Posts Tagged ‘hacking’

Desktop Summit 2011

August 02, 2011

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!

The Board 0.1.3

April 28, 2011

The Board 0.1.3

Time for a new development snapshot release of The Board! I’ve just uploaded the 0.1.3 tarball. Get it while it’s hot! So, what are user-visible changes?

The main feature of this release is the webcam support in photo elements with Cheese. It’s fun, it’s magic! A couple of useful key shortcuts were added: Ctrl+N to add a new page and Delete key to remove selected elements. An important crasher fix—caused by an update in gobject-introspection—is also included.

I should be updating The Board’s PPA with the new release in the next days. Other distros should have updated packages soon. The sad news is that the webcam support will not be available on Natty as it doesn’t ship Cheese 3.0. Everything else should work fine.

What’s next? I will be working on the implementation of a storage layer based on Tracker and a few important UI improvements. On other news, I’ll be giving a talk about The Board in the next Desktop Summit. Yay!

Cheese in The Board

April 04, 2011

Cheese in The Board

I spent a few spare hours during this week to finally implement webcam support on The Board‘s photo elements. I still need to polish the design a bit but it’s pretty nice already! Click the image above to see a video demonstrating how it works.

As you can see, I haven’t shown my face on the demo video. This is because I recorded it too late today and I would definitely have to shave—yes, I’m looking like an ogre at the moment. So, I preferred to introduce the feature using one of my daughter’s favourite toys, my pet mug, and my charming hands instead.

This feature was very simple to implement thanks to Cheese‘s library (libcheese) which recently received a lot of love from Luciana. Thanks to her and the Cheese team I was able to use Cheese’s functionalities in The Board with little hassle. The photos are saved on the location than the photos taken with the Cheese app. When you don’t explicitly write a caption before taking the photo, The Board gracefully defaults to a date and time caption—see third photo on the video.

This work is not in git master just yet because I need to get a few fixes in Cheese first. So, I’ve pushed the code to a remote branch for now. This feature should be available to testers soon—in the next development release. Stay tuned!

The Board 0.1.1

February 01, 2011

The Board 0.1.1

Here we go again. About a month ago, I made the first-ever release of The Board. Now it’s time to roll a new release with some pretty nice features and bug fixes. So, what’s new in The Board 0.1.1?

It also has a couple of important bug fixes such as 637703 and 637484. Just like 0.1.0, this is not a release for end-users. The Board is currently unstable, buggy, and often loses data. Early testers are more than welcome though—to provide general feedback and report bugs. Distro packages for 3 popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE) are coming soon—I will announce them in my blog, don’t worry. That should help early testers get started easily.

Versioning. I decided to use the classic odd-unstable/even-stable style of versioning. This is a common practice in GNOME and should be natural for most contributors in the community. In terms of milestones, this means that you’ll see a bunch of 0.1.x development releases from now on and 0.2.0 will be the first release for end-users. I honestly have no final answer as to when 0.2.0 is going to happen yet.

What’s next. I will be rolling a new development release (0.1.2) in the next few weeks—depends on the amount of spare I end up having. I’ll focus on two things: toolbars and element stacking. I’ll do a second design iteration on the toolbars with focus on scalability. In practice, this means fixing bugs like 636637 and 636634. Element stacking is the final major feature for multiple elements which I ended up moving to 0.1.2. You’ll be able to create stacks of elements in the page. I’m quite excited about this one!

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