/bɑs ˈtjɛ̃ no ˈse ʁɑ/ (hadess) | News

Wacom tablets in GNOME 3.4

2012-01-27T13:07:00.000Z

Working from designs.

The cool stuff first

Cosimo Cecchi presents the updated Wacom settings

Go to YouTube directly if you can't see the video here.

A new arrival

As mentioned by Cosimo, we have a new library to help us implement the settings you saw: libwacom.

libwacom is there to give us metadata about tablets, whether or not they are connected to your system, the list of styli it supports, as well as information about the styli themselves. As you can see from the UI, it's pretty important that we know:

whether the tablet is builtin (so we know whether you can calibrate it)
which form factor it has
the list of styli it supports
for each stylus, its full name, the number of buttons, what it looks like

In the past, all this information was only available within the drivers (as comments), exported in different ways (sysfs attributes), non-machine readable in public documentation, or, worst of all, hidden in Wacom's internal drivers for OS X or Windows.

So if you have a Wacom tablet, send us a definition file for your tablet, so you can configure it with the impression that the software actually knows about your device.

Where's that configuration again

After knowing what each tablet had to offer, we had to have a way to match the definitions to XInput devices, assign settings per-tablet, and importantly, switch stylus configuration when the user switches stylus. This is done using the new GsdWacomDevice and GsdWacomStylus objects, shared between gnome-settings-daemon (which will apply the configuration) and gnome-control-center (which will set the configuration).

This also means we have a few debugging applications, such as list-wacom in gnome-settings-daemon, to show you the attached GsdWacomDevices, or test-wacom in gnome-control-center, to test display of particular tablets if you don't own them (this is the place where I spend a lot of time).

What's next

Peter Hutterer, my input buddy at Red Hat, who made the original Wacom panel for GNOME 3.2, and the first version of libwacom, is currently spending a lot of time on Multi-Touch, and fixing bugs I report in the Wacom driver.

Jason Gerecke, from Wacom, who did most of the initial work on calibration support, is working on the related display-mapping. This will allow choosing whether a tablet's working area is the whole desktop, or a single monitor when in multiple monitors are used.

For my part, after fixing the layout bugs that so annoy me in the settings panel, I'll be starting work on tablet button mapping. I look forward to making the LEDs on the tablet match up with the selected keyboard shortcut!

Many thanks to Cosimo and Monty for helping out with presenting the work, and doing the video.

Stalk^W Following designs, the easy way

2011-12-05T10:13:00.000Z

If you want to follow all the new designs from the GNOME Design team, including work-in-progress mockups, gathering of relevant art, etc. be sure to subscribe yourself to the pages that interest you in the various sections of the GNOME Wiki.

A nice trick is using our Wiki's notification, with regex support. Head onto your notification settings page, and add those lines to the "Subscribed wiki pages":

GnomeLive:Design*
GnomeLive:GnomeShell/Design*
GnomeLive:GnomeOS/Design*

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 5

2011-12-04T19:38:00.000Z

Yesterday was our sponsored dinner, at a very nice vegetarian place, followed by some cinema discussions in a bar where the toilets are hidden behind mirrored walls (most strange).

Still, quite a few happenings in code land:

Nayan is banging his head against the wall with some Accelerated Compositing issues.
Mario has done a lot of work on enabling WebKit2 accessibility, as well as fixing some WebKit accessibility bugs. He also committed an updated AdBlocker extension for Epiphany.
Xan wrote a blog post about Web design, and worked on implementation with Claudio.
Philippe started work on fullscreen support for WebKit2 (this includes, but isn't limited to <video>
And I wrote a replacement plugin for Flash videos.

The hackfest is drawing to a close, and I'll take this opportunity to thank our very kind sponsors for flights, accomodation and even feeding us in the office so we didn't have to stop hacking for long.

Also a big thank you to Igalia for providing us with hacking beer in the evenings (left-overs from Igalia's 10th anniversary party, a happy coincidence).

Many thanks to Xan, Juanjo and Alex for the hackfest organisation, and the personal chauffeur service, and my most heartfelt thanks to Juanjo for his infinite patience to our tourist needs (such as showing us the Torre de Hércules on a windy December afternoon).

Vegas Baby!

2011-12-04T18:20:00.000Z

Before: No video, because no Flash, and no MP4 support

After: Video, through Totem's Vegas plugin

Totem's new Vegas browser plugin provides you with a way to watch Flash based videos, without using Flash, using libquvi's growing collection of supported sites.

Code is available from GNOME git this instant. Be sure to pass --enable-vegas-plugin=yes to compile the plugin.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 4

2011-12-03T20:16:00.000Z

The crema de ojuro took effect. While the effects simmered down, code fixing was still in full flow.

Philippe finished landing the fullscreen fixes for the <video>
Xan and Claudio started fixing GNOME 3.4 Epiphany design bugs (on the road towards the Web app design)
Alex, Martin, Joone and Nayan all looked into Accelerated Compositing. They all owe you, dear reader, blog posts full of nitty gritty details.
Jon didn't spend the day debugging bizarre browsers crashes
Wingo punched the air as he figured out a tricky memory allocation issue. He also listened to the Thundercats theme tune, in a loop
Gustavo and Dan figured out a design for multipart/x-mixed-replace support, as used by some streaming IP cameras, and Gustavo started the implementation
Nayan showed legendary patience waiting for tourists outside a haberdashery
Dan committed a number of libsoup related cleanups in WebKitGTK+, including a very impressive minus 200 lines cleanup.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 3

2011-12-03T10:16:00.000Z

Another incredible day of hacks, and UI design.

Carlos added support for downloads to the MiniBrowser, the WebKit2 test application
Bob, Juanjo and I visited the GUADEC facilities, ahead of next summer's conference
We had a long discussion about HTML5 applications, hosted and packaged ones, as well as native applications
The discussion about the new "Web" UI carried on, with some more details being added to the Wiki page
Andy carried on his work on adding gnome-shell required language features to JavaScriptCore

And despite the crema de ojuro, hacking carries on at the week-end. Join us in #webkit-gtk-hackfest on GIMPNet.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 2

2011-12-01T22:00:00.000Z

After a late evening yesterday, the hackfest started a bit slower, but started picking up pace again with a big ticket item, the WebKit2 GTK+ API discussion. This was the destination for a lot of the WebKitGTK+ hackers, leaving us outsiders, well, outside. The discussion isn't quite finished.

This lead us onto a little lunchtime kick-about. The arrange 6 v. 6 game turned into a 5 v. 4 before getting to the ground, and finish as a 3 v. 4 when two of our most jet-lagged/backbroke hackers dropped out.

And then onto a lunch. And another late evening.

Philippe fixed more bugs in WebKitGTK+'s fullscreen video playback mode
Bob uploaded a new draft of his WebKitGTK+ cookbook
Gustavo was playing Street Fighter whilst increasing the size of his farm on Facebook (in WebApp mode!)
And the new buildbot is up, running, and churning through test suites in a loop, as fast as the hackers can add new code.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 1, Afternoon

2011-11-30T17:53:00.000Z

After num-num tapas for lunch (and some chocolatey cake), we got back to the agenda, with Jon presenting the design for the Web application, successor (in spirit, and perhaps in code) to Epiphany.

Andy did the initial work on adding new language features to JavaScriptCore (let and const, as used heavily in gnome-shell)
Martin and Gustavo worked on a way to automate running the WebKitGTK tests with test fonts, and are working on making all the tests automated, and reproduceable
Philippe fixed fullscreen support in the HTML5 YouTube player
Dan fixed the broken security status in Epiphany
Carlos worked on the WebKit2 support for windowed plugins, and the WebKit side of favicons support
Philippe, Martin and yours truly discussed sharing of fullscreen media controls (UI and behaviour) between WebKitGTK, Totem and Sushi, as well as a way to make fullscreening smoother.

I hear they didn't finish all the beers for Igalia's 10th anniversary party...

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 1, morning

2011-11-30T11:08:00.000Z

After landing in (not so sunny) A Coruña yesterday, we started bright and early today with the WebKitGTK+ hackfest agenda.

We've got most of the topics pinned, as listed on the wiki. If you have more topics to add to the discussion, feel free to drop by #webkit-gtk-hackfest on GIMPNet IRC, and try to drum up interest in somebody championing your topic.

It looks like we could get some pretty cool demos done by the end of this week!

ObexFTP in GNOME, (non-)update

2011-11-07T15:14:00.000Z

If you've tried to use ObexFTP browsing (browsing files on mobile phones over Bluetooth) in GNOME in recent times, and didn't get a good experience from it (crashes, or very unreliable browsing), those problems are known, and due to the architecture used to implement the functionality.

If you want to help make ObexFTP browsing good again, please try to convince one of your coder friends to help port the existing code to use the "gobex" library that the obexd D-Bus service uses.

Unless somebody steps up in the GNOME 3.4 timeframe, I will disable the access to the functionality in gnome-bluetooth. The brokenness makes us look very bad, and the files are still available through other (cabled) means in most cases.

Bluetooth panel merged

2011-10-18T19:12:00.000+01:00

The Bluetooth panel was the last bad citizen in getting merged into gnome-control-center itself. It's now been integrated into gnome-control-center itself, using a very cleaned up libgnome-bluetooth.

Ready for GNOME 3.4! Please report any breakage.

OMG! I haz designed a bug fix!

2011-09-16T15:49:00.000+01:00

In GNOME 3, we removed an option which got GNOME users hot under the collar (and gave the opportunity to the ones who weren't something to troll about): we removed the configuration option to select what happens when you close your laptop lid.

We started digging, and found out that the main reason for people wanting this feature was so that they could go from a table to another in the coffee shop, from their desk to the meeting room in the office, or a table to the next in the library, with the laptop lid closed, and your internet connection still on-going.

In that case, what's really needed is a way to disable suspending when you're moving the laptop. But having to dig in the settings would take too long anyway. And, apart from a number of tethered ones, users would live happily without that ability, so we wouldn't be adding this in the gnome-shell UI itself.

Let's add the button in a separate application. A single button isn't too interesting though. Let's make this more interesting!

Office Runner!

Testimonials

“this is the best thing ever”
“the most creative way I've heard of to solve a power management bug in a while”
“I expect people to spill their coffees over this”

What now?

The code is available in GNOME git, and we're just waiting to knock a few TODO items, and get a UI review before releasing the first version. Patches welcome. Enjoy!

COSCUP 2011: Taipei

2011-08-24T17:26:00.002+01:00

Just got back from Taipei, where I attended COSCUP, alongside troublemaker Xan López, both of us having been invited to represent GNOME.

Pre-COSCUP

After a fairly smooth but long flight (followed by a shorter flight from Hong-Kong), I landed in Taipei International Airport where I met Max, holding a card with a GNOME foot and my name on it, at the arrivals hall. Max then drove me to the hotel, or rather, he was my driver to the hotel, as he insisted that I ride in the back seat rather than up front alongside him (I think you'll see a pattern emerging soon).

Our very nice and modern hotel (with “North-European furniture”, as the brochure said, and it did indeed have Ikea branded glasses in the bathroom) was a stone's throw away from the Nangang Software Park MRT (metro) station.

I only saw those on TV when I was a kid.

I proceeded to catch up on my sleep, after a quick look at the TV channels (Hackers!).

Garbage!

The next morning, thanks to Max' helpful cue cards, I managed to get myself a network adapter and cable out of Guanghua Digital Plaza. This place must be an absolute dream for people who like making their own computers, though the newness of the hardware is dependent on the use. No Bluetooth 4.0 dongles, but the latest in anime shaped USB sticks.

Blade Runner, day time.

After being reminded on the plane quite how important business cards were, I asked the hotel reception whether they could help me get this sorted. After 10 minutes of calls by the enormously helpful receptionist, Max arrived from another airport run with Xan. Ten more minutes of phone calls, Max drove me to the print shop, where they live designed my business cards. It took a good half hour. At which point I should mention that during that whole time Max's wife was in the car, double-parked not very far from the shop. And that Max managed to arrange for the business cards to arrive at the hotel.

Snooze, mail, and we got ready for the speaker's dinner. In the lobby, we met David Cuartielles, the co-founder of the Arduino project, and Pofeng, one of the organisers. Pofeng proceeded to organise for my business cards to be delivered to the dinner we were just going to.

Dinner, num-num, early night.

COSCUP

I'll cut short on the presentations, as most of the slides and videos should find their ways online soon. Jonathan Corbet made a nice feature out of my presentation (which was followed by Aaron Seigo's Plasma active on tablets talk).

Demo time!

Side note, if you cannot access the Linux Weekly News article, you can wait a week, or give to Friends of GNOME, and get a free LWN subscription.

The talk was well received, and a few hardware makers are interested in our approach.

Xan's presentation was also well received, and we started discussing the idea of Epiphany's web applications integration using standardised metadata information, as Firefox also needs such integration.

I would advise future organisers of GUADECs and associated to talk to the organisers of COSCUP in terms of getting staff on the grounds, online social interactions (including COSCUP Cheese), or even the mobile apps for the conference.

Social and touring

Xan hacking.

David hacking.

We tried our best to mingle amongst the conversations during the conference, but it's soon fairly obvious that the Westerners end up together, if only because we were all tourists. Which is how I ended up spending a fair bit of time with the Beijing-based German Ollo, Berlin-based Frenchman Paul Rouget (who's just bad at Mario), Malmö-based Spaniard David, Living-out-of-a-suitcase Xan, and Taipei-based Englishman James.

We spent some time trying to find veggie food for Xan in the night markets, amongst the game arcades, Angry Birds T-Shirts, and potent smell of soy sauce (no, not the same one you have in your cupboard).

The day after the end of the conference, the speakers were invited to a tour of the city. We went up Taipei 101 (where my mild acrophobia made me feel queasy looking down the emergency stairwell, 90 stories to the bottom), and down it for some gadgets shopping, and the most awesomest dumplings in the existence of the world at Din Tai Fung.

This was followed by a visit of the National Palace Museum (where you could see the most amazing work on ivory, and jade, real craftsmanship), and the change of guard at Martyr's Shrine.

Tourist information

The working hours are mostly European ones, but they're not in sync with the sun. So getting out of a dark building at around 10 AM means that you'll be in the noon sun, and nearly blinded. Bring sunglasses.

It's really hot and humid (BBC Weather mentioned 36 Celsius, with 86% humidity for last Monday), bring light clothes. Women can buy a sun-umbrella locally. Bring a napkin/cloth to wipe your face.

It's part of culture to exchange gifts amongst friends. Even if you don't have any friends there yet, the people are so nice that you are bound to feel that they deserve those gifts anyway. Bring gifts, especially foodstuff.

Don't look like a plonker by not bringing business cards to any business meeting (like I did). You can probably get them printed in Taipei (expect to pay around 200NT for 200 business cards, eg. around 5£). Bring name cards (as they call them there).

You're in the Republic of China, not the communist People's Republic Of China.

And read the metro map properly...

Thanks

My wholehearted thanks to all the COSCUP organisers, and the conference itself, for inviting us to Taipei, taking great care of us, and sponsoring our accommodation, to the well-connected Emily Chen (who everyone seemed to know) who proposed me for a talk, Max and his wife, for being the best of hosts (and for the Stephen Chow DVDs!), and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my flight there.

I can now say I've been to Asia, crossing a bridge in Istanbul doesn't really count :)

Desktop Summit all done

2011-08-15T17:18:00.001+01:00

Like a large number of Desktop Summit attendees, I made my way back home shortly after the end of the conference. I will spare you the details of my schedule, and will share a few things of note.

Hackfests

As I attended one of those recently, I did a presentation about them for the Advisory Board on Tuesday. The things to come out of the discussions that followed is that we would want more reporting in some cases, even post-hackfest if the network access isn't good enough, or there are loose items (filing bugs, long-term goals definitions, etc.).

This help our AdBoard members, the Friends of GNOME contributors, the community, as well as the hackfest sponsors, know how the hackfest helped the project.

Seeing as we were in a shared event with KDE, I would also like to note that if you want to work on lower levels of the stack, such as hardware enablement, or features that can be shared as standards through FreeDesktop.org, talk to the board about organising a Hackfest.

Presentations

My presentation about tablets (and not sofas) went past. I'll know for next time that antihistamines don't make for a clear mind, but if you were present and I missed a particular subject you were interested in, don't hesitate to contact me.

During the conference, Nohemi fixed a number of the bugs I reported through her mentor, and my tablet can now be booted with the on-screen keyboard enabled by default.

I also prepared a presentation for the Advisory Board meeting that ties in to the above subjects, which generated a fair bit of discussion, but this will require reporting separately.

Miscellaneous

They have high towers and holes in Berlin
I'm a sucker for a bratwurst, and had the best kebab of my life
Museum Island is impressive
I was in the winning team at FreeFA, though people say we had too many Brazilian full-backs on our team.
Kay knows how to make a rose from a napkin

See you all next time in A Coruña!

Update: No dots in "A Coruña".

Pretty, oh so pretty

2011-06-23T15:26:00.000+01:00

There was a tiny problem with the Bluetooth panel has it was implemented in GNOME 3. There wasn't a way to rename the Bluetooth adapter. Well, there was a way, but it wasn't implemented, but it was there, in our minds.

We started by adding support to the Info panel to set a machine's pretty hostname, as implemented by systemd. Looks simple enough.

The next step was to make bluetoothd know about this file, and use it to name Bluetooth adapters, instead of crappy hostnames. And voila.

Implemented as it should be.

If you have applications where using a device's name (as opposed to the user's name) makes sense, please look into using the machine's pretty hostname.

If you want to test all this, packages will soon be trickling into Fedora 16 (aka Rawhide). All the patches are upstream, though the bluez patches are still pending.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, final day

2011-06-17T17:11:00.003+01:00

Today was a shorter day, with many of the attendees taking their leave before the week-end (and a pizza lunch turning into kitchen discussions).

Today focused on brainstorming around a Conversation app, to eventually replace Empathy. There are still many problems to be solved before that jump can be made though, so don't expect it to happen for GNOME 3.2.

The other topic today was a reusable contact selector widget, to be used in applications that offer sharing to contacts, like Tiffany's on-going GSoC for document sharing in Evince.

No cats were harmed during the making of this hackfest.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day four

2011-06-15T18:29:00.003+01:00

Day four. People had bad dreams last night due to the huge amount of cheese ingested. Will need to seek counselling. Travis' knee doesn't hurt too much anymore.

Today we discussed the interaction of the “presence chooser” in the Shell's user menu with IM statuses, especially given that we soon hope to make it possible to answer chats without launching an “empathy” binary. A number of options were discussed, and the best one now lives in a bug. (Note that both reports are incredibly detailed, thanks to Will Thompson's amazing screenwriting skills).

Morten then presented his current plan for integration of contacts within the Shell. More details are available on the wiki, and most of the problems and potential solutions were discussed at a high-rate, given the well-known problem space.

We missed out on some interesting changes to account creation (as well as edition) in Empathy/Telepathy yesterday.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day three

2011-06-15T17:10:00.004+01:00

Day three, and the walls are closing in.

Some of our hosts mention they have “work to do” and hide away from light, behind shades.

Alex Larsson showed up, bright and early in the Collabora offices, and most of the day has been spent working on a Folks hit list ^[1] with Travis and Philip as tech leads. Integration of GnuPG contacts metadata (can I encrypt e-mails for that person?), as well as more general IM integration in apps (slide-show sharing for example) was also mentioned, as we hope to share most of this infrastructure.

[1]: Travis' knee was on the hit list, got whacked against a table leg.

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day two

2011-06-14T12:41:00.004+01:00

Day two, in the Collabora house, Rob Bradford graced us with his presence, on his birthday, and today started discussing integration of gnome-online-accounts into Empathy/Telepathy[1], libsocialweb and interactions with various accounts systems.

Most of the rest of the pre-lunch hacking was about setting ourselves up for hacking on the above. The afternoon was spent with much of the same, trying to get more documentation for things like Google's Chat authentication, including a draft patch to gnome-online-accounts, Empathy/Mission Control work for this support, and tons of related bug fixes.

The Telepathy hackers also discussed text handling in Telepathy (with the goal of making the specification clearer, avoid problems of "missed" messages, etc.).

[1]: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652546 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652544

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, the sponsors

2011-06-14T12:30:00.003+01:00

Many thanks to Intel, Red Hat, and the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring participants at the hackfest, and heaps of thanks to Collabora who are contributing a lot of participants to this hackfest, their offices, their coffee machine, and getting us pizza and Nutella dough balls yesterday. Num Num!

IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest, day one

2011-06-13T17:55:00.004+01:00

In Cambridge (the proper one, in Cambridgeshire), at the Collabora offices, for the first day of our IM, Contacts and Social Hackfest.

Today, we:

discussed end-user problems with Telepathy and Empathy's gnome-shell integration (and started the specifications necessary to fixing some of those bugs) (everyone for the problems listing, Danni and Guillaume for the start of bug fixing)
started working on integrating gnome-keyring dialogues into the Shell (Stef Walter)
fixed libfolks bugs (Philip), and discussed a potential problem API problem in the folks to evolution-data-server synchronisation code (which will be used in the Contacts API) (Travis, Raul, Bastien)
packaged up gnome-online-accounts for Fedora (Bastien)
worked on better high-level tp-glib support for file transfers (Morten)
HMAC support in glib (Stef Walter)

Tomorrow we'll have Rob Bradford joining us, and probably start talking about GNOME Online Accounts integration with libsocialweb, as a way to kickstart its use all across the desktop.

Small tablet improvements

2011-06-08T12:59:00.004+01:00

I recently added two new plugins to gnome-settings-daemon, which should make life a little bit better on tablet computers, such as the WeTab/ExoPC that most MeeGo developers seem to have lying around.

The first plugin is the orientation plugin, which will read the orientation from udev (which itself reads it from the accelerometer), and rotate the display and the input touchscreen as appropriate.

The second plugin is the cursor plugin, which will simply hide the mouse cursor when you don't have a mouse attached to a computer with a touchscreen.

Related to those are two gnome-shell bugs. Related to orientation is this bug about providing smoother XRandR transitions in gnome-shell, and related to cursor is a way to show activity in the shell panel when a busy cursor would be shown.

No screenshots, because a vertical desktop with no cursor isn't that interesting.

If you're interested in testing out this on a WeTab, you'll need the accelerometer driver in the kernel, udev git (or udev 172 when it's released) and gnome-settings-daemon master.

And if you want support for another tablet device, check out this discussion on the linux-input list, and drop me a mail if you need more guidance.

Get your hot (beta) GNOME 3 distro!

2011-04-19T16:41:00.003+01:00

Want a distro with all the best gizmos? systemd, with learning read-ahead for faster boot? GNOME 3 getting out of your way so you can do work? And much more.

Get Fedora 15 Beta now!

Want to debug an old status icon applet?

2011-04-12T16:09:00.003+01:00

If you want to debug an "old" status icon when running the GNOME Shell, and it duplicates functionality from a icon in the shell itself (say Bluetooth or Sound volume, in my cases), there's two tricks available.

The shell looks at the WMNAME for the applet when choosing to hide it, or show it.

For most applets, gtk_status_icon_set_name() isn't called, we just need to change the binary name. Create a symbolic link to your binary with a different name (say, "test-applet"), and launch your application from that.
If the applet calls gtk_status_icon_set_name(), just name it differently. Unfortunately, that will require recompilation.

With those tricks, I fixed the volume status icon for the fallback mode, and helped Frédéric Crozat pin-point a (likely) bug in the Bluetooth menu in the shell, as we could not reproduce the bug with the fallback status icon.

GNOME 3.0 is out!

2011-04-06T21:39:00.002+01:00

Yay!

Loads of thanks to all the people who have helped, poked, nudged, nagged, and kept me honest for the past 9 months, in no particular order, Rodrigo Moya, Thomas Wood, Jon McCann, Richard Hughes, Luca Ferretti, Giovanni Campagna, Cosimo Cecchi, Matthias Clasen, Florian Müllner, Kjartan Maraas, Sergey Udaltsov and Daniele Forsi, and most likely a number of people that I'm forgetting.

They helped make the System Settings (including my favourite parts, the Bluetooth and Sound panels) what it is in GNOME 3.0.

Totem in GNOME 3.0, plans for 3.2

2011-04-04T17:59:00.004+01:00

Totem for GNOME 3 is available in the GNOME FTP servers. And now onto GNOME 3.2.

There's a couple of major UI changes planned for Totem 3.2, with designs from the GNOME Design team (and Hylke in particular). These include the removal of the status bar, better fullscreen controls, more contrast when playing movies, etc.

New colours

The changes for contrast are already in Totem itself, and you can grab a 3.2 version of gnome-themes-standard to see the "dark" variant of Totem (or enjoy the screenshot below).

Black Swan, go see it.

New video widget

For the rest of the changes, we needed a video widget that was more flexible than the X-based one we were using. So from Totem 3.2, we'll start using clutter, and clutter-gst.

This means that we'll be able to implement things like OSDs for more than just the fullscreen version, use an indicator in the video directly when buffering for live streams instead of the status bar. It would also allow other useful features, like rotating videos with animations, to preview movies from your phone or camera in landscape mode.

Performance-wise, if you were already using an OpenGL-accelerated desktop, the difference should be minimal, comparing clutter-gst's video sink to an Xv overlay using OpenGL, the major difference being the addition of the videobalance element to the pipeline.

If you don't have OpenGL drivers for your machine, Totem 3.0 will still be maintained, with important bug fixes being backported.

Misc changes

We expect a Grilo plugin making its appearance, which will allow us to focus our bug fixing on the interface parts, rather than having to maintain the code to access various video resources.

We also made changes to the nautilus properties tab, which should make it faster, using Edward's GstDiscoverer.

Colophon

You can start testing the clutter-based Totem, the dark variant, and the faster nautilus properties right now, in the master branch of Totem in GNOME git.

Desktop Summit Call for Papers closes Friday

2011-03-23T13:27:00.001Z

Read, Submit.

Bluetooth panel

2011-02-22T04:20:00.003Z

Nearly implemented in one evening (Friday evening, before the UI freeze), and a day (well, a long day, it's 4:30 AM).

The only thing not implemented is the hardest part, the "active" button, which needs to take into account whether there are Bluetooth devices at all, if one is the default and powered, and handle hardware killswitches as well as software ones (software-based airplane modes for example).

Yay, I can wiggle my mouse

As per usual, refer to the design documents for more information on the changes made.

The screen panel

2011-02-08T18:53:00.004Z

Following on from the region panel, we now have an updated “Screen” panel for the control-center. Richard worked on the initial version (which you can see in older revisions of the control-center for GNOME 3), and I finished hooking it up this week.

Not much to say about this, except that the lock screen timeout preference now changes the underlying preferences for both “on AC” and “on battery”, as well as the idle time (which is used by a number of desktop components like your IM application).

I'm also very glad that we managed to get rid of the brightness levels based on whether on battery or mains power. This usually worked exactly as you didn't want it to. Now, just use your keyboard shortcuts for those instead of hoping to gouge somebody's eyes out every time you changed power source.

See also the design page for more information about the changes made.

GNOME 3 Test Day

2011-02-05T00:58:00.003Z

On Wednesday evening, Fedora Desktop hackers were frantically building GNOME 2.91.6 into rawhide, including a number of rebuilds against newer versions of GTK+, and beta testing Live CD images to make sure they were usable.

On Thursday morning (European time), ISO images were being uploaded by the our favourite QA insomniac. Quite a few people came to test the Live CD, and many bugs were filed.

There were plenty of questions about GNOME Shell itself, and some about the design decisions. So if you did try out one of the many GNOME 3 live CDs, and asked yourself the following questions, we'll try and provide some answers.

Q: The dash is broken, I can't add more than 13 favourites to it!?

A: It's known problem, which also fits into the dash resizing when you drag'n'drop new items to it.

Q: I can't read the full name of certain applications when searching for them in overview mode. Can I haz tooltips?

A: Tooltips, maybe not, but a solution is being worked on. Follow the discussion in this bug.

Q: I can't change my font size, really?

A: You can change it for the applications, in the Universal Access settings. For the shell, it's currently not possible, but it will get fixed.

Q: I don't like how hard it is to create workspaces. Is this the final design?

A: It's not. Owen has been working on implementing Jakub's video mockups. See this bug for all the links.

Q: I use 2 monitors, and GNOME Shell is very difficult to use. Is it going to get fixed in time?

A: Hopefully yes. There are two bugs you can monitor. One is about a bug when using two monitors (or at least, more prominent when using two monitors), the other about the plans for even better multi-screen support.

Q: How do I restart my computer?

A: Type "reboot" in a terminal? Unfortunate, but how to present it needs a bit of design work. Just adding another menu item in the system menu just muddles it.

Q: This is way slick. But the NetworkManager applet looks really out-of-place. Can you make it look cool?

A: Yes! System status legend Giovanni is on the case.

Q: My machine can't run GNOME Shell. What about the fallback mode?

A: It looks pretty sad at the moment. There's plenty of room for improvements here. Feel free to jump in if you want to help those not fortunate enough to be able to run GNOME Shell.

Also notable is the fact that plenty of bugs were filed, and quite a few fixed, that we are exercising the graphics drivers and finding bugs, and that despite some complaints (some of them constructive, but not always), GNOME 3 is looking better and even more usable than GNOME 2 by the day.

PS: We even had KDE make GNOME crash. Or close enough.

Region panel

2011-01-28T20:04:00.004Z

Yesterday, I finished working on a UI cleanup for the “Region and Language” panel in the control-center. You can see the results below. I'm pretty happy with this, though quite a bit of work could still be done, like allowing users to install “language packs” (fonts, translations, dictionaries) from the language tab, or integrating input sources in the layouts tab.

The layout before the separator are used by other users on the system

My favourite layouts, with the new contextual items

(and sans keyboard model selection)

infra-red remotes in GNOME 3

2011-01-26T15:41:00.004Z

gnome-lirc-properties has served its purpose. It will probably carry on working on GNOME 3 desktops, but you won't be happy when it drags in GTK+ 2.x Python bindings, HAL or doesn't integrate into the new control-center.

But things have changed since gnome-lirc-properties was first written, and the way to handle IR remotes has changed as well:

A large majority of receivers are now supported in the kernel using rc-core (né ir-core).
Some receivers aren't supported (iguanaIR amongst others), and some need porting from pure input drivers to rc-core. Some functionality for the ATI Remote Wonder remotes is also not supported by the new drivers. If you're interested in working on this, drop a mail to the LIRC list.
Mauro Chehab is making progress at propagating the key events from the kernel up to the stack to X11 applications. There's some patches in that direction on the Red Hat Bugzilla.

This means that:

Event delivery would still need a broker in the session, to get to unfocused applications. gnome-settings-daemon can step in that role (and step out of the way when the application is focused, so the app can bring context dependent behaviour). gnome-settings-daemon already handle some of the more common multimedia keys in its media-keys plugin.
The only configuration one would need to do is selecting the type of remote for the receiver, eventually tweaking the keymap for that remote.

So to write a replacement for gnome-lirc-properties that would fit into GNOME 3, one would need:

A way to enumerate receivers on the machine
A way to change the remote configuration (changing the keymap) for that receiver
Eventually a way to tweak the keymap

This could all be handled through a D-Bus version of ir-keytable. If Mauro's patches reach X.org mainstream, then a kernel/GNOME summer of code project could be had for this work. Best to start writing some kernel patches, or laying some code if you want to get a headstart.

PS: For completeness' sake, there are also "pure" input devices that are remotes that wouldn't be handled through this. Those would need to be blacklisted in the input layer, and handled through rc-core instead.

YouTube playback will suck again

2011-01-13T17:14:00.003Z

If you've seen the comments on this PiTiVi bug, you're probably already aware that YouTube/Google strongly disapprove of any breach to their terms of service.

We thought that Totem was living in a soft, gray, area by using YouTube GData API to do video searches, and then accessing direct streams that were of the quality expected by users, and in formats that meant out-of-the-box support for most Linux distributions (eg. using Web-M).

Turns out not. I won't make a whole scene about the way that this problem was brought up to me, but let's say that it wasn't the way I would have expected a corporation like Google dealing with things.

After a multitude of e-mails back and forth, I'm afraid that YouTube stuck to its guns, and I was repeatedly told about the "supported" solutions (embedding Flash was even proposed as a solution!).

So Totem will soon be playing your YouTube videos in crappy quality. Some of you with faster computers and better connections will be switching from full-HD streams to 176x144 videos.

If you want decent desktop integration with high-quality streams, feel free to "star" this GData bug report.

And for something different now

2010-12-14T14:57:00.003Z

Because it looks better in fullscreen, with acceleration, and you can save it if you want to keep it. Totem now with a "Save Copy..." menu item, and a playlist parser that knows about video websites.

The ever present Xan is demo man.

You'll need quvi (for its library) and the master of totem-pl-parser (that should even work with older versions of Totem) for the video website support. The "Save" menu item lives in Totem master, scheduled for GNOME 3.

New gnome-phone-manager maintainer

2010-12-10T15:22:00.003Z

Seeing as I haven't given gnome-phone-manager enough love lately, Daniele Forsi, of gnokii fame, is stepping up as the new maintainer for it. Bug fixes coming your way very soon!

I'll still be handling the packaging of gnome-phone-manager in Fedora.

House arrest, or just document sharing

2010-12-01T02:31:00.003Z

Yesterday and today, I wrote a chunky patch for gvfs to allow it to use the "house arrest" protocol for iOS devices. This is the protocol is rather more well-known as "iTunes documents sharing".

You can see a tedious example of how you can use it in this Apple KB.

For GNOME, we did it slightly differently, and you don't need to use your music manager as a file manager for your non-music device. Plug the device in, and all the apps that support file sharing will be showing up in a "Applications on Foo" device, on your desktop.

Managing files with a file manager, what a brilliant idea.

Bluetooth in gnome-shell

2010-11-08T14:41:00.003Z

Even though I'm still gnome-shell impaired (waiting on 3D support landing for my Radeon video card), I helped out Giovanni Campagna into getting Bluetooth support in the gnome-shell.

My work was to review Giovanni's code for gnome-bluetooth, and making sure that the gnome-shell behaviour matched that of the existing GNOME Bluetooth applet.

A lot of to-and-fro, but the gnome-bluetooth changes are now in, and waiting on sub-menu fixes for gnome-shell itself. Owen was kind enough to provide me with a screenshot for your enjoyment.

Bluetooth in the shell

This wasn't my first interaction with Giovanni, as, in another long-winded bug, we hashed out the volume control shell icon. This work is already merged, and lives in gnome-shell.

Fedora 14 is out!

2010-11-02T18:39:00.001Z

With the latest GNOME 2.32, go get it!

The new control-center and you

2010-10-05T10:44:00.003+01:00

URI scheme handlers

In the past, handlers for specific URI schemes lived in GConf. This caused multiple problems:

it would cause problems when 2 applications tried to lay claim to the same URI schemes (say both Banshee and Rhythmbox wanted to handle the "itpc" scheme), because GConf would expect only one schema (thus one application) to handle a particular key.
when the key was set, by the preferred applications for example, the key would lack important information to make things like startup notification work (or even whether it works), the application name, icon, etc.
and for schemes where a desktop-wide modules (such as gnome-vfs, as listed above) would own the key, you'd still need to add a separate file to have the application added to the Preferred Applications control-center applet.

We now use mime-types for all this. If you wanted to handle the aforementioned "itpc" URI scheme, you'd just need to say you handle the "x-scheme-handler/itpc" mime-type. This also means you could easily switch between applications handling a URI scheme, as you would a filetype.

You can track the feature, and its usage in bug 631433.

Non-panels in the dog house

For GNOME 3.0, the control-center "capplets" got turned into panels in a new shell. In addition to porting your old preferences application to being a control-center panel (see gnome-bluetooth, gnome-media, gnome-power-manager and others for a show-and-tell), you'll need to make a few changes to your .desktop file.

You'll need to add the "X-GNOME-Settings-Panel" category. If your dialogue is a panel, but lacks this category, it will show up under "Other" in the shell. If your preferences are not a panel but you try to cheat, you'll get a warning, and be removed from the shell altogether.

New sharing UI update

2010-09-01T15:02:00.004+01:00

Even though the current status is best gathered from bugzilla, I'll post a few teaser screenshots to whet your appetite.

Sending to Twitter/Twitpic

Sending to Flickr

The interface will see a "folks" based sending item called "Contacts" at the top of the sidebar, and we should see some more services and devices appear as well, as libsocialweb gains support for them, and old nautilus-sendto plugins are ported.

More when those pesky upstream bugs are fixed.

libfprint project updates

2010-08-20T12:01:00.001+01:00

As mentioned in my previous post, Bugzilla and translations project setup were still pending.

They're now all setup.

Fingerprint readers: new substitute maintainer

2010-08-19T16:29:00.003+01:00

Another week, another hardware enablement project. I'm now the official substitute maintainer for libfprint, the fingerprint reader library, and we just had a new release!

If you have a newer Thinkpad, with the UPEK Eikon II reader, grab the latest version, and don't forget to apply this patch to the control-center, or the enrolling UI will look bizarre.

All those bug fixes and new versions coming to a Fedora update shortly.

Geek hardware, for a change

2010-08-16T10:56:00.004+01:00

Wireless router

Urgh. After having been fighting with my ISP about connectivity problems, they announced that the problem I was plagued with (a bug in a Motorola UBR on their network) was fixed. I was still getting dropped connections though. Turns out the software on the provided D-Link DIR-615 is DIRe (see what I did there).

Here comes DD-WRT. I followed the instructions from this forum post (just the “How do I install DD-WRT?” part), with a firmware grabbed from the DD-WRT website itself.

After the initial setup, I also switched off 802.11B support, as the last device I have to require this is a Nintendo DS that doesn't even do WPA.

New phone

I got a new phone on Friday, and managed to steer clear of iTunes for now. First off, I exported all the contacts from my old Sony Ericsson phone using obexftp:

obexftp -v -b 00:11:22:33:44:55 -U synch -S -g telecom/pb.vcf

This will give you a pb.vcf file with all your contacts.

With the new device still missing a micro-SIM, I fixed a bunch of nautilus-ideviceinfo bugs. With the micro-SIM inserted, I activated the phone with Free Software. After setting up a minimal network, I sent my pb.vcf file to the new phone via e-mail, and reinserted all the contacts.

Still plenty more integration to be done, though a visit to jailbreakme.com will make this easier.

Old skool GNOME

2010-08-11T01:36:00.006+01:00

Some of us were discussing olden UIs during this year's GUADEC, including the original Totem UI. Searching through my old files, I found some interesting screenshots.

That includes an early version of Soundbox, the predecessor to Rhythmbox (it was later renamed to Rhythmbox as the name Soundbox was already used by some piece of software).

CDDB-enabled, incredible

Also of interest, abc, the audio-CD burner equivalent of sound-juicer, a bonobo-ised version of Rhythmbox, early versions of Vanity (my Cheese-before-Cheese webcam tool), and instructions on how to flash my netBook (click the link, you'll be surprised).

And a screenshot of Totem circa June 2002 (the first public release was in July 2002).

Totem with the original interface designed by task-pooper man

Bad Bastien

2010-08-03T11:08:00.003+01:00

I forgot to mention in all my previous blog entries that my accommodation at GUADEC was sponsored by the GNOME Foundation. Thanks guys!

GUADEC slides

2010-08-02T10:38:00.006+01:00

Got back from GUADEC on Saturday, and spent most of the week-end recovering. Probably a good thing, as I have loads of things on my TODO list, for either the Board, GNOME or Fedora.

Geoclue talk

As per usual when I make slides, I end up going through them quickly, but the Q&A session was long enough for me to go into more details.

Bluetooth talk

No slides, for a change. I hope the videos will be available online soon.

10th GUADEC

2010-07-26T12:40:00.002+01:00

Made it to the venue today, and am currently enjoying my 10th GUADEC. I'm still behind jrb :)

Travel preparations

2010-07-23T11:18:00.004+01:00

I got myself a little Huawei E585 device, so that I can put in a data SIM card when travelling. My attempts at getting a 3G data subscription in the UK that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg when abroad completely failed, and I didn't fancy carrying a phone just to use as a modem when travelling (I use my usual handset through Bluetooth when in the UK).

Once in the Netherlands, I'll get a Pay-as-you-go 3G SIM card, top it up and subscribe to the cheapest data deal, and be done with it. Note that I needed to unlock the device for use with other carriers, using this dodgy looking website. But it worked as expected.

My attempts at finding the Linux code on the device failed (and this code doesn't seem to be it), so I also dropped a mail to Huawei's FOSS office.

See you online at GUADEC!

My first GNOME Foundation board meeting

2010-06-28T13:55:00.002+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in my first GNOME Foundation Board meeting. As you'll soon see (when the meeting minutes are published), I might have opened my mouth a bit too often as I ended up with 5 separate action items :)

With my holidays behind me, I've been able to knock a couple of those items from my list, and I'll try and use this last day to catch up on the rest of them.

I'll be flying in to GUADEC tomorrow morning, probably spending the day doing some tourism, as Sunday is our first face-to-face Board meeting of the new crew.

iDevice tablet hints

2010-06-19T13:42:00.008+01:00

As some of you know, I purchased an iPad some time ago, and I've been using it to read articles and papers away from the computer (which definitely makes for a nice change on week-ends).

It's also started to find its place as an online encyclopedia (thanks Wikipanion) next to the sofa, and a YouTube client when friends are around (along with jeers from my N900 wielding housemate).

Getting Books

Plenty of locations to get those. I've been using Project Gutenberg, because it allowed me to get some classics in French. EPubBooks.com has a similar collection, but better formatted, if you only want the English versions.

For comics, I recommend Tintin Revolution (in English and French), with a definitely left-leaning Tintin, out of a job and on the dole. You'll also find some very old school comics on Golden Age Comics.

Reading books

I use Stanza for PDFs and ePubs and ARCReader for comics. Note that ARCReader is supposed to handle PDFs, but it failed to import any of the files I put on there.

Getting the books on the iPad

The version of the iPhone OS on the iPad is different from the one on the other devices (for now), and doesn't allow easy access to the application documents. All the documents live in the application's directory, and a new protocol is used to get and put documents within each app. This isn't working just yet within Linux, so if you don't want to use iTunes, here are a couple of work-arounds.

One way is using ideviceinstaller. It's painful, especially for large files, but it would at least allow you to get your documents back, or on the iPad, even on a non-jailbroken device.

You would need to list the apps:

$ ideviceinstaller -l | grep -i arcreader
org.fieldman.arcreader - ARCreader 1.1

Get an archive of the application onto your computer:

$ ideviceinstaller -a org.fieldman.arcreader -o copy=./

Unpack the IPA file (it's a zip file), add your documents to the Documents subdirectory, repack as a zip file, and push the IPA file back onto the device.

YMMV, I was having some problems with archiving myself.

The second option is using the afc2 jailbroken filesystem. Once jailbroken, and with the afc2add package installed, you can mount the complete filesystem using nautilus-ideviceinfo (right-click on the device, select Properties, then Details, and select "Browse jailbroken filesystem"). The URI is afc://UUID:2/ if you want to mount it by hand using gvfs-mount or nautilus.

Then you can browse to /var/mobile/Applications/Application UUID/Documents add add documents there. Note that free space stat()'ing is broken (I saw 300 megs free when I have nearly 30GB of free space), and you might break your device using the jailbroken filesystem.

The final option would only work with Stanza, we'll come back to this in a second.

Offline reading

I wanted a way to mark articles as "to read later" in my desktop web browser, and be able to read them when more at ease later on. The bare minimum, which I was using until a couple of days ago is the Offline Pages application, a web browser that'll allow you to download full pages for later reading.

Much better for my usage was the Readitlater application, along with its high-quality javascript bookmarklets. The service has nice APIs, so it would be nice to see more integration in feed readers and web browsers (brownie points for the person who makes an Epiphany extension for it).

Getting the books on the iPad, part #2, Stanza

When launching Stanza, you might see a "Computers sharing books" section in the Get Books/Shared section. This will look for computers on the local network exporting a Stanza service via Zeroconf.

Calibre has an implementation, but it's a bit too heavy duty for me. I tried implementing a proof-of-concept version, and it turns out it's not too complicated, though would need more integration into the desktop.

The protocol used is HTTP, with ODPS data. Implementing things like search and categories was not my prime concern either.

First, I launched a web browser, using the little script I use in Totem for my web-based streams tests:

./launch-web-server.sh --remote start

Then publish it via Avahi:

avahi-publish-service "Stanza export" _stanza._tcp 12345

Right, it shows up in Stanza, and the access_log shows me it's trying to get '/'.

It copied a PDF inside the root directory of my web server, and created cover and thumbnail images for it:

evince-thumbnailer -s 512 'foo.pdf' cover.png
evince-thumbnailer -s 512 'foo.pdf' thumb.png

Finally, I create the smallest possible Atom/ODPS file to advertise my PDF file (saved as index.atom):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:opds="http://opds-spec.org/2010/catalog">
<entry>
<title>My PDF</title>
<link type="image/png" rel="http://opds-spec.org/cover" href="cover.png"/>
<link type="image/png" rel="http://opds-spec.org/thumbnail" href="thumb.png"/>

<link type="application/pdf"
rel="http://opds-spec.org/acquisition"
href="foo.pdf"/>
</entry>
</feed>

And redirected the index file to index.atom:

$ cat .htaccess
DirectoryIndex index.atom

Retry access from Stanza, and voila.

This should be fairly straight forward to implement in gnome-user-share, the only hard part being the metadata extraction for the PDFs, and other file types. If somebody fancies taking this on, drop me a mail, and I'll point you in the right direction.

PS: Found out about vim's TOhtml function. Neat.

Python code obfuscation

2010-06-16T13:04:00.004+01:00

A couple of days ago, I looked at code to access tvcatchup.com from Totem, and started looking at the XBMC plugin source code.

Then you see things like that:

Oo = ii [ 0 ] . urlopen ( I11i [ list ] )
I1ii11iIi11i = Oo . read ( )
I1IiI = ii [ 1 ] . getcwd ( ) + I11i [ list + 1 ] . replace ( "/" , ii [ 1 ] . sep )
o0OOO = I1IiI . split ( ii [ 1 ] . sep )

Probably a good thing there's readable alternatives available. Note that I'd still be interested in seeing somebody decypher that, as an excercise :)

iDevice changes

2010-06-01T09:16:00.005+01:00

If like me you jumped the queue of soccer moms, divorced middle-age business men and fanbois on Friday morning, you might have had a new toy to play with this week-end.

The good news

If you use Fedora 13, we fixed up some bugs and you can now mount your iPaid (private joke) on the desktop, and have it show up with a spiffy icon. All the updates are in updates-testing.

upower got the ability to tell you your battery status when plugging in an iDevice, though you'll need gnome-power-manager from master to see it, and even then, it won't show up on a desktop system without a UPS. Still some UI problems to iron out there.

gvfs will now warn you about the device being locked. Again, this change is only on master as it adds new strings.

nautilus-ideviceinfo is nearly ripe for consumption after my wad of bug fixes. I expect the code to move into the GNOME repos soon after the first release.

The bad news

Still no video, music or e-books syncing on the tablet iDevice.

No support yet for the per-app documents syncing. If you have a jailbroken device, you can use iFile to move your documents to the Documents sub-directory of /var/mobile/Applications/application-UUID (make sure to turn on "Application names" in the preferences).

Fedora 13 is out!

2010-05-25T18:02:00.004+01:00

As the subject mentions, Fedora 13 is out!

Check out the announcement, and the fancy looking release notes.

Funny tidbit, The Register called it Linux for Applephobes, but failed to mention the enhanced iDevice support, and the features we added for Apple Macs as a Fedora machine.

More on remotes and receivers

2010-05-21T14:42:00.004+01:00

After receiving a load of new remotes last week, it was only fair I hacked on gnome-lirc-properties and fixed a number of the long-standing bugs, and release gnome-lirc-properties 0.5.0.

So, what happened

Before the 0.5.0 release, we had a very small number of remotes and receivers combination declared, and unless you owned a receiver and remote that the developers did, you had to select your receiver/remote combination by hand.

Johannes Schmid fixed half of that problem by creating a script that'll go through the lirc sources to add all those remotes to our remotes list. I fixed up a number of bugs, added quirks, and support for parsing user-space drivers.

With that, we went from around 10 remotes/receivers combinations to just short of a hundred.

What's next

ir-core work is ongoing in the kernel, and will provide drivers for a number of receivers with a default keymap. That means that things will work as soon as you plug them in.

A number of receivers also already have input drivers, one level down from ir-core, and work out of the box, such as the ati_remote and appleir drivers.

As we can receive events from the remotes, we just need to funnel them to the desktop. That'll be the work of lircd in the short-term, until XKB2 shows up.

Can I help?

Sure you can. Plug in your receiver, launch gnome-lirc-properties and report whether the receiver is not auto-detected, or whether no remote is selected by default. You can also get me one of the listed remotes on this Amazon wishlist :)

My new toys

2010-05-10T15:50:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Openismus and Fluendo for sending me 7 new remotes. I guess it means I need to start helping Jarod make all those remotes work using the input layer now :)

And dark themes for apps are in GTK+

2010-05-10T01:16:00.004+01:00

Another week, another GTK+ feature. This week's feature is probably easier to implement for applications that would require it, but the uses are also more far-reaching.

Before

After

What does it mean for me, application developer?

If your application matches the type of applications that would benefit from having a dark theme, please try it out. The 3 lines patch is easy to add to existing applications.

You'll most likely want to switch to using symbolic icons as well, for most of your UI, so that the icons show in the expected colour when a dark theme is not available.

What does it mean for me, GTK+ theme designer?

Either you keep your theme as-is. Then all applications will use that theme. This is most likely what should happen for Accessibility-related themes.

Or you create a "gtkrc-dark" file in your theme, at the same level as your gtkrc, and make it dark (not a bit darker like the bad example above, but real dark). Test it out with gtk-demo's “Application Window” demo.

By the way, you might want to update your theme for GTK+ 3.0 at the same time.

Client-Side Window Decorations and misconceptions

2010-05-04T13:33:00.004+01:00

This morning, my RSS reader was full of news with links to Mark Shuttleworth's blog about Canonical's idea for windicators.

The problem now is people conflating Canonical's own design decisions (most of which I don't agree with, except for the case of netbook UIs, but that's not the point here) and Client-Side Window Decorations support.

Martin Gräßlin's blog lists a few things that you would lose if we were to use client-side window decorations. Most of them are just wrong:

Consistent behavior between all applications no matter if it is a Qt or a GTK or $Toolkit application: How can you say that when there's no agreements on the implementation yet? Of course Athena widget apps will look different, they already do. As long as the theming and behaviour is known and agreed upon, there's no reasons why it should happen. It's just a bit more complicated because you would have cases where the Window Manager would behave differently from the toolkit. All those are solvable, and old, unmaintained toolkits will not integrate.
Window Tabbing (KWin specific): Why would that be impossible to implement? You'd just need help from the toolkit to do that.
Window rules like always show a close button even if the window is not closeable: Working around broken apps? Fix your apps...
Accessibility features like big border and button sizes for all windows: Certainly not. It would even mean that you wouldn't get a disconnect between application and window manager implementing accessibility features.
Easily changeable window themes: Why wouldn't they be easily changeable? That's highly dependent on how the theming is implemented in toolkits. I guess it would be the case if you had a half-hearted implementation.
Shadows which are part of the theme (KWin would not paint shadows for a client-side window-decorated window): Why not? If KWin knows that the application is drawing its own decorations, it could draw the shadows, or you could make the application's toolkit be aware that it needs to draw the shadows. Either way, it's not impossible to implement.

There also doesn't seem to be a list of thing you'd end up winning:

Tear-free window resizing (when the client is doing the resizing, with a proper resize grip for example)
Better integration of resizing within applications (say "zooming" when going to fullscreen
Proper way to do tabs in titlebar, a-la Google Chrome
Window-as-a-document/object (see the tab interaction part of this Empathy UI review, which would enhance the integration between applications and file managers)

And that's just the things I see myself as winning. There's more technical details on the GNOME Wiki.

Update: Got my knickers in a twist over Client-Side Windows vs. Client-Side Window Decorations, fixed up links and text.

Deinterlacing, now in Totem

2010-04-30T13:29:00.003+01:00

Totem, in git master for GNOME 2.32, has support for deinterlacing video streams, thanks to the work by Sebastian Dröge. You'll need gst-plugins-base from git master to test it out for now.

Free of charge, you'll get Philip Withnall's work on not blocking the interface when parsing playlists. This should make Totem feel more responsive overall.

Symbolic icons support in GTK+

2010-04-27T10:55:00.014+01:00

The design

Discussed as part of the GNOME-Shell design plans, and at the Usability hackfest we had in London earlier this year, we wanted to have icons that would only draw attention to themselves when needed. Unlike what Mark proposed, we wanted to use the theme colours and sizes so as to avoid problems, for users either with or without a visual impairment.

The tricks

To load and theme the icons, we use a CSS style-sheet, with the "!important" keyword, overriding every colour in the SVG file itself. Here's an example of what it might look like.

The second trick is using the tray's colours for GtkStatusIcons. Matthias has more X-fu than me, so using X11 atoms, we export the colours we care about for the icon from the tray, to the out-of-process status icon. Seeing that the shell might not end up using status icons, and that the panel would have the same GTK+ theme as the rest of the desktop, it might not be quite as important for the long term.

Building the icon theme

Jakub updated the instructions on what it took to create the symbolic icon theme, along with some explanations of what's necessary to allow the recolouring.

To test out your created icons, you can also use the SVG snippet above, modify the colours, change the file path for the xi:include, and open the SVG file created with eog, or another gdk-pixbuf powered image viewer.

What does it mean for me, GTK+ theme designer

We chose to only export 3 colours for use by the icons, one warning ("orange"), one error ("red"), and a positive feedback one ("green"). Those are named colours in the GTK+ theme, and you can use Jakub's commit as an example on how to add support for those in your GTK theme.

The main part of the icon (the usually white, or gray-ish bit) will use the text foreground colour for drawing. This means that dark-on-bright and bright-on-dark themes should work out of the box without having two separate icon themes (as was done for Ubuntu's latest release).

What does it mean for me, application writer

Many of the GNOME desktop components already had bugs filed against them, to start using symbolic icons when available. First, review your icons, and see whether they match the use cases mentioned in the design documents. Check whether an icon exists for your application in the gnome-icon-theme-symbolic git repository. Make a patch against your application (example patch), and file it in a bug.

Then, drop by the #usability channel on GIMPNet IRC, or drop a mail to the usability list and ask for your patch to be reviewed.

Testing it out

Just like the famous quatre-quarts, 4 equal quantities of:

libcroco from git master
librsvg from git master
GTK+ from git master
gnome-icon-theme-symbolic from git master

Sprinkle with your favourite application for testing, or use gtk-demo.

Thanks

Hiroyuki Ikezoe for his librsvg and libcroco fixes, Jakub, Hylke and Lapo for their work on the symbolic icon theme, and Matthias for his original GTK+ patch.

And my icon turned itself into a symbol, shting

2010-04-27T10:06:00.005+01:00

A few bugs to kill off before symbolic icons support is in GTK+. But we have some screenshot action for it!

Hardware enablement

2010-04-23T17:04:00.004+01:00

Patches flying, and the results are nearly there.

Driver for the Apple Infra-red Receiver should soon be upstream (and a patch not to break LIRC setups), along with support for the Intuos 4 wireless tablet.

Ross merged patches in Gypsy which should allow for crappy serial GPSes to work, as well as the one on the Nokia N810 (and N900?), and the (even) crappy(er) ones that require a closed-source daemon and write to a FIFO.

GMyth dead?

2010-04-14T14:00:00.004+01:00

Do you use MythTV? Do you use Totem?

GMyth, which Totem uses to access MythTV installations (watching recordings, and live TV) is dead upstream. Is anyone interested in taking over from upstream, and updating/maintaining Totem's plugin?

If I don't see any movement on this, I'll be forced to remove the MythTV plugin from Totem.

Code for cash: Summer of Code ideas

2010-04-01T13:10:00.003+01:00

As you might know, the time as come to put in your applications for Google's Summer of Code project ideas.

There's a good bunch of ideas available on the GNOME side of things, but if you fancy helping out GNOME without working on GNOME, you might also like the ideas from FFMpeg, GStreamer, or BlueZ (some of it directly related to gnome-bluetooth).

And if you're into web development, we have 2 good ideas in the GNOME Wiki (See the Front-end for common web services and Collaboration server/client ideas).

iPhone and iPod touch support in Fedora

2010-03-24T11:30:00.004Z

As Martin posted recently, libimobiledevice hit 1.0.0 earlier this week.

As a timeline of what's available in Fedora, here's a list of the features available in each Fedora release for iPhone and iPod Touch users:

- Fedora 11 contains libimobiledevice 1.0.0 and filesystem access through ifuse

- Fedora 12 was the first distribution to ship with out-of-the-box support for gvfs-afc, presenting you with your device on the desktop as soon as plugged in.

- Fedora 13 (and the upcoming Beta) will contain libgpod and Rhythmbox with music syncing support for those devices.

Loads of tweaks are happening now in Fedora 13 to make the experience smoother. Feedback in the bugzillas, as per usual.

Guessing DVD titles

2010-03-18T00:39:00.003Z

I just pushed discident-glib to GNOME git, a small library that uses discident.com's service to guess the title of DVDs. They have a database of some 250k DVDs, though the database itself isn't open, and the API doesn't seem to allow submission.

Still a few FIXMEs to go through and API docs to write, and it should be ready to be integrated in your favourite DVD ripper.

Drop me a line if you're interested in using it in your app.

Speaker testing

2010-03-12T15:44:00.004Z

Based off the work Lennart did, let me introduce you to the speaker testing UI in gnome-volume-control.

Patch lives in Bugzilla, and will be in the Fedora 13 repositories shortly.

I can't even spell my own name?!

2010-03-02T17:43:00.003Z

Thanks to David, I finally fixed the header title of my blog to spell my name in Hebrew properly. David, don't hesitate to let me know if it still sucks :)

For the record, the banner was previously in Katakana, then in Arabic for a while (thanks Imed!), and in Hebrew since Eitan kindly transliterated my name for me.

If you have some Hindie skills, drop me a note :)

Before everything is broken

2010-03-01T12:03:00.002Z

As my awesome hosting provider is closing his servers soon, I moved my DNS to using GANDI's DNS servers, and my mail to Google's servers. Things should still be working as before, but do let me know if I really broke something...

Tea break! (and High-Quality vids)

2010-02-26T17:54:00.003Z

We're currently closing up on some discussions at the GNOME UX Hackfest, and I'm going through my browsing history and cleaning up my TODO lists at the same time.

I thought I'd mention this nice link if you haven't seen it. Theora, when encoded with a newer Theora (Thunelsda) encoder, should at least match “MPEG-4” (in quotes, because I don't want to mention specific profiles, and get into a pissing contest).

Monty's been working on Theora and Vorbis quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure he would admit that the Theora of past didn't do justice to the capabilities of the codec.

Have fun with the surround sound work in Vorbis too :)

We're (re)moving settings again

2010-02-25T17:00:00.005Z

Currently at the GNOME UX hackfest in London, where plenty of good discussions are happening.

One thing we discussed recently is removing preferences. Everybody loves when we remove preferences because it gives them a reason to vent steam, and we love receiving abuse (“- Are you being sarcastic? - No, I never am.”).

There's been talks of "TweakUI" type functionalities in the past, with no one ever showing up, and putting their money where their mouth is, and implementing it.

Taking a well-known MacOS application as a way to represent super-tweaky (or crack-rock, depending on which way you look at it) settings and preferences, Jakub (with help from the ever tweaking Hylke) mocked up “GNOME Plumbing”.

PLUMB!!1!

The honorable Vincent Untz has volunteered with implementing the settings pane for the gnome-control-center to go along with the changes in other capplets.

The reasoning behind removing settings is never made to antagonise people. There are various reasons, taking into account the increased complexity of preferences and settings, the ratio of people using such features, and possibly the maintenance costs of having more tweakable bits. Contact your local designer if in doubt :)

A lot of us had hoped that gconf-editor could serve as a crutch, hoping the community (in that case, the community of the more vocal people that complain about the changes) would handle creating the settings tweaker that was alluded to so many times.

We're hoping this will be the end of complaints when features get “moved” for design decisions.

PS: We copied a Mac app, not because it's a Mac app, but because it had the simplest UI for displaying seemingly unrelated settings, and making potentially complicated settings easy to understand. Thanks guys for making hard things easier.

Shared-mime-info patches

2010-01-28T17:24:00.003Z

Ooh, the strain.

If you filed a bug against shared-mime-info in the past and wonder why your requested mime-type still isn't in, it's just a lack of time, and the fact that most of the bug reports require too much work on my side to be integrated.

If your bug doesn't include a test case, I won't look at it.

If your bug is a copy/paste of a stand-alone mime definition file, I won't look at it.

If your bug doesn't contain any reference information, I won't look at it.

If your patch isn't git-formatted, I won't look at it.

If your patch breaks the test suite, I won't look at it.

Given the requirements to compiling shared-mime-info (git, a C compiler, and glib), I don't think I'm setting the barrier too high. Furthermore, all those requirements are spelled out in the HACKING file.

Let me know if you have any questions, or want clarification on some points, so I can update the HACKING file with that information.

User accounts dialogue

2010-01-15T16:19:00.006Z

Over Christmas, Matthias worked on the first pass at the lo ng awaited user accounts tool.

I did my bit and committed this afternoon the new icon selection popup, which allows you to capture and crop a picture from your webcam (through my earlier cheese work). I also committed the ability to save your fingerprints, as was available in gnome-about-me.

Screenshots below. More information on the Fedora Features page.

The new icon selection popup

Fingerprint enrollment

Webcam capture and cropping

Looking for Leftfield

2009-12-19T15:46:00.003Z

I bought Leftfield's “Leftism” audio CD a couple of weeks ago, and managed to scratch it to death trying to put it in the tray of a vertical CD drive (and closing the tray with the CD falling out of it).

Does anyone have some rips of the CD for my legitimately purchased music?

Freezing Totem with text subtitles?

2009-12-16T01:16:00.003Z

Then ask your distribution to backport the patches.

This has been fixed in Fedora about a month ago.

Sound Juicer "So give me a hug, it's your birthday" 2.26.2

2009-11-26T14:10:00.002Z

Ross should be celebrating his birthday, so here comes a release of the old stable sound-juicer, with plenty of fixes you already saw in 2.28.1.

* Fix warning on startup when the configured drive doesn't exist (Bastien Nocera)

* Fix a number of leaks and crashes when the audio CD isn't known in MusicBrainz (BN)

* Disable paranoia when playing back the CD (BN)

* Fix CD-Text metadata using gvfs to work (BN)

* Don't truncate submission URLs (BN)

* Set MusicBrainz UUID in files, not a full URL (Philipp Wolfer)

Enjoy!

Sticky tape

2009-11-20T11:48:00.003Z

Google might know how to write a web browser, but writing an OS certainly isn't their forte.

You might have seen Matthew's mention of the acpid hacks, some of the other sources are just as funny to read.

Hard-coded xorg.conf, because they don't want to run HAL.

Patches from Fedora 11

xscreensaver for a screen locker

Fedora 12, and beyond

2009-11-19T12:28:00.003Z

Fedora 12

Fedora 12 got released yesterday, with plenty of nice new features.

My hand in that was the running bluetoothd on-demand, work on gnome-volume-control and its profile switching (meaning dead-easy 5.1 support), enhancements in the GNOME Bluetooth UI (which you probably already saw if you use Fedora 11), the PAN support in NetworkManager.

The stuff I really like is:
- the Bluetooth PAN support, so I can install the non-free wireless drivers on my laptop (which lacks Ethernet)
- the new notification theme
- the awesome work on KMS, and performance enhancements, which means I now use a GL compositing manager on all my machines
- the out-of-the-box mounting of my iPod Touch, though music syncing is still some way away.

You might want to read Matthias' interview for the Fedora 12 release.

Fedora 13

More recently work has started on Fedora 13.

nautilus-sendto got its own plugin API now, so you can extend it whilst keeping the code closer to your application or library. Empathy in GNOME 2.30 will take advantage of that. Pascal Terjan worked on the Pidgin plugin to make it use the Pidgin D-Bus interface, which means we don't need a Pidgin plugin to talk to nautilus-sendto anymore. Both changes are in Fedora 12 and Fedora 13.

Totem finally got some of my time, and a number of bug fixes have gone into the GNOME 2.28 and unstable branches. In master, we now have a nice OSD, disk-buffering of streams, reverse frame-stepping, and RTSP/HTTP authentication. Much thanks to the GStreamer guys, and Wim in particular, for making those last 3 items possible in Totem.

There's a few more items I'm still working on that'll sure please the crowds :)

A little OSD

2009-11-11T16:53:00.003Z

Totem in master now has purdy OSD when you press a key, or a key on your remote control, and you're in fullscreen. Note that this requires compositing.

Screenshot streaming the Avatar HD trailer

Get Moblin, get GNOME

2009-11-05T22:04:00.003Z

If you were to install the new Moblin 2.1 somewhere, you'd be getting a gnome-bluetooth powered Bluetooth panel.

All the code lives upstream in the gnome-bluetooth module on master.

No more stuttering

2009-11-04T19:44:00.003Z

Today, as some of you guessed from my teaser yesterday, I finished implementing on-disk buffering in Totem, using playbin2's new features.

Using Totem in master with this gstreamer patch, Totem will start playing back videos as soon as enough buffering has been done on disk.

Note that this will only work for QuickTime and FLV streams, but that means that the YouTube Totem plugin and streaming trailers from Apple's website just got better, and should allow us to implement stream saving very soon.

Notice anything?

2009-11-03T18:47:00.002Z

Answers on a postcard (or in the comments).

Bug fixing galore!

2009-10-29T16:05:00.003Z

In the past couple of weeks, we've been hard at work fixing bugs for the next Fedora release, Fedora 12.

We've had new releases for Totem - with loads of warnings, crashers, and behavioural bugs fixed -, for gnome-bluetooth - with upstream fixes for some killswitch handling problems -.

I've also helped out fixing bluriness in gnome-settings-daemon, and made gnome-power-manager use the same OSD code as the volume pop-ups.

As a relief from all the bug fixing, I've started working on a Bluetooth input setup helper, which will help you set up a mouse and keyboard on Bluetooth should you find yourself without any connected to your computer. This should be helpful to users of Logitech, or Dell branded dongles.

Shared-mime-info translations now at Transifex.net

2009-10-05T20:24:00.003+01:00

Which means translations don't make any more work for me:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-October/011087.html

Pushing patches

2009-10-01T16:32:00.003+01:00

AFC backend

A couple of hours ago, I committed the AFC backend to gvfs. This means you should now be able to access the storage on your iPhones and iPod Touches. Note that this does not include music syncing yet, as the feature would belong in libgpod.

This feature has also available in Fedora 12 repositories for a couple of weeks. Just make sure you install gvfs-afc.

Moblin work

After updating gupnp in rawhide a bit too quick, I was left with the task to port bickley to gupnp 0.13. Rygel is working nicely with this after a bit of back and forth with Zeeshan. The preferences still need a bit of love though.

I also ported network-manager-netbook to NetworkManager 0.8 with Dan's help.

Finally, dalston's volume control bits got updated cut'n'paste code from the latest gnome-media.

All the patches are sitting in the upstream bugzillas or repos, and are already in the Fedora 12 Moblin packages.

nautilus-sendto plugin API

2009-09-23T17:53:00.003+01:00

As promised in the nautilus-sendto module proposal, I fixed up the plugin API, wrote API docs, and exported the plugin functionality.

I've already patched Empathy to carry its own nautilus-sendto plugin, and will be moving the Pidgin and Bluetooth plugins in the near future.

Too many modules

2009-09-21T17:38:00.003+01:00

Today I released GNOME 2.28.0 versions of:

- totem-pl-parser and totem

- gnome-bluetooth

- gnome-media

- and gnome-user-share

I also released a new nautilus-sendto, with a revised GNOME-ish version number.

Both gnome-bluetooth and totem are also due 2.28.1 releases to fix a couple of buglets.

Some little tools

2009-09-17T16:17:00.004+01:00

GNOME 2.28 and Fedora 12 are approaching, so I'm in full bug fixing mode.

I've been using clang on totem-pl-parser as a test:

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/ --libdir=/usr/lib64 --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

$ CFLAGS=-I/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-redhat-linux/4.4.1/include/ scan-build -o clang make

All the little bugs will be listed in clang/index.html. I fixed most of those, and pushed them using git-bz:

$ git bz file totem-pl-parser/general HEAD~10..

And voila, a nice list of patches, ready to apply.

GUADEC digits

2009-07-25T05:13:00.002+01:00

Have you been to 8, 9, 10 GUADECs?

Let us know! We're still looking for a GNOMie with a perfect attendance.

Bad at updates, Easy 5.1

2009-07-23T23:31:00.004+01:00

Looks like I didn't blog one bit after GCDS (or usefully during). I won't do it usefully now either.

gnome-volume-control (in master) has profile switching support. You can now disable devices you're not interested in, and setup 5.1 support for your desktop in 2 clicks.

Input switches (and highlights of the volume control BoF) to come later.

FreeFA!

2009-07-08T15:21:00.002+01:00

Remember, tomorrow (Thursday 9th July 2009), 15:00 to 17:00 ¹, is FreeFA.

Join in at around 14:40-45, join us in front of the main University Building. We'll get to the pitch by foot.

Summing up:

Bring your football kit (trainers, or moulded shoes, shinpads)
Bring T-Shirts of different colours (at least a clear and dark one)
Show up at 14:40

The teams haven't been set up yet, as we don't know whether we'll have smaller goals available (it's currently setup as a full-fledged 11-a-side pitch).

If you show up late, you won't be able to play...

¹: Might last a bit longer

«Todos es mejor con Bluetooth»

2009-07-04T17:04:00.004+01:00

Ladies and gents. Tomorrow, the great Bluetooth presentation! Come and join in the chuckles. A superb presentation that the New York Times calls «Inexplicably enticing», an anonymous KDE developer say it's «Dumbed down, and not Cross-desktop und so weiter».

Where: Palacio de la Música
When: 12:00 to 12:30
Who: Y.T.
What: ¡la mejor presentación de Bluetooth en el mundo!

GCDS: Discrimination by accent

2009-07-02T10:41:00.008+01:00

My level of Spanish being what it is, and my accent being what it is, my cab ride to Las Palmas cost me some €60 from the airport, and that's after the cabbie switched off the meter...

Apparently, the «Catalina Park» apartments booked by the nice people at the GNOME Foundation, have a namesake near Playa de Inglés.

From top to bottom: where I wanted to go, where I was, where I ended up (locations provided «by ear», do not try to replicate at home). Yippee!

FreeFA

In other news the FreeFA tournament is going to happen next Thursday, from 15:00 to 17:00. I'll put the details onto the Wiki when I can remember my password.

Secure Simple Pairing support, now in Fedora 11

2009-06-30T22:49:00.002+01:00

I updated gnome-bluetooth in Fedora 11, and that new version supports Secure Simple Pairing, an easier pairing mode for Bluetooth 2.1 devices.

The update currently lives in the updates-testing repository, but will be in the normal updates when we've had enough good feedback about it.

If you have Bluetooth devices in your possession that don't work as expected with your systems, and fancied a bit of playful testing, find me at GCDS, and we'll try and fix that.

FreeFA '09

2009-06-30T00:58:00.003+01:00

If you're interested in joining in for some «Futbol» at GCDS, add your name to the list on the Wiki, and bring your shoes/shinpads/other bits of kit.

We don't have a date and time settled for it yet, so make sure you check the schedule when at the conference.

As every year, if you don't bring shinpads and you break your leg in two, you'll have little sympathy.

fprintd integration with KDE

2009-06-29T16:13:00.004+01:00

I was pointed today to this blog, which shows the integration work being done in KDE with fprintd. Happy to see all that work on the daemon and the documentation is coming to good use.

DBusGProxy introspection, where art thou?

2009-06-26T01:14:00.003+01:00

I tried to beat the wash cycle on my washing machine at doing something useful[1].

Tried to add Introspection support to gnome-bluetooth.

The result nearly works, as it seems that there's no bindings for DBusGProxy in gobject-introspection...

** WARNING **: Entry 'DBusGProxy' not found

If somebody knows...

[1]: I played football twice today, and needed to wash my kit again, as I'll be playing tomorrow, though I hope we'll play better than we did this evening, shrug.

A little (geo)clue

2009-06-24T11:14:00.003+01:00

Over the past week, I've been working a little on Geoclue stuff.

First up is a Geoclue plugin for gnome-bluetooth, which allows you to set up your Bluetooth GPS device.

This will work best with the patches in the Geoclue bugzilla, so that the selection is instant-apply.

The second piece of work is a Skyhook Geoclue provider. This code manages to put me within 20 yards of my house, though we should be getting NetworkManager's help to get the AP's MAC address.

Finally, my Geoclue Firefox patch should soon be getting reviewed. It's been long enough that I forgot how to build Mozilla (probably a good thing).

As an added bonus, I've sent a patch against NetworkManager to Dan with a gnome-bluetooth plugin, which should allow users to just tick a box to set up PANU Internet access.

Now, we just need somebody reviewing all those Geoclue patches. Maintainer, where are you at?

gdb trick

2009-06-18T16:47:00.002+01:00

I had a problem with gnome-bluetooth's wizard, a couple of days ago, that I couldn't reproduce when running under gdb. Turns out that I'm too slow at typing or something, and the problem was a race (though a slow one).

There's a few tips and tricks in this class material. The one I was interested in was:
(gdb) break foobar_new
(gdb) commands
thread apply all bt
continue
end

Then, every time you hit that break point, you'll get a backtrace, and the program will continue. I fixed that bug I saw :)

I'm upstream!

2009-06-18T02:06:00.002+01:00

Or at least, my Wacom Bluetooth tablet driver is. I was wondering in which tree it was lost. You'll still need a patch to bluetoothd though.

Simplez! Simple Pairing support now in gnome-bluetooth.

2009-06-16T18:42:00.002+01:00

After a furious hacking session (and a bunch of paper-drawn mockups), Simple Pairing support is now in gnome-bluetooth.

Simple Pairing is an optional part of the Bluetooth 2.1 spec, which makes pairing Bluetooth device simpler. For most devices, simply check that the passkey matches on your computer and the device, or for headsets, do nothing, and voila, paired.

Code is in git master, release to follow shortly.