Archive for the ‘Maemo’ Category

Hello Mozilla!

August 23, 2011

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!

Leaving litl

June 13, 2011

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 :-)

Horizontal Space

February 16, 2011

Bastien’s latest post about the new GNOME screen panel—which looks generally nice by the way—reminded me of something that bugs me a bit on certain user interfaces with abundance of horizontal space.

In the new screen panel case, the brightness slider widget fills most of the window width. My first impression was “Wow, I’ll have to drag the pointer quite a long distance to adjust brightness”. But this kind of misuse of horizontal space is not so rare in other contexts. You can also see it on MeeGo’s status panel with too wide buttons on top. Or in some Maemo 5 apps, with weird menu buttons filling the whole screen width.

This kind of issue usually happens when the UI has to conform with some broader constraints from the design. For example, the screen panel runs inside GNOME’s System Settings which requires all settings panels to have the same dimensions. MeeGo’s status panel could definitely be less wide but the design seems to require all panels to fill the screen width. All that for good consistency reasons. But you might end up giving more space then the UI actually needs—in which case you probably want to ensure nothing looks odd.

Bad use of horizontal space can be avoided by spending a bit more time getting your UI layout right for the available horizontal space. Adding inconsistency to better cover special cases might be acceptable—if the resulting UI doesn’t have a major negative impact on the user experience.

The examples I gave here are not the end of the world or anything. But they definitely add some unwanted awkwardness to the UI. And, you know, little details matter.

4 Years Abroad

October 14, 2010

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!

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