vizZzion.org :: sebas' blog » Silk

Lion Mail is Alive!

sebas — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 23:20:47 +0000

Surely, I’m going to Akademy, too!

sebas — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:54:08 +0000

I’m on the first leg of my trip back to the Netherlands right now. I’ve spent a couple of days in Bretagne, France to celebrate the marriage of a close friend, who asked me to be his best man. The celebrations, which lasted for three days were terrific, but also pretty tiring as you don’t get to spend much time just by yourself. The main celebration was held in the "ridiculously beautiful" Chateau Domaine de la Bretesche, and in Pornichet, the home of the bride. I’m returning to the Netherlands right now, for three days of desk time (needed to prepare my Akademy talk and to get some last minute work done on the impending openSUSE 11.3 release). On Friday, I’ll be boarding a flight to Helsinki and then on to Tampere to take part in my fifth Akademy.

This year’s Akademy is significant to me for a number of reasons:

I’m running for a second term on the Board of Directors of the KDE e.V., the foundation backing KDE. I’ve taken this opportunity to re-focus on my activities there. I will be working towards improving the organisation’s transparency a bit more. Transparency of the of our activities sometimes falls behind a little, since we’re very much focused on getting things done, and there’s always something important to push a little further, at the same time, status information gets outdated rather quickly. With the launch of our Supporting Membership Programme, it’s even more important to get the word out what the KDE e.V. is doing, so that’ll be what I’m working on on that front.
Last year, Richard Moore and I started Project Silk, which has been silently tagging along. Silently doesn’t mean that we didn’t make progress, just that we didn’t talk about it as much as we could. We felt that we wanted to show results before talking a lot about it, so we sat down and wrote code, worked out concepts, talked to people in order to verify and improve on our ideas. I think we’re at a point now where we got some really compelling stuff to show, and to prove that what we have in mind is not only very viable, but also very important to move on. This year’s Akademy will in part be used to spread those ideas within the KDE team, and to get more people to think Silky. If you think that’s all too vague, attend my talk during Akademy. For the few of you, my dear readers who won’t make it, I’ll prepare some online resources over the next days, so you can catch up as well, and join the Silk bandwagon.
Meeting my fellow hackers from the KDE Plasma team. After our last meeting in February in Nuremberg, we’re getting together at Akademy next week to plan, hack, gather ideas talk and have fun. What I really enjoy about getting us together is the sparkling you can see above the table we’re working on after only shortly being together. I guess it’s the motivation, the friendliness, the shared love for beautiful, intuitive Free software but also the mutual respect that creates this atmosphere where we’re getting into hyper-creative mode. It puts us in the position to think about solutions for the really hard problems out there, which none of us could solve individually, and it has more than once been the start of exciting new features and sub-projects.

[break] So I just got home, into our hot top-floor appartment in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Everything’s been taken care of by our terrific friends, the cat is better now after a bladder infection we had to leave it at home with last week. While I do like summery weather, temperatures beyond 30 degrees centigrade without a really cold room are a bit too much for me, and tend to have a bad effect on my productivity. Band-aid: Work at night as much as possible, keep the sleeping room as cool for as long as it lasts and stay in bed as long as I can to get the needed sleep. The laptop is already compiling an updated trunk, while I’m enjoying Brazil playing Chile (Robinho scores the 3:0 as we speak, so I guess my special friend Artur will be happy).

New challenges.

sebas — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:36:31 +0000

I’ve resigned my job at KDAB last month in a swift move towards more KDE-time. This all came pretty suddenly, but it felt like The Right Thing to do for me personally and for KDE, which I care a lot about. Since May, I’ve been working for Open-SLX, a German company that makes and supports the openSUSE boxed version. My focus in that work is the user experience of the product. The idea is to work upstream (in openSUSE and KDE / Plasma) as much as possible. While Open-SLX benefits directly from my work done in KDE, this is also a nice way to give back to the community, by making sure I get to spend enough time on things that are not directly related to the product. So now I’ve settled into my new job, and up until now, it’s been great. I’ve been able to catch up with a couple of areas in KDE, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted in the past, and I have started working on some ideas I was dragging around in the back of my brain for a while). One of those things is Project Silk, which is a Project to boost and deeply integrate the web into KDE Plasma and applications. Its motto is no less ambitions than "Freeing the Web From the Browser", so there’s lots of work to do. ;-) Others have already shown off their cool creations, so I’ve got some catching up to do. I’ll share more detailed information about Silk in the next weeks, so if you’re interested in that, hang on just a little bit longer.

With this new job, I’m also able to spend a bit more time on KDE e.V. things. I’m a Board Member for some time already. Being able to sneak in a bit more of that structured desk time for things that need doing in the near future is surely a good thing. Regarding the e.V., I’ll travel with Ade to Berlin on Friday to meet Celeste, Cornelius and Frank there for an extended weekend of board work (and fun).

Dropping $stuff onto Plasma

sebas — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:23:00 +0000

Earlier this year, while working on Lion Mail I wanted to be able to drag and drop references to items stored in Akonadi, I ran into some limitations we had in Plasma — in KDE 4.3, it is basically only possible to drop local files onto Plasma, with some exceptions. Think of dragging a photo from your file or image browser onto Plasma, and it offers to create a picture frame plasmoid on the desktop (or netbook, or whatever Plasma shell you use). or The underlying problem is the mimedata dropped either contains a URL or mimedata. The second case is clear, get the mimetype, find applets that can deal with it, add such an applet to the desktop and pass it the mimedata as arguments. Applets can specify, as parts of their metadata (actually an entry in their .desktop file) which mimetypes they support. For remote URLs, it’s not quite simple. It’s generally not possible to safely derive the mimetype of the data a link points to from its URL. The mimetype needs to be retrieved from the remote object (in most case, this doesn’t involve downloading the whole file, luckily, but just asking for the mimetype). As it’s likely a network operation, it can potentially take forever. We need to make sure we don’t freeze Plasma while waiting for the mimetype, so it has to be asynchronous. What we’re doing now when a URL is dropped, we start a KIO Job to retrieve the remote file’s mimetype, as long as the job’s running, we show a menu with a spinner, and repopulate the menu with suitable applets once the mimetype is in. The job retrieving the mimetype is then put on hold, and marked ready for reuse. This trick speeds up loading of the content from the applet, and the connection doesn’t have to be renegotiated. This mechanism works well now, I actually got it to work during the hacking sessions at GCDS, and merged it a few weeks later into KDE trunk/ to be part of KDE 4.4. Aaron has done a screencast showing this mechanism for wallpapers, it’s pretty neat.

(You can download an ogg version on blip.tv as well.)

The problem with this mechanism is that it’s not flexible enough for a couple of things I’d like to do, especially not for Akonadi, and also not for applets we want to create based on a specific web service, or anything else that you can safely derive from the URL. I’ve been thinking about a good solution for this for some time, but didn’t have high hopes to actually make it work in time for KDE 4.4, with the feature freeze looming in only a couple of weeks. On Sunday, I had told Steve (he asked for Akonadi/Plasma interaction, see below) that KJots notes (which are stored in Akonadi) should be drag’n'droppable between Kontact and Plasma (and possibly other applications), and that the way to go would be to pass around typed references to akonadi items by URL (basically akonadi: as protocol, the item’s unique id and its type wrapped into a URL). A lame suggestion in fact, since I knew it wouldn’t work. Then I figured if Plasma::Applet could just tell me which applets are suitable for a given URL (a mechanism similar to the mimetype-based finding of applets), we’d be peachy. Hacked up a patch for that and got it working just before I went to bed, had some good feedback the next day. So I went to clean up and optimise the patch a bit, had it review-boarded overnight and committed it this morning. Applets can now provide matching patterns for URLs. You put a wildcard (or a list of wildcards, useful if you want to cover some subdomains, but not others), in the .desktop file of the applet like this:

[X-Plasma-DropUrlPatterns]=akonadi:*

You can use the usual wildcard syntax, and put in multiple patterns (separate them with a “,”). This makes your applet automatically appear in the popup you get when you drop something onto Plasma. The patch weighed in at 35 new lines of code, quoting Aaron “impressive what’s possible with so little code”.

On an semi-related note, Lion Mail is getting better with every Qt release. Painting and clipping problems I had in scrolling with graphicswidgets seem to be gone completely when using Qt 4.6 snaps. Some automatic relayouting issues remain. Lion Mail’s Email QGraphicsWidget (the canvas-based equivalent to a “normal” QWidget) used dynamic relayouting pretty heavily, as it shows different parts of an email based on the screen space available for the applet. I’ll have to revisit some of this, it might be interesting to take the concepts and implement them using QML & declarative UI tech for that, and also making use of the Pure Awesomeness of steveire’s Elite EntityTreeModel for Akonadi. I’ll let him figure out how this works best for KJots first, though. :)

NLUUG Fall 2009: The Open Web

sebas — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:22:06 +0000

Just returned from the semi-anually dutch UNIX user group conference. This fall’s edition, which was today, was titled The Open Web. I had a presentation scheduled, titled Freeing the web from the browser. I talked about ways how we can overcome limitations of the web, such as fitness for very small and very large screens, different input methods, caching, and generally making online data available to rich client applications in a meaningful way. I managed to completely avoid using the term “Cloud”, I’m proud of that. A combined roadshow for Akonadi (while my fellow KDABians are chipping away at the Kontact/Akonadi porting) and Silk, so to say. The talk was well received by its estimated 70 attendees (ok, given the size of the conference this year), with only one person asleep (front row, and at least he was a VIP speaker). I also did a first public demo of Selkie, the standalone web application Richard Moore and I have been working on after Akademy. I’m planning to do a screencast shortly, for those two or three people online that would like to see what it is as well.

A couple of notable things happened today in the Marketing of today might also be interesting to share. Jos Poortvliet (of Dot fame) and Frank Karlitschek (fellow board member and social desktop swabian) and Adriaan de Groot (of FSFE and pink whip fame; no whip this time around though, that must be an Akademy thing). We talked a bit about next steps in an effort to put more structure into the various brands KDE has. Right now KDE has many different meanings (a desktop, applications, a community, …). This leads to real practical problems, it is for example hard to explain to everybody that you can run KDE applications also in GNOME, Windows, Mac OS, on Maemo … — it’s called KDE applications because it’s part of the KDE desktop, right? Wrong. That needs fixing though. This probably involves creating a more distinct identity (“brand”) for the desktop / workspace environment and individual applications. This effort is a longer term process, and is well underway already.
Schuberg Philis, the conference’s main sponsor impressed me with a very sensible idea. Instead of having a huge booth with big machines, interesting for geeky folks, the brought in a battery of espresso machines and (so I heard) the dutch champion barista to make coffee. And good coffee it was (I’m still bouncing). Quite a nice marketing performance, not so “in your face”, still a presence suitable for a conference’s main sponsor, in a way that really adds value to a conference — excellent coffee.
The third thing that struck me was the appearance of rekonq’s new icon (rekonq is a webkit-based web browser which integrates well with other KDE applications and the desktop). The rekonq team has taken Konqi (a young dragon) and turned it into an adult dragon. We’ve been playing with this idea in the KDE’s marketing team some time ago, taking our teenage Konqi and make it a full-fledged dragon, sharp teeth and fire included. Cool to see this in rekonq, I think it’s a neat metaphor especially for this app. I’ve just pulled the latest code from its git repo to give it a whirl.
Fourth, Qt marketeer troubalex a.k.a. Alexandra (sometimes referred to as “trouble alex” by certain very funny people), didn’t make it to Ede due to someone in the family being sick, get well soon from the Netherlands.
I also met Koen Vervloesem, who recently did an interview (the link should be publically accessible by now) with me.

One of the talks I attended was held by Bastiaan Jacques. Bastiaan talked about the status of GNASH, and why it’s important to have a Free flash content viewer, even if Flash sucks and is actually not a piece of technology the “Open Web” should move forward with. During his talk, I downloaded the source and tried to build it. There were some issues building it with my Qt 4.6 installed in a non-standard path, which Bastiaan helped fixing after his talk. I’ve added to my “interesting things to investigate” list to further look at gnash and see in how far it’s suitable for displaying content we really cannot get in a better format than flash (and, by design, easy to integrate also in native client applications).

Another talk I attended was the one by Mozilla hacker Paul Rouget. Paul showed some things that are part of the HTML 5 standard, for example the new video and canvas tags, and then quickly went over to show a bunch of demos what you can do with JavaScript, CSS transformations, SVG and the video tags and canvas tags. Pretty fun stuff, although I have concerns if shipping large amounts of JavaScript code that can even do pixel-based transformation and analysis of image is really the way to go for the web of the future. It doesn’t at least solve problems such as accessibility of data for other applications, it is in fact encouraging putting more and more application logic into web pages, mixing content and presentation and making it hard to actually use the resulting content in a meaningful way (think caching, attaching semantic information or making web pages suitable for different input methods and displays). Pretty entertaining, and a good final presentation anyway (let’s be honest, after a long day of technical talks you’re entitled to some bling).

After the conference, I was invited to the speakers’ dinner, held in a nice restaurant in Ede. Food and conversations were good, and it was nice to learn a bit about others view of various topics. All in all a very interesting, enjoyable and generally worthwhile conference.

Qt DevDays Report Published on Heise; Silk

sebas — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 11:54:34 +0000

After visiting the Qt developer days last week (in my capacity as KDAB‘ian, I got the opportunity to train my rusty German a bit. I had been asked to write a report for Heise (a German IT publisher of the C’t and iX magazines). My report has been published yesterday, you can read it here (again, our theme this week is: No English ;-)). So now I’m a journalists (on the Internet, everyone is).
I’ve published a similar article (this time in English, but it went public last week, so it doesn’t count) on The Dot.

Work on Silk is also progressing nicely. I’m getting more and more the hang of Webkit and what cool stuff you can do with it. Richard Moore has just been blogging about our adventures with webkit on QGraphicsView. I had collected some information about that during DevDays and the Maemo summit the weekend before where I met Kenneth (at both events), a Danish/Brazilian QtWebkit hacker and Ariya (the food guy) who patiently answered my questions. More about progress in Silk will be revealed in the coming weeks as we’re making good progress.

Interviewed about Project Silk, Qt DevDays

sebas — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:44:31 +0000

Koen Vervloesem has published (well, kind of published, it’s LWN subscriber-only right now, but AFAIK will become publicly available later) an interview with Frank “Social Desktop” Karlitschek and me. The interview provides a preview of what Frank and me will discuss in our respective presentations during NLUUG’s fall conference which will be held on October 29th in Ede, Netherlands. I heard that registration is still open, so if you happen to be in the area, drop by. For the majority of my readers (those that aren’t LWN subscribers and not able to come to “The Open Web” conference, this post is more turns out pretty useless though . As the interview was published on my birthday (I’m 33 now), I’ll just take that as an excuse. Random related fact: The KDE project is — to the day — exactly twenty years younger than I am. Happy birthday fellow gearheads!

Mostly unrelated fact, I’ve just returned from the Qt DevDays in Munich where I “hung out” with my fellow KDABians. A Dot (the KDE news site) story reporting about that is coming up (I’m about to queue it for review by fellow dot-editors).

Update: The Dot article has been published.

More Update: A Dutch version of the article is up on Transparante Zaken