Silicon Island

On GNOME Shell

One thing that came to my mind after the summit was that after John McCann's presentations on various GNOME Shell topics, people went from the so called 'gnomeshellskepticism' to actually start getting it, and by the end of the event most people were using it by default.

A lot is yet to be done to get it to a final state and they seem to have a real vision for it. But it was still bugging me the fact that an explanation of the philosophy and showing some of the features in action made such a difference.

After realizing this I somewhat started to considering that a first login introduction in form of an assistant or a video could make a huge different on terms of success of adoption of the new shell, this approach works pretty well for games, where usually the first time you play it there's some sort of introduction showing you the basic controls and the interface.

Boston Summit Fun

I'm at the Boston GNOME Summit at M.I.T. nice to visit the US a second time and get a grasp on another city. This is my first summit and so far it's been really nice to experience a different kind of event than GUADEC. I like the environment and the fact that is less crowded and more relaxed. It allows you to have the time to actually talk quietly with the people around.

Gtk+ Font Dialog Revamp

A while ago I tried to approach the Gtk+ standard font dialog usability issues and started some discussions in my blog.

After having some discussions that didn't really help me to get anywhere, I decided to find someone with a real usability background so I poked Máirín Duffy and she agreed to team up to solve this problem by doing some mockups for me to implement in pygtk and the run usability tests with the prototypes.

I'm glad I found someone to actually approach this problem from a proper UI design cycle rather than making things up based on gut feelings and random suggestions from other developers based on their personal preferences.

In about a week we should be able to come up with the first prototype.

GSettings/dconf

Ryan and myself have done some PR on dconf and GSetings and trying to push the proposals of inclusion of the basic infrastructure into GLib to move forward. It seems we have a way forward. This is good news for the de-Bonobo-ization goal for GNOME 3.0. and getting a more performant configuration system and a proper GObject friendly API for the platform.

GNOME Shell

Loads of sessions and audience around the GNOME Shell projects, I have to say that I've been exceptic about the direction of the Shell, but after the sessions and the overview of the RedHat guys and been running it from Karmic for a while I think it's coming along not that badly and that we could get.

On competition (Was RE: Back Home)

Just come across on this post from Rodrigo Moya, beloved GNOME hacker and friend. He is sort of upset by the amount of duplicated work and he is sort of sad about the feeling of competition between free software projects and the duplicity of work that it implies.

Somwhat Rodrigo thinks that we would be better off if we worked together instead of competing among each other. Up to some extend I agree that a level too high of fragmentation is not any good as long as you pursue the success of the freedesktop.

However, I do think that competition is essential, and instead of discouraging it, we should try to understand why peolpe have to start so many different projects to get something right. I would like to share some thoughts about this:

• Building a team of developers is hard, for a team to work well there should be some sort of complicity, vision and easy going atmosphere in a community. And that means that the group of people creating a project have to share the bulk of a common vision. This involves having good leaders, good software architects and perform a good promotion of the project among the open source community.
• Competition and fragmentation are two different things. Ideally competitors have to follow a certain set of common rules, and more importantly, they should participate in the process to set the rules (standards), this is, if competitors pursue the best for their users. Fragmentation only spreads confusion ammong users and makes downstream projects' life harder (there is where the duplicity of work comes from).
  
• Competition is our key differentiator against the closed source model. Is the one thing that makes us appealing. Of course it has its downsides, but our efforts shouldn't go towards constraining that competition, instead, enforcing a set of rules that we all agree about, and commit ourselves to those rules.

I think that companies like Canonical, RedHat or Novell have a lot to say about this, if we have 16 different libraries for a single purpose, don't you think developers would stop using most of them if these 3 key players decided not to distribute them anymore at some point? As long as these libraries get distributed, developers won't make the effort needed to keep a sane dependency tree, and if they don't even then, we are better off without software that is poorly maintained.

Life, Gtk+ and GUADEC

Life

Long time no blog. I've been quite busy lately, mostly work and real life. For the first time I've joined a gym, and I'm quite commited to lose the fat I've got during my college years. It's been almost 10 years since last time I did regular sport, and I'm actually surprised that results are getting there only after 1 month, soon I'll need new trousers. I'm doing three times a week, plus a soccer match on thursdays with the guys at Sun (originally started as a MySQL vs. Sun soccer match).

At the begining I thought that it will be pointless, that it will take me too much time to lose fat, and that I will be tired all day, but it turns out that is funny, and the trainers are quite friendly and are always up to help me and answer any question I have to get better results. After all this years I' actually regret not to do this before. I've lost 4 kg already (probably more taking muscle gain into account), and I haven't been so thin since my first year which actually encourages me to go ahead, still around 15/20 more to go though.

Gtk+ Theming API Hackfest

Since Real Life(TM) is taking me some more time than usually, I don't have as much time as usually to hack and my Gtk+/Win32 love and other ramdom stuff is kind of stalled. However, I took the time to organize a small hackgest here in Dublin in the Sun offices for mid februray.

The idea of the hackfest is to improve the whole theming situation on Gtk+, how Gtk+ draws and how can be themed, this aims to make life easier to artists (CSS, more flexible engines), engine writers and non X11 look&feel integration and extend the capabilities of Gtk+. Also, people from Trolltech and Mozilla will be around to give us their feedback on how can we improve our public API for better integration of Gtk+ on third party toolkits, I guess offscreen rendering work would be a big topic here.

There are quite interesting people coming, check the wikipage of the event. I would like to thank Sun and the GNOME Foundation for supporting this event.

( GUADEC+Akademy || Akademy+GUADEC )

Things are start to rolling in what I think it could be the start point for a lot of great things to happen in the free desktop world, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I have the gut feeling that if we sit down together face to face we can achieve a lot of interesting things, I'm starting to feel the good sinergy between both communities in the organization mailing list.

My Christmas flight is earlier than expected to Gran Canaria this year, we're going to have a meeting between the GNOME Board (Chema, Dave and myself), the KDE eV guys and the local government (Cabildo de Gran Canaria) to visit  the venue, discuss, and why not, enjoy a more pleasant weather than the central european one ;-)
Kudos to Agustin and the local organization team for setting everything up to both board visitors for this meetings.

Dirk and Geoff, my managers, have agreed to include my involvement in GUADEC into my personal development plan, that means, I have working hours dedicated to GUADEC's organization. So expect more blog posts about what's going on on the most important open source event of the year! (Okay, that was biased, but I don't care).