Rob Bradford’s Weblog

Previously i’d talked about how we use GNOME technologies in the Moblin Myzone. Now i’m going to talk about another component that i’m responsible for, the People Panel.

An important aspect of the Moblin user experience is about communicating with others and this panel provides quick access to do this. The core of the content is provided by an abstraction, simplification and aggregation library called Anerley. This provides a “feed” of “items” (an addressbook of people) that aggregates across the system addressbook, powered by EDS, and your IM roster, powered by Telepathy. You have small set of actions you can do on these people such as start an IM conversation / email / edit them with Contacts. The core of our IM experience is supplied by the awesome Empathy. We’ve been working with the upstream maintainers to accomodate some of the needs of Moblin into the upstream source. This included the improvements to the accounts dialog and wizard that landed for GNOME 2.28.

One of the biggest problems with the IM experience in Moblin 2.0 was that it was easy to miss when somebody was talking to you. If you were looking away when the notification popped up, whoops, it’s gone. With our switch to Mission Control 5 I was able to integrate a Telepathy Observer into Anerley and the People Panel. An Observer will be informed of channels that are requested on the system. This allows us to show ongoing conversations in the panel and by exploiting channel requests and window presentation allow the user to switch between ongoing conversations. This wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of the nice folks in #telepathy and at Collabora: Sjoerd, Will, Jonny and countless others.

I hope everyone is enjoying the ice cream! So this week there are going to be some talks by me and my colleagues at the summit.

11:30 on Sunday, Joshua Lock will be talking about ConnMan and the lesson’s that he’s learnt from building the Moblin UI for it. This talk will take place in Room 3, “Palacio de la música”. ConnMan: New Connection Manager

5pm on Sunday, I will be talking about Mojito and librest; social web service integration for the GNOME/Moblin stack. This talk will take place in the “Gran Canaria” room. Sipping Mojitos and thinking RESTful thoughts

5:45pm on Sunday, our glorious Emmanuele Bassi will be giving five short lightening talks on various aspects of the Clutter library. This talk will be in the “Cámara” room. State of Clutter

10am on Monday, Patrick Ohly, author of SyncEvolution will be talking about synchonisation in the “Gran Canaria” room. Synchronization: From the SyncML Protocol to Free and Open Implementations

11am on Tueday, Chris Lord, animations guru, will be showing off his Clutter animations skills in the “Cámara” room. Building complex UI animations in Clutter 1.0

And last but not least, at 12pm on Wednesday, our very emminet use experience designer Nick Richards will be taking to the state to talk about the Moblin Netbook UI. Designing Moblin-Netbook. A free desktop on a 7-10″ Screen

I really like the 3.0 plan. There are two extra areas in particular that i’d like to see us attack:

Firstly (the smaller of the two) i’d like to see a revamping of the Evolution client libraries, ECal & EBook, in particular ECalComponent is horrible. The work that Chris and I have been doing on libjana is showing some of the direction that such a library for accessing calendaring could go. This requires an ABI & API break to do this effectively (hence being a 3.0 thing.)

Ross has also been doing sterling work on the server side of things by migrating the eds-dbus fork into the mainline. This is now basically just waiting on the migration to git and a double review of the calendaring code.

The second and more significant thing that I care about is that I think we need to bring web services closer into the desktop. I’ve been persuaded that desktop applications are not dead but I think we need compelling, transparent and easy ways to integrate with “cloud” services. In particular we are entering an age of “almost always on” connectivity. Many people already find little use for their computers if they are not connected to the Internet. However since the omnipresent and omni-reliable 3G/wireless/wimax utopia is not yet with us we live in a world where we get connectivity in bursts as we travel, socialise and live. Our platform should cunningly pull down interesting content when the user is on cheap and reliable connectivity which they can then peruse when offline or on an expensive and unreliable connection.

A project that Ross and I have been working on at Intel to bring social networks to the desktop/mobile is called Mojito. I’ll cover this in more detail soon.

Our hero: Ross Burton

When OpenedHand was first acquired by Intel I was asked to look into ways of making it easier to access web services from within GLIBish (i.e. Clutter & GTK) applications. We figured that as web services more important to the users of Moblin, and thus by extension, GNOME we needed some way to help developers access them.

So, I did some research, read up on RESTful. And thought yay, lots of services are claiming to be RESTful, let’s see if we can come up with some kind of service description language that we can autogenerate code from (ala, dbus-glib). Turns out that very few services actually adhere to this RESTful definition and my attempts to produce some kind of description language resulted in more lines of XML than code, hmmm.

Anyway, I persevered and looked at building an API that I would fine easy to drive RESTful web services with. After a few iterations I decided upon designing something with a somewhat Cairo-esque API.

Marco thinking RESTful thoughts.

The API is comprised of two parts, the first half is for making the requests (and is based on libsoup.) Here is an example:

  proxy = rest_proxy_new ("http://www.flickr.com/services/rest/", FALSE);
  call = rest_proxy_new_call (proxy);
  rest_proxy_call_add_params (call,
                              "method", "flickr.test.echo",
                              "api_key", "",
                              "format", "xml",
                              NULL);
  rest_proxy_call_run (call, NULL, NULL); /* obviously can do async instead */
  payload = rest_proxy_call_get_payload (call);
  len = rest_proxy_call_get_payload_length (call);

Easy, huh? Anyway, enough rambling for today’s blog post, next week i’ll talk about the really interesting stuff we’re (Ross and I) are working on to make parsing XML fun (yes, really, honestly, fun.)

Oh and and the source code can be found in git and it’s licensed under LGPLv2.1, etc etc. (Yes, we have too many libraries, when mature perhaps we can move this into libsoup.)

Packages for Clutter 0.8 have been uploaded to the Debian archive and to the OpenedHand Debian repository. There are packages available for Debian unstable and Ubuntu hardy (no gutsy i’m afraid, glib is too old.)

And in completely unrelated news thanks to everyone involved in the organisation of GUADEC: Good work guys!