enjoy!

The litl Team

So, you’ve probably seen the news: litl webbook released! It’s the result of heavy work of an awesome team! Our website has a lot of information about the product from a user perspective, so I thought it would be nice to bring an overview of the more technical aspects of the litl OS that I find specially interesting. Scott has written some technical notes about our OS too.

Javascript. Almost all UI code is written in javascript using our GObject introspection-based binding called gjs (using SpiderMonkey engine). It was a quite interesting learning experience to write a large amount of UI code in javascript. By the time we started, I think no one in the team had any real experience with javascript. So, it took some time until we all agreed on the javascript programming idioms (the flexibility of the language may “cause” a lot of inconsistencies…) and on how to better/correctly take advantage of its features. Most of what we agreed in terms of coding style is in the gjs style guide. Doing stuff in javascript (i.e. not doing the whole UI in C or any other insanity like this) allowed us to prototype, refactor, rewrite things much faster. And that was crucial for us because the ideas around the UI design changed a lot during the first months of development and we ended up rewriting large chunks of code several times on the way. Doing relatively large scale stuff in javascript definitely requires very clear and strong guidelines in order to keep the code base sane – maybe a bit more than usual.

GNOME & FLOSS stuff. The OS is heavily based on well-known open source projects. Some facts: it’s based on Ubuntu (with great support by Canonical) and the UI is all written with GNOME platform and co. As I said, almost all code is written in javascript using gjs. Most of the UI is Clutter-based. We have our own specialized window and compositing manager that was implemented with our use cases in mind. We’re definitely one of the projects with the largest Clutter-dependent code base. We use GTK+ in just a few places where we needed more complex widgets (i.e. text entry). The web browser is Gecko-based and it’s pretty much implemented as a XUL app running in a separate process than the OS chrome. We use Evince and Totem (as browser plugins), GStreamer, Network Manager, and others. One interesting fact about our development process is that, in the ~2 years of heavy hacking, we had to adapt to major changes in the upstream projects we base our OS on. So, since we started, we had to port our UI to Clutter 0.6, then 0.8, and finally 1.0; had to port gjs to use the then-new GObject introspection scanner; migrated from Network Manager 0.6 to 0.7; and maybe some other major changes that I can’t remember now. We contributed to those projects as much as possible during the process.

No storage, just caching. You probably noticed that the device has “only” 2GB of storage. That won’t sound strange if you see this from a “webbook perspective”. One of the ideas behind the product concept is that the device serves as a much improved window to the web. In other words, the device provides a simple and beautiful way to access web content – among other things. So, we are pretty much only using storage for local caching. We don’t really store any real permanent data on the device. And that brings some interesting challenges on how we implemented the OS. So we had to implement some smart ways to cache as much content as possible and expire the right bits at the right time so that the general experience is nice and smooth. Simple example: the OS provides a way to access all your Flickr photos and videos (which can be a lot of photos and videos btw) but we never permanently store anything on disk. We cache things like rss feeds, profile pictures of your litl contacts, a lot of your Flickr photos and videos, website favicons, installed channels, etc. Each type of content may use a different way of expiring items and all that needs to fit in the relatively small storage space we have. You can guess how fun it was to hack on this. Hacking on syncing was even more fun though :-)

Syncing. Another interesting aspect of the device is that each device is connected to a litl account on our servers and all your stuff (browser cards, channels, settings, contacts, etc) is always synced in our servers. That means if you lose your device and get new one, you would just need to connect your device to same account and all your stuff would be nicely restored. Additionally, multiple devices can be associated to same account. In that case, they will automatically share channels and other things. If you add channel card in one, it will automatically appear on the other. We spent quite some time working on our syncing infrastructure (client and server), dealing some relatively complex problems – especially when dealing with making UI immediately react to sync-related changes in the local and remote datastores. The server side syncing stuff (and other server-side features) is implemented with Google App Engine, some bits in Amazon S3 and Django.

Seamless system updates. The OS comes with a smart update system. No package management involved. No user action needed to get system updates. In practice, we download and install a new OS image and fetch your data again from litl servers while the system is idle. The update system falls back to current image in case something goes wrong with new OS images. The update system allows us to keep updating, adding features, fixing bugs, and then push those updates to our users in a burden-free way.

We had a lot of fun hacking on the litl webbook. It’s always great to work in a team full of very smart people. Definitely learnt a lot in the process. We still have a lot of work to do of course but I already feel very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. Exciting times!

Update: Saying that the UI is 99,99% Clutter-based is not very accurate. It’s a bit less than that.

Amsterdam

• Moved to a better/cheaper/larger apartment in the same cool area in London. Perfect! After all the hassle of the move, we are really enjoying our new home and neighborhood!
• Work at litl is fastly and intensely moving forward. So intense that I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out for GNOME stuff… I’m trying to catch up with my long list of pending GNOME tasks now.
• Really glad that we managed to come up with a plan for GNOME 3. There are still a lot of open questions which I hope will be answered as we move on the schedule. Another great move was our migration to git. We’ve got a very positive atmosphere inside the community now. That’s awesome!
• Cultural life in London simply rocks. I went to Stomp and Mama Mia, concerts of Richard Bona, Bosco de Oliveira, Vanessa da Mata, Ben Harper, a bunch of nice museums, parks, neighborhoods, open markets, etc, and planning to go to many more! That’s something I really missed in Finland.
• For some reason, my english accent tends to be a bit too American but I like the British English accent much more. I’m practicing my British English “Hello” and “So…” everyday. Maybe at some point I’ll have a a perfectly pronounced “Hello” but then there are all the other words to get the pronunciation right :-P
• Traveled to the simply beautiful Prague (photos) in March and to the weirdly amazing Amsterdam (photos, some more uploads pending…) in April. More travels being planned, yay!
• Got LittleBIGPlanet: fun, fun, fun. It’s the only game my wife and I get to play together (as she doesn’t like to play most of the games we have). So, it’s double fun for us.
• Looking forward to getting a new DSLR camera soon. I’m getting very annoyed by the unstable handling and the small viewfinder of my Canon 350D. I’ve heard Canon 450D has some good improvements over the 350D but I’m leaning towards a Canon 40D… Suggestions for camera models, places to sell my used camera, and stores with good deals for new cameras are welcome.
• Two awesome apps I started to use recently: GNOME Do and Miro.
• Latest playlist includes: Holly Golightly, Erykah Badu, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Soulive, The New Mastersounds, Jill Scott, Amel Larrieux, Anthony Hamilton, Miles Davis, Fiona Apple, Sonny Rollins, Roberto Mendes, Stanton Moore, Ben Harper, Clube do Balanço, Black Rio, a lot more. Actually, I feel it’s time to renew my music collection with some new albums…
• I’m in Twitter now. It took some time until I got the point of microblogging. So far, it’s been an interesting experience.
• That’s all for now. Time to sleep.

Click on the image to know where our office is in this photo by tko