Shane Fagan » Open Source

Why 2010 has been a great year so far for open source

Shane — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:25:56 +0000

2010 so far has been awesome.
1. Ubuntu 10.04 was released and its the best Ubuntu yet.
2. Google released WebM (Vorbis+VP8).
3. Steam began porting their engine to Linux.
4. WebGL and other HTML5 technologies are gaining ground.

What all this means is the barrier is lowering and lowering for full open source adoption. With all these great technologies in the browser and on the desktop that support our open source efforts we can rest assured that regular users can move away from proprietary software. Oh and porting steam to Linux lowers the barrier to moving to Linux so although its proprietary software itself it helps users to not get regressions from moving and we should be very very happy about any help we get.

The innovations in web technologies support everyone but mainly this support helps Linux.
If everything on the web is inter-operable then why pay for an crap OS? If all the awesome innovations happening is open source how can Microsoft compete? The answer is even with all of its money Microsoft cant compete long term and with this web innovation happening no one should pay for an OS.

The challenge to Ubuntu is to leverage web apis on the desktop but build fantastic desktop applications for the times when you aren’t connected. Integrating the web into the Ubuntu desktop experience is the challenge for the next 10 years.

RE: Thoughts on flash

Shane — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:51:08 +0000

I fully agree with Steve Jobs about the problems with flash.
All of his points are correct but one of his points is very hypocritical.

He complains about Flash being a proprietary technology when most of the apple platform is proprietary.
He also complains about Adobe having complete control over the Flash platform, when apple themselves used their control over their products to block Flash coming to the iPhone OS platform.

The technology points are very correct Flash causes so many problems when browsing for me personally. Since I moved to AMD64 I have problems almost every time I browse sites that use Flash.

Adobe said that Flash is an open spec and that anyone can deploy it but it will never be as complete as Adobe’s own. If Flash is to survive the crossover to HTML5 they will need to make an open source version and allow community contribution to make it stable. Adobe said a few months ago (I cant remember the link) that the reason they cant open source it is because they have a H.264 decoder included in it. Just strip it out plain and simple.

I love some Adobe products like Flex, Dreamweaver and Photoshop. They are all fantastic programs but until Adobe get smart they wont survive without their main product. Plus I really hope they release the creative suite on Linux.

The great standardization vs innovation battle

Shane — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:42:26 +0000

Do standards hold us back? Its a good question to ask ourselves as
people who work with technology, should we be always looking to
innovate?

First of all are all standards bad and the answer is a big no. Doing
things in a centralized fashion is great for things like the dbus and gstreamer but what about for things
like OOXML
that was made an iso standard even though there is no completely
standard compliment implementation not even from Microsoft themselves.
Standards can be great but it really depends on who makes them.

Application developers who make services for the desktop like Zeitgeist
and Tracker innovate. They dont need to worry about communication
because they use the dbus to pass info and have a well documented way of
formatting the info passed. So innovative projects use standards but the
programs shouldnt push things like how Microsoft pushed OOXML, they
change things release on release and try to keep things stable and well
documented but it doesnt stop the innovation.

So the problem with standardization in software projects is exactly what
happened to OOXML. A bunch of people sat around a table and wrote a
document that was rejected as a standard then they made some changes and
it was accepted (quite ridiculously). While they should have been
already developing it (maybe not releasing it but working on it) because
developing it works out the kinks. There is lots of pages to the
standard but some of it will never see the light of day and why because
it wasnt developed in the correct manner. They should have developed the
standard in house then presented it as a standard.

How can you expect anyone else to develop a standards compliant
application if the developers of the standard cant even do it? How do
you expect to develop a standard without testing it? Whats wrong with
innovation as a means to develop a future standard?

You develop standards through innovation not by committee.

Making free smarter

Shane — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:45:35 +0000

Zeitgeist is awesome and can already do some cool stuff. Here are some examples of stuff that it can do but if it gets support from the development community.

Rhythmbox could make up a playlist of songs that you play most often or which songs you havent played.
Totem could suggest the next movie in a series going by which you have already watched.
Open Office could suggest what to work on going by what you normally work on at that time of the day.
Empathy could remind you to audio call your Mother/Boss at the time of day you normally ring her.
On your N900 your phone could automatically switch between work mode and home mode going by the time you work at and offer you the right contracts.

Zeitgeist can give Gnome/KDE/Maemo all of this right now. Think of a desktop that learns how you do things from the way you do things, the time you do things at and in which program you use them in. Zeitgeist is not just a logger it is your desktop/phone/netbook/smartbook/server but smarter.
Now the hard part is getting some attention we can do lots of cool stuff but we need some help from the development community to get data into Zeitgeist and get the data used in programs. You can push the relevent info to zeitgeist (the docs are here) so help out and make the desktop a little smarter. I promise its not hard and if you hit any bumps go to #zeitgeist on freenode and they can help you out. Oh and if you want to mess about with the code or try the new versions in trunk go here.

On the zeitgeist front have a look at Gnome activity journal. They have a really cool related activity thing now and some preview magic now. You can grab the version from the repo in lucid but its a little out of date and doesnt have the new coolness yet. If you want to mess about with the code or try the bleeding edge grab the trunk.

If you want some more reading they are making this this and this a reality(Ok the last one is a little bit far fetched but maybe…….?)

Open sourcing proprietary software projects

Shane — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:30:44 +0000

In Ireland we have a special relationship with software we see the goodness but politicians dont have a clue how to make sure they get delivery on the sanctioned software systems. There have been a few systems an e-voting system and PPARS(its a payroll system for the medical service) both cost a half a billion to develop and neither are being used.
This is where proprietary software failed badly so why not open source the software (for PPARS not the e-voting) and let the community fix the problem? No matter how complex the system needs to be I cant see how any company can get away with nearly €200 million and not deliver on a product.
Why not open source all failed software projects that wont see the light of day? How many games a year get cut half way through development and never get played? The answer is lots and lots of them. How about really old games (around 15-20+ years old) and open sourcing them? No one makes money on them so who is it harming? In fact we can give a new lease on life for lots of projects and I think its sad that we the community arent being considered at all. A game I would love to have a crack at porting to linux is the original Fallout game.

The importance of awesome

Shane — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:26:20 +0000

Im going to plug a bunch of projects and stuff I like in this post so I hope you guys like it.

Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool. Not only is it nice and interesting(kinda like my blog ) but it gives a nice view on things. The two guys have a good back and forth and the show in general has a good feeling and a nice tone. Plus its short enough to keep my attention which is very limited but long enough to take a dump while its on. Whats also great is the talk that gos on in the comments. People air their views and its nice to see such friendly conversation going on.The show rocks go on and listen

Zeitgeist, ive blogged a lot about zeitgeist so ill just post a few links to what I said previously. They also had a new release (along with gnome activity journal) so id like to congratulate them on that.
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/15/debunking-the-gnome-3-myths/
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/10/gnome-activity-journal/

Gnome Do or well Docky, I love Docky its nice to look at. It does the window management which I like. Plus you can store application shortcuts in it for added ease of use. Gnome Do is cool too, I love the plugin system and the way applications are easy to open. Its one of those things that shortens the time to get things done.

Tracker, I love tracker too. The way it gets all the files, emails, everything. The thing that always made me love it was it isnt slow. It has so many things to look through and it still isnt slow. Id love for it to be included by default again in ubuntu. For Gnome 3 if we had Zeitgeist and tracker included we would be able to get a lot of info and have a complete use history for each file (with zeitgeist) and have the metadata and cool stuff that tracker has. Exciting stuff (well for me who is interested in somewhat boring stuff)

Vala, my first programming language is Java. Then I went on and learned VB and assembly as part of my college course. Then I learned python and a few other languages(most of the main ones). The problem was that im most familiar with Java and im getting better at the others but I still wanted to find an alternative. So then I gave Vala a try and its really fast and all the Gnome stuff (GTK…etc) have bindings for it so I love it.

Quickly, Python-Snippets, Acire and Lernid. All of these projects are awesome in their own way. Quickly makes it easy to do the hard stuff in programming, starting, packaging and distributing and lets you get down to the fun bit making a project do awesome things. Python-Snippets and Acire help you do the programming. The snippets show you what to do and you can copy them into your own projects. It contains code from the simple to slightly more advanced stuff. The whole point is learning. Acire is the viewer for the Snippets and allows you to view the code but also execute it too which is cool.
Lernid is a project to make it easy to contribute to IRC events like ubuntu open wee, ubuntu user days, bug jams..etc. It has some awesome features other than simply viewing the IRC event you can also view information posted by the event host, which is really cool.

Ok so I talked a lot there so ill just give a quick list of some more cool stuff I like. Liferea, Gwibber and Inkscape check all those out too.

Gnome 3 world wide release parties

Shane — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:21:57 +0000

At the last Gnome marketing meeting an interesting idea came up. That was to have a ubuntu loco style release party for Gnome 3 this fall. The proposal is here, im sure sponsors are welcome.
I have to stress its a cross community effort so Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Suse, Open Solaris, Mint, Debian….etc everyone who uses Gnome, develops Gnome, free and open source software lovers or people just wants to party all are welcome. I have emailed or pinged the community managers of a few distros but we need everyones help to make it happen.

Lets make it awesome

Debunking Gnome 3 myths

Shane — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 20:34:30 +0000

Some people are slightly confused about what Gnome 3 actually is. The biggest myth is

Gnome Shell == Gnome 3

Actually its very far from the truth, in fact there is a lot of work that has nothing to do with user interface.

The second biggest myth is

Gnome will drop all support for Gnome-Panel

Actually it will be fairly easy to go back to Panel if you dont like Gnome-Shell its just “gnome-panel –replace” in command line.

Here is a list of some of whats going on (If I forget some please feel free to comment and add them).

You can see the release announcement here. For one its a redefining of the user experience with Gnome-Shell. Its also Gnome activity journal which will bring a new level of convenience to the desktop. There will be a lot of integrating of web technologies like webkit and javascript(which is what gnome shell is written in). A lot of outdated technologies will be deprecated and new technologies introduced. A new Gnome website too.

Gnome-Shell
There is some cool mockups and info about shell here.
This is the one huge change, removing the old gnome panel written back eight years ago and replacing it with a new fresh user interface. It is written in Javascript and uses CSS for theming. Gnome Shell uses Clutter for the display and it is very exciting looking at the beauty of Moblin which uses Clutter already. It features a simple desktop and an activities area that gives and overview of workspaces and allows the user to do all of what it does currently. It also has a built in notifications system and will soon get its own applcation indicators. Its not a huge change but it adds some new eye candy to the Gnome experience.

Gnome Activity Journal and Zeitgeist
This is very cool and has a load of awesome applications throughout the desktop. Zeitgeist is an engine which simply gets your activity from the programs you use, files you open, pages you open, code you view or edit and so on. Gnome Activity Journal uses Zeitgeist, tracker and telepathy to offer a complete timeline of your activities and the history of your files. Telepathy integration is also coming for to the journal for added collaboration.
What Zeitgeist offers is that it replaces GTK recently used and it can show you what activities you do most for each program. Zeitgeist and tracker will have all the information about you and your files and will add a never before seen level of information and relevance. Here is a nice video of Gnome Activity Journal in action.

If you cant see it click here if you still cant see this get Firefox or Chrome

Use of web technologies
The use of web technologies is very important, it enables developers from the single largest area of development to contribute. It also leverages all the goodness being done in this area. So we can use webkit to make a really cool program made using HTML, CSS, XHTML, Javascript, Ajax… Also as I mentioned above Gnome Shell is being written in Javascript to lower the barrier for new developers coming from other platforms.

Deprecation of old technologies and increasing use of new ones
Cleaning up is awesome, the Gnome platform hasnt had a big clean up in a long time and its starting to get crowded. The main changes are moving fully over to the dbus and moving to dconf. This will streamline the platform substantially.

The new Gnome Website
This looks really awesome.

So whats coming is a clean up, a new user experience, new technology and a new website. I hope this post clarifies Gnome 3 for people and I hope you are as excited as I am

Lowering the programming barrier

Shane — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:44:38 +0000

I love quickly and quidgets just for the simple reason they lower the barrier for potential programmers to join in and start easily. But it makes me think that gtk is getting old and its showing its oldness by not being too friendly to write using. This is a major problem because lets say you want to do hello world in java its two lines of code (I cant remember it off hand but ill dig it out if anyone cares). Here is the pygtk example I found for hello world http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/ch-GettingStarted.html#sec-HelloWorld. Maybe im a little lazy when it comes to the boring stuff in programming but I really think we should have a nice group of one liners to…
A. print a message
B. ask a yes or no question
The main reason im saying all this is the same reason Microsoft created VB (and VB is very very simple). VB is the perfect example of lowering the barrier. We have glade and its ok but there are some problems and we have pygtk if you dont like using point and click ui drawing. The problems with glade are very simple, it needs grids to layout everything and the UI of the designer sucks. The problem with pygtk and gtk in any language is that its a big hassle.
What VB does right is its a very simple language and a very simple interface. Ok your not going to do any great programs written in it because it would drive you mental and if you are an experienced programmer you will be annoyed by how rigid it is. The main thing is it lowers the barrier, anyone can use it.
What java does right is that it has UI designers and it has one liner code to handle small stuff.
I think the problem stems from how, when and who developed gtk and glade. They were both made by very smart people and it works perfect for them and most other people but it isnt made to be easy, its made to be functional. Im not saying scrap everything im saying look again and see what can be simplified and what can be nicer. The when is simple it was designed back in 1998-2000 so its at least 9 years out of date in terms of style. How is also simple it gtk was made as a big functional tool kit that works because thats all they wanted and needed at the time. They more than likely didnt think of a wider audience using it.
And all projects from time to time need to have a long hard look at themselves and see what needs changing. Firefox is changing itself open office is doing it too why not gtk? why not every old project in gnome? I think what is needed is competition to drive the need for change otherwise we just put up with the good and the bad.
Oh and sorry to all the kde folks I dont have a clue about the state of your GUI programming but it looks nice

Google chrome hidden but awesome feature

Shane — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:32:36 +0000

Ok at the moment chrome does most of what firefox does at the moment but not much difference. I found a button in chrome that does something awesome.

What that says is “Create application shotcuts”. No its not a funny way to say bookmark it to the desktop. Its the exact same idea as mozilla prism. Its a website acting like an application on the computer. So it adds a menu shortcut or desktop shortcut to run the website like an application.

Then it runs in a window with just webkit.

It is a nice feature and it adds the menu shortcuts itself witch is great too. I didnt notice it before and in truth its not the most special feature but it is good that they thought outside the box when it comes to the web becoming more application like. The lines really do blur when you start seeing google docs like an application on your computer.