Relatório da Hackatona de Design

Durante semana, no mês de janeiro, eu estive no Brasil, no Rio de Janeiro para uma hackatona de design, com os designers de Endless e do projeto GNOME.

Que é o produto de Endless?

O maior produto de Endless é um sistema operativo para mini computadores que eles fazem, o Endless Mini e o Endless (Maxi?). O sistema operativo usa Linux e uma versão de GNOME com algumas changes (mudanças). O uso principal desses computadores é de ter muitas informações sem acesso à Internet. Por exemplo, tem muitos aplicativos sobre viagens, animais e etc que são diretamente dentro do computador, usando Wikipedia como fonte, e uma outra aplicação de receitas, com uma outra terceira fonte.

A hackatona em si

Os dois primeiros dias foram para viajar e visitar os usuários “beta” do Endless computadores, um dia na Rocinha, uma favela do Rio. E um outro dia em Magé, uma cidade rural do estado do Rio.
Os três últimos dias foram para discussões no escritório de Endless.

Observações

É uma coisa para fazer testes de usabilidade nos EUA e na Europa, e uma outra coisa de fazer isso num país sem habitude de usar “computadores pessoais” com Windows o MacOS X, mas muita mais habitude com celulares.

Por exemplo:
- Se se tem um mouse, vão dar dublo clique. Não é um problema com teclados sensíveis.
- Dividir a tela para ter um aplicativo ao lado de uma outra é difícil também.
- Se não se tem um acesso à Internet, não vão tentar instalar o acessar outros aplicativos que estão já no computador.
- Não estão acostumados a fechar aplicativos que não usam mais. Um sistema operativo de celular vai fechar os aplicativos antigos de maneira transparente.

Conclusões

Muitas coisas que o Endless ou GNOME podem mudar ou melhorar.

- GNOME tem alguns vídeos para explicar o “overview”. Um jogo ou tutorial podem ser melhor para explicar e ter certeza de que os usuários entendem.
- GNOME precisa melhorar a integração de modems celulares. ModemManager tem as funções que GNOME não usa.
- “Web” precisa de integração com detecção de malware, que ele não tem agora, mas foi uma ideia para o Summer Of Code dos anos precedentes.
- GNOME pode melhorar a primeira tela de todos os aplicativos e do sistema também, especialmente se o usuário não tem Internet para baixar conteúdo.

Muito obrigado a fundação GNOME pelas minhas passagens. Obrigado ao Endless e o Allan Day pela a organizacão. Obrigado ao meu empregador Red Hat pela oportunidade. E, enfim, obrigado à Caro pela correcção!

Contents Apps Hackfest 2015

As you might already have noticed from the posts on Planet GNOME, and can find again on the hackfest's page, we spent some time in the MediaLab Prado discussing and hacking on Content Apps.

Music

Following discussions about Music's state, I did my bit trying to gather more contributors by porting it to grilo 0.3, and thus bringing it back into the default jhbuild target.

Videos

I made some progress on Videos' "series grouping" feature. Loads of backend code written, but not much in the way of UI for now. We however made some progress discussing said UI with Allan.

I also took the opportunity to fix a few low-hanging fruit^Wbugs.

Documents

This is where the majority of my energy went. After getting a new enough version of LibreOffice going on my machine (Fedora users, that lives in rawhide only right), no thanks to COPR, I tested Pranav's LibreOfficeKit integration into gnome-documents, after Cosimo rebased it.

You can test it now by checking out the wip/lokdocview-rebase branch of gnome-documents, grabbing the above mentioned version of LibreOffice, and running:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib64/libreoffice/program/  gjs org.gnome.Documents

After a number of fixes, and bugs filed in the Document Foundation bugzilla, we should be able to land this so that you can preview and edit word processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets without going through the heavy PDF preview.

A picture, which doubles the length of my blog post

And the side-effect of this work is that we can start adding new "views" to the application without too much trouble, like, say, an epub view.

Thanks

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel, the MediaLab Prado for hosting us, and Allan and Florian for organising the hackfest.

Gadget reviews

Not that I'm really running after more gadgets, but sometimes, there is a need that could only be soothed through new hardware.

Bluetooth UE roll

Got this for my wife, to play music when staying out on the quays of the Rhône, playing music in the kitchen (from a phone or computer), or when she's at the photo lab.

It works well with iOS, MacOS X and Linux. It's very easy to use, with whether it's paired, connected completely obvious, and the charging doesn't need specific cables (USB!).

I'll need to borrow it to add battery reporting for those devices though. You can find a full review on Ars Technica.

Sugru (!)

Not a gadget per se, but I bought some, used it to fix up a bunch of cables, repair some knickknacks, and do some DIY. Highly recommended, especially given the current price of their starter packs.

15-pin to USB Joystick adapter

It's apparently from Ckeyin, but you'll find the exact same box from other vendors. Made my old Gravis joystick work, in the hope that I can make it work with DOSBox and my 20-year old copy of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter.

Microsoft Surface ARC Mouse

That one was given to me, for testing, works well with Linux. Again, we'll need to do some work to report the battery. I only ever use it when travelling, as the batteries last for absolute ages.

Logitech K750 keyboard

Bought this nearly two years ago, and this is one of my best buys. My desk is close to a window, so it's wireless but I never need to change the batteries or think about charging it. GNOME also supports showing the battery status in the Power panel.

Logitech T650 touchpad

Got this one in sale (17€), to replace my Logitech trackball (one of its buttons broke...). It works great, and can even get you shell gestures when run in Wayland. I'm certainly happy to have one less cable running across my desk, and reuses the same dongle as the keyboard above.

If you use more than one devices, you might be interested in this bug to make it easier to support multiple Logitech "Unifying" devices.

ClicLite charger

Got this from a design shop in Berlin. It should probably have been cheaper than what I paid for it, but it's certainly pretty useful. Charges up my phone by about 20%, it's small, and charges up at the same time as my keyboard (above).

Dell S2340T

Bought about 2 years ago, to replace the monitor I had in an all-in-one (Lenovo all-in-ones, never buy that junk).

Nowadays, the resolution would probably be considered a bit on the low side, and the touchscreen mesh would show for hardcore photography work. It's good enough for videos though and the speaker reaches my sitting position.

It's only been possible to use the USB cable for graphics for a couple of months, and it's probably not what you want to lower CPU usage on your machine, but it works for Fedora with this RPM I made. Talk to me if you can help get it into RPMFusion.

Shame about the huge power brick, but a little bonus for the builtin Ethernet adapter.

Surface 3

This is probably the biggest ticket item. Again, I didn't pay full price for it, thanks to coupons, rewards, and all. The work to getting Linux and GNOME to play well with it is still ongoing, and rather slow.

I won't comment too much on Windows either, but rather as what it should be like once Linux runs on it.

I really enjoy the industrial design, maybe even the slanted edges, but one as to wonder why they made the USB power adapter not sit flush with the edge when plugged in.

I've used it a couple of times (under Windows, sigh) to read Pocket as I do on my iPad 1 (yes, the first one), or stream videos to the TV using Flash, without the tablet getting hot, or too slow either. I also like the fact that there's a real USB(-A) port that's separate from the charging port. The micro SD card port is nicely placed under the kickstand, hard enough to reach to avoid it escaping the tablet when lugged around.

The keyboard, given the thickness of it, and the constraints of using it as a cover, is good enough for light use, when travelling for example, and the layout isn't as awful as on, say, a Thinkpad Carbon X1 2nd generation. The touchpad is a bit on the small side though it would have been hard to make it any bigger given the cover's dimensions.

I would however recommend getting a Surface Pro if you want things to work right now (or at least soon). The one-before-last version, the Surface Pro 3, is probably a good target.

GNOME 3.18, here we go

As I'm known to do, a focus on the little things I worked on during the just released GNOME 3.18 development cycle.

Hardware support

The accelerometer support in GNOME now uses iio-sensor-proxy. This daemon also now supports ambient light sensors, which Richard used to implement the automatic brightness adjustment, and compasses, which are used in GeoClue and gnome-maps.

In kernel-land, I've fixed the detection of some Bosch accelerometers, added support for another Kyonix one, as used in some tablets.

I've also added quirks for out-of-the-box touchscreen support on some cheaper tablets using the goodix driver, and started reviewing a number of patches for that same touchscreen.

With Larry Finger, of Realtek kernel drivers fame, we've carried on cleaning up the Realtek 8723BS driver used in the majority of Windows-compatible tablets, in the Endless computer, and even in the $9 C.H.I.P. Linux computer.

Bluetooth UI changes

The Bluetooth panel now has better « empty states », explaining how to get Bluetooth working again when a hardware killswitch is used, or it's been turned off by hand. We've also made receiving files through OBEX Push easier, and builtin to the Bluetooth panel, so that you won't forget to turn it off when done, and won't have trouble finding it, as is the case for settings that aren't used often.

Videos

GNOME Videos has seen some work, mostly in the stabilisation, and bug fixing department, most of those fixes were also landed in the 3.16 version.

We've also been laying the groundwork in grilo for writing ever less code in C for plugin sources. Grilo Lua plugins can now use gnome-online-accounts to access keys for specific accounts, which we've used to re-implement the Pocket videos plugin, as well as the Last.fm cover art plugin.

All those changes should allow implementing OwnCloud support in gnome-music in GNOME 3.20.

My favourite GNOME 3.18 features

You can call them features, or bug fixes, but the overall improvements in the Wayland and touchpad/touchscreen support are pretty exciting. Do try it out when you get a GNOME 3.18 installation, and file bugs, it's coming soon!

Talking of bug fixes, this one means that I don't need to put in my password by hand when I want to access work related resources. Connect to the VPN, and I'm authenticated to Kerberos.

I've also got a particular attachment to the GeoClue GPS support through phones. This allows us to have more accurate geolocation support than any desktop environments around.

A few for later

The LibreOfficeKit support that will be coming to gnome-documents will help us get support for EPubs in gnome-books, as it will make it easier to plug in previewers other than the Evince widget.

Victor Toso has also been working through my Grilo bugs to allow us to implement a preview page when opening videos. Work has already started on that, so fingers crossed for GNOME 3.20!

GNOME 3.16 is out!

Did you see?

It will obviously be in Fedora 22 Beta very shortly.

What happened since 3.14? Quite a bit, and a number of unfinished projects will hopefully come to fruition in the coming months.

Hardware support

After quite a bit of back and forth, automatic rotation for tablets will not be included directly in systemd/udev, but instead in a separate D-Bus daemon. The daemon has support for other sensor types, Ambient Light Sensors (ColorHug ALS amongst others) being the first ones. I hope we have compass support soon too.

Support for the Onda v975w's touchscreen and accelerometer are now upstream. Work is on-going for the Wi-Fi driver.

I've started some work on supporting the much hated Adaptive keyboard on the X1 Carbon 2nd generation.

Technical debt

In the last cycle, I've worked on triaging gnome-screensaver, gnome-shell and gdk-pixbuf bugs.

The first got merged into the second, the second got plenty of outdated bugs closed, and priorities re-evaluated as a result.

I wrangled old patches and cleaned up gdk-pixbuf. We still have architectural problems in the library for huge images, but at least we're up to a state where we know what the problems are, not being buried in Bugzilla.

Foundation building

A couple of projects got started that didn't reached maturation yet. I'm pretty happy that we're able to use gnome-books (part of gnome-documents) today to read Comic books. ePub support is coming!

Grilo saw plenty of activity. The oft requested "properties" page in Totem is closer than ever, so is series grouping.

In December, Allan and I met with the ABRT team, and we've landed some changes we discussed there, including a simple "Report bugs" toggle in the Privacy settings, with a link to the OS' privacy policy. The gnome-abrt application had a facelift, but we got somewhat stuck on technical problems, which should get solved in the next cycle. The notifications were also streamlined and simplified.

I'm a fan

Of the new overlay scrollbars, and the new gnome-shell notification handling. And I'm cheering on co-new app in 3.16, GNOME Calendar.

There's plenty more new and interesting stuff in the release, but I would just be duplicating much of the GNOME 3.16 release notes.

"GNOME à 15 ans" aux JdLL de Lyon

Le week-end prochain, je vais faire une petite présentation sur les quinze ans de GNOME aux JdLL.

Si les dieux de la livraison sont cléments, GNOME devrait aussi avoir une présence dans le village associatif.

A GNOME Kernel wishlist

GNOME has long had relationships with Linux kernel development, in that we would have some developers do our bidding, helping us solve hard problems. Features like inotify, memfd and kdbus were all originally driven by the desktop.

I've posted a wishlist of kernel features we'd like to see implemented on the GNOME Wiki, and referenced it on the kernel mailing-list.

I hope it sparks healthy discussions about alternative (and possibly existing) features, allowing us to make instant progress.

GTK+ widget templates now in Javascript

Let's get the features in early!

If you're working on a Javascript application for GNOME, you'll be interested to know that you can now write GTK+ widget templates in gjs.

Many thanks to Giovanni for writing the original patches. And now to a small example:

const MyComplexGtkSubclass = new Lang.Class({
    Name: 'MyComplexGtkSubclass',
    Extends: Gtk.Grid,
    Template: 'resource:///org/gnome/myapp/widget.xml',
    Children: ['label-child'],

    _init: function(params) {
        this.parent(params);

        this._internalLabel = this.get_template_child(MyComplexGtkSubclass,
                                                      'label-child');
    }   
});

And now you just need to create your widget:

let content = new MyComplexGtkSubclass();
content._internalLabel.set_label("My updated label");

You'll need gjs from git master to use this feature. And if you see anything that breaks, don't hesitate to file a bug against gjs in the GNOME Bugzilla.

On fêtera la sortie de GNOME 3.14 mardi soir à Lyon

In French, for a change :)

Mardi soir, le 23 septembre, quelques-uns d'entre nous se retrouveront vers 18h30 au Smoking Dog pour quelques boissons, et poursuivront avec un dîner indien prés du métro St-Jean.

N'hésitez pas à vous inscrire sur le Wiki, que vous soyez utilisateurs de GNOME, développeurs ou simplement des amis du logiciel libre.

À mardi!

Fresh software from the 3.14 menu

Here is a small recap of the GNOME 3.14 features I worked on. Some are already well publicised, through blogs:

• Brought maturity to GOM. It's now usable for real applications (including a number of grilo plugins), and will be gaining features for the more demanding uses soon (such as batched writes), along with gjs support.
• Made the default firewall experience on Fedora better (and made Sharing better on every NetworkManager-using Linux distribution, by the same token).
• Automatic rotation for Windows 8 certified devices. This will still need more work to be integrated into systemd/udev or GNOME.
• Worked on architecturing the Sharing functionality between applications which will be required for sandboxed applications.
• A bit last minute, but Totem now works on Wayland, triggering more bugs in the stack.

And obviously loads of bug fixes, and patch reviews. And I do mean loads :)

To look forward to

If all goes according to plan, I'll be able to merge the aforementioned automatic rotation support into systemd/udev. The kernel API is pretty bad, which makes the user-space code look bad...

The first parts of ebooks support in gnome-documents have already been written, scheduled for 3.16.

And my favourites

Note: With links that will open up like a Christmas present when GNOME 3.14 is released.

There are a lot of big, new features in GNOME 3.14. The Adwaita rewrite made it possible to polish the theme greatly. The captive portals support is very useful, the travelling you will enjoy this (I certainly have!).

But my favourite new feature has to be the gestures support in gnome-shell. I'll make good use of that :)

And now for some hardware (Onda v975w)

Prodded by Adam Williamson's fedlet work, and by my inability to getting an Android phone to display anything, I bought an x86 tablet.

At first, I was more interested in buying a brand-name one, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro Adam has, or the Lenovo Miix 2 that Benjamin Tissoires doesn't seem to get enough time to hack on. But all those tablets are around 300€ at most retailers around, and have a smaller 7 or 8-inch screen.

So I bought a "not exported out of China" tablet, the 10" Onda v975w. The prospect of getting a no-name tablet scared me a little. Would it be as "good" (read bad) as a PadMini or an Action Pad?

Vrrrroooom.

Well, the hardware's pretty decent, and feels rather solid. There's a small amount of light leakage on the side of the touchscreen, but not something too noticeable. I wish it had a button on the bezel to mimick the Windows button on some other tablets, but the edge gestures should replace it nicely.

The screen is pretty gorgeous and its high DPI triggers the eponymous mode in GNOME.

With help of various folks (Larry Finger, and the aforementioned Benjamin and Adam), I got the tablet to a state where I could use it to replace my force-obsoleted iPad 1 to read comic books.

I've put up a wiki page with the status of hardware/kernel support. It's doesn't contain all my notes just yet (sound is working, touchscreen will work very very soon, and various "basic" features are being worked on).

I'll be putting up the fixed-up Wi-Fi driver and more instructions about installation on the Wiki page.

And if you want to make the jump, the tablets are available at $150 plus postage from Aliexpress.

Update: On Google+ and in comments of this blog, it was pointed out that the seller on Aliexpress was trying to scam people. All my apologies, I just selected the cheapest from this website. I personally bought it on Amazon.fr using NewTec24 FR as the vendor.

A follow up to yesterday's Videos new for 3.14

The more astute (or Wayland testing) amongst you will recognise mutter running a nested Wayland compositor. Yes, it means that Videos will work natively under Wayland.

Got to love indie films

It's not perfect, as I'm still seeing hangs within the Intel driver for a number of operations, but basic playback works, and the playback is actually within the same window and correctly hidden when in the overview ;)

Videos 3.14 features

We've added a few, but nonetheless interesting features to Videos in GNOME 3.14.

Auto-rotation of videos

If you capture videos in portrait orientation on your phone, we are now able to rotate them automatically in the movie player, as well as in the thumbnails.

Better streaming

You can now seek anywhere inside streamed videos, even if we didn't download all the way to that point. That's particularly useful for long videos, or slow servers (or a combination of both).

Thumbnails generation

Finally, videos without thumbnails in your videos directory will have thumbnails automatically generated, without having to browse them in Files. This makes the first experience of videos more pleasing to the eye.

What's next?

We'll work on integrating Victor Toso's work on grilo plugins, to show information about the film or TV series on your computer, such as grouping episodes of a series together, showing genres, covers and synopsis for films.

With a bit of luck, we should also be able to provide you with more video content as well, through partners.

Post-GUADEC

• If you have an orientation sensor in your laptop that works under Windows 8, this tool might be of interest to you.
• Mattias will use that code as a base to add Compass support to Geoclue (you're on the hook!)
• I've made a hack to load games metadata using Grilo and Lua plugins (everything looks like nail when you have a hammer ;)
• I've replaced a Linux phone full of binary blobs by another Linux phone full of binary blobs
• I believe David Herrmann missed out on asking for a VT, and getting something nice in return.
• Cosimo will be writing some more animations for me! (and possibly for himself)
• I now know more about core dumps and stack traces than I would want to, but far less than I probably will in the future.
• Get Andrea to approve Timm Bädert's git account so he can move Corebird to GNOME. Don't forget to try out Charles, Timm!
• My team won FreeFA, and it's not even why I'm smiling ;)
• The cathedral has two towers!

Unfortunately for GUADEC guests, Bretzel Airlines opened its new (and first) shop on Friday, the last days of the BoFs.

(Lovely city, great job from Alexandre, Nathalie, Marc and all the volunteers, I'm sure I'll find excuses to come back :)

Firewalls and per-network sharing

Firewalls

Fedora has had problems for a long while with the default firewall rules. They would make a lot of things not work (media and file sharing of various sorts, usually, whether as a client or a server) and users would usually disable the firewall altogether, or work around it through micro-management of opened ports.

We went through multiple discussions over the years trying to break the security folks' resolve on what should be allowed to be exposed on the local network (sometimes trying to get rid of the firewall). Or rather we tried to agree on a setup that would be implementable for desktop developers and usable for users, while still providing the amount of security and dependability that the security folks wanted.

The last round of discussions was more productive, and I posted the end plan on the Fedora Desktop mailing-list.

By Fedora 21, Fedora will have a firewall that's completely open for the user's applications (with better tracking of what applications do what once we have application sandboxing). This reflects how the firewall was used on the systems that the Fedora Workstation version targets. System services will still be blocked by default, except a select few such as ssh or mDNS, which might need some tightening.

But this change means that you'd be sharing your music through DLNA on the café's Wi-Fi right? Well, this is what this next change is here to avoid.

Per-network Sharing

To avoid showing your music in the caf, or exposing your holiday photographs at work, we needed a way to restrict sharing to wireless networks where you'd already shared this data, and provide a way to avoid sharing in the future, should you change your mind.

Allan Day mocked up such controls in our Sharing panel which I diligently implemented. Personal File Sharing (through gnome-user-share and WedDAV), Media Sharing (through rygel and DLNA) and Screen Sharing (through vino and VNC) implement the same per-network sharing mechanism.

Make sure that your versions of gnome-settings-daemon (which implements the starting/stopping of services based on the network) and gnome-control-center match for this all to work. You'll also need the latest version of all 3 of the aforementioned sharing utilities.

(and it also works with wired network profiles :)

Good bye Totem browser plugin

10 years ago, I committed the first version of a browser plugin in Totem's source code tree. Today, it's going away.

The landscape of video on the Web changed, then changed back again, and web technologies have moved on. We've witnessed:

• The fall of RealPlayer
• The rise of Flash video players, as a way to turn videos into black boxes with minimal "copy protection" (cf. "YouTube downloader" in your favourite search engine)
• The rise and precipitous fall of Silverlight (with only a handful of websites, ever, or still, using it)
• And most importantly, the advent of HTML5's <video> tag

Totem's browser plugin did as good a job as it could mimicking legacy web browser plugins from other platforms, such as QuickTime or Windows Media Player (even we stopped caring about the RealPlayer mimicking).

It wasn't helped by the ill-defined Netscape Plugin APIs (NPAPI) which meant that we never knew whether we'd receive a stream for the video we were about to play, or maybe not at all, and when you request one, you'd get one automatic one and the one you requested, or whether it would download empty files. Or we couldn't tell to open in another application when clicking directly on a file. All in all, pretty dire.

We made attempts at replacing the Flash plugin for playing back videos, but the NPAPI meant that we needed to handle everything or nothing. Ideally, we'd have been able to tell the browser to use our browser plugin for websites that we could support through libquvi, and either fallback to a placeholder or the real Flash plugin for other cases. NPAPI didn't allow us to do that.

The current state of media playback in browsers on Linux is such that:

• WebKit-based players (such as GNOME's own Web), Firefox and Chrome all support HTML5 media playback (with slightly different codec support)
• The Flash plugin is only supported with Chrome's Pepper Plugin API, which Firefox will not support.
• Chrome will soon not support NPAPI plugins.

Given all this, and the facts that Totem's browser plugin will not work on Wayland (it uses XEmbed to slot into the browser UI), that its UI is pretty broken since the redesign of the main player (not unfixable, but time consuming), and that it does not work properly in GNOME's own web browser (due to bad interactions between Clutter and GL acceleration in WebKit), I think it's time to call it a day.

Good bye Totem browser plugin.

I'll miss the clever puns of your compatibility plugins (Real Player/Complex and QuickTime/NarrowSpace being the best ones). I won't miss interacting with ill-defined APIs and buggy implementations.

What is GOM¹

Under that name is a simple idea: making it easier to save, load, update and query objects in an object store.

I'm not the main developer for this piece of code, but contributed a large number of fixes to it, while porting a piece of code to it as a test of the API. Much of the credit for the design of this very useful library goes to Christian Hergert.

The problem

It's possible that you've already implemented a data store inside your application, hiding your complicated SQL queries in a separate file because they contain injection security issues. Or you've used the filesystem as the store and threw away the ability to search particular fields without loading everything in memory first.

Given that SQLite pretty much matches our use case - it offers good search performance, it's a popular thus well-documented project and its files can be manipulated through a number of first-party and third-party tools - wrapping its API to make it easier to use is probably the right solution.

The GOM solution

GOM is a GObject based wrapper around SQLite. It will hide SQL from you, but still allow you to call to it if you have a specific query you want to run. It will also make sure that SQLite queries don't block your main thread, which is pretty useful indeed for UI applications.

For each table, you would have a GObject, a subclass of GomResource, representing a row in that table. Each column is a property on the object. To add a new item to the table, you would simply do:

item = g_object_new (ITEM_TYPE_RESOURCE,
                     "column1", value1,
                     "column2", value2, NULL);
gom_resource_save_sync (item, NULL);

We have a number of features which try to make it as easy as possible for application developers to use gom, such as:

• Automatic table creation for string, string arrays, and number types as well as GDateTime, and transformation support for complex types (say, colours or images).
• Automatic database version migration, using annotations on the properties ("new in version")
• Programmatic API for queries, including deferred fetches for results

Currently, the main net gain in terms of lines of code, when porting SQLite, is the verbosity of declaring properties with GObject. That will hopefully be fixed by the GProperty work planned for the next GLib release.

The future

I'm currently working on some missing features to support a port of the grilo bookmarks plugin (support for column REFERENCES).

I will also be making (small) changes to the API to allow changing the backend from SQLite to a another one, such as XML, or a binary format. Obviously the SQL "escape hatches" wouldn't be available with those backends.

Don't hesitate to file bugs if there are any problems with the API, or its documentation, especially with respect to porting from applications already using SQLite directly. Or if there are bugs (surely, no).

Note that JavaScript support isn't ready yet, due to limitations in gjs.

¹: « SQLite don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more »

JDLL 2014 report

The 2014 "Journées du Logiciel Libre" took place in Lyon like (almost) every year this past week-end. It's a francophone free software event over 2 days with talks, and plenty of exhibitors from local Free Software organisations. I made the 600 metres trip to the venue, and helped man the GNOME booth with Frédéric Peters and Alexandre Franke's moustache.

Our demo computer was running GNOME 3.12, using Fedora 20 plus the GNOME 3.12 COPR repository which was working pretty well, bar some teething problems.

We kept the great GNOME 3.12 video running in Videos, showcasing the video websites integration, and regularly demo'd new applications to passers-by.

The majority of people we talked to were pretty impressed by the path GNOME has taken since GNOME 3.0 was released: the common design patterns across applications, the iterative nature of the various UI elements, the hardware integration or even the online services integration.

The stand-out changes for users were the Maps application which, though a bit bare bones still, impressed users, and the redesigned Videos.

We also spent time with a couple of users dispelling myths about "lightness" of certain desktop environments or the "heaviness" of GNOME. We're constantly working on reducing resource usage in GNOME, be it sluggishness due to the way certain components work (with the applications binary cache), memory usage (cf. the recent gjs improvements), or battery usage (cf. my wake-up reduction posts). The use of gnome-shell using tablet-grade hardware for desktop machines shows that we can offer a good user experience on hardware that's not top-of-the-line.

Our booth was opposite the ones from our good friends from Ubuntu and Fedora, and we routinely pointed to either of those booths for people that were interested in running the latest GNOME 3.12, whether using the Fedora COPR repository or Ubuntu GNOME.

We found a couple of bugs during demos, and promptly filed them in Bugzilla, or fixed them directly. In the future, we might want to run a stable branch version of GNOME Continuous to get fixes for embarrassing bugs quickly (such as a crash when enabling Zoom in gnome-shell which made an accessibility enthusiast tut at us).

GNOME and Rhône

Until next year in sunny Lyon.

(and thanks Alexandre for the photos in this article!)

My GNOME 3.12 in numbers

1 new GNOME Videos, 1 updated Bluetooth panel, 2 new thumbnailers, 9 grilo sources, and 1 major UPower rework.

I'm obviously very attached to the GNOME Videos UI changes, the first major UI rework in its 12-year existence.

GNOME Videos watching itself

Go read the press release and follow to the release notes.

Extend GNOME Videos with Lua

As you've probably seen in my previous post, the new Videos UI has part of its interface focused on various channels from online sources, such as the Blip.tv, or videos from the Guardian.

Grilo recently grew support for Lua sources, which means you can write about 100 lines of lua, and integrate videos from an online source into Videos easily.

The support isn't restricted to videos, GNOME Music and GNOME Photos and a number of other applications will also be able to use this to be extended.

Small tutorial by example

Our example is that of a source that would fetch the list of Ogg Theora streams from Xiph.org's streaming directory.

First, define the "source": the name is what will show up in the interface, supported_keys lists the metadata fields that we'll be filling in for each media item, and supported_media mentions we only show videos, so the source can be skipped in music players.

source = { 
  id = 'grl-xiph-example',
  name = 'Xiph Example',
  supported_keys = { 'id', 'title', 'url', 'type' },
  supported_media = 'video',
}

We'll then implement one of the source methods, to browse/list items in that source. First, we cheat a bit and tell the caller that we don't have any more items if you need to skip some. This is usual for sources with few items as the front-end is unlikely to list items 2 by 2. If that's not the case, we fetch the page on the Xiph website and wait for the callback in fetch_cb

function grl_source_browse(media_id)
  if grl.get_options("skip") > 0 then
    grl.callback()
  else
    grl.fetch('http://dir.xiph.org/by_format/Ogg_Theora', 'fetch_cb')
  end
end

Here's the meat of the script, where we parse the web page into media items. Lua doesn't use regular expressions, but patterns. They're different, and I find them easier to grasp. Remember that the minus sign/dash is a reserved character, '%' is the escape character, and '()' enclose the match.

We create a new table called for each one of the streams in the HTML we scraped, with the metadata we said we'd give in the source definition, and send it back to Grilo. The '-1' there is the number of items remaining in the list.

Finally, we call grl.callback() without any arguments to tell it we're done fetching the items.

function fetch_cb(results)
  if not results then
    grl.callback()
  end 

  for stream in results:gmatch('<p class="stream%-name">(.-)</p>') do
    media = {}
    media.url = stream:match('href="(.-)" ')
    media.id = media.url
    media['type'] = 'video'
    media.title = stream:match('<a href.->(.-)</a>')

    grl.callback(media, -1) 
  end 

  grl.callback()
end

We're done! You just need to drop this file in ~/.local/share/grilo-plugins/grl-lua-factory, and you can launch Videos or the test application grilo-test-ui-0.2 to see your source in action.

Why Lua?

This screen scraping is what Lua is good at, with its powerful yet simple pattern matching. Lua is also easily embeddable, with very few built-in functions which means we can have better control over the API plugins use, a low foot-print, and all the benefits of an interpreted garbage-collected language.

I hear heckles of "Javascript" in the background, so I guess I better address those as well. I think Lua's pattern matching is better than Javascript regexes, and more importantly, Lua is more easily embeddable in big applications, because of its simplicity as a language and a VM. Basically, Javascript (and the gjs implementation we'd likely have used in particular) is too powerful for our use case.

Better sources

It's obviously possible to avoid this screen scraping when the online source provides data in an easily parseable format (such as Json for which we have Lua bindings). That will be the case of the Guardian videos source (once we've figured out a minor niggle with the 50 items query limit) thanks to the Guardian's Open Data work.

Hopefully it means that we'll have sources for the Wiki Commons Picture of the day (as requested by GNOME alumni Luis Villa) for use in the Background settings, or for Mediagoblin installations.

Videos sidenote

An aside, for those of you who have videos on a separate network storage, or not indexed by Tracker, there's a hidden configuration to show specific paths in the Channels tab in Videos.

gsettings set org.gnome.totem filesystem-paths "['smb://myserver.local/videos/']"

Epilogue

I'm looking forward to seeing more Grilo sources. I feel that this Lua source lowers the barrier to entry, enabling the evening hacker to integrate their favourite media source into GNOME, which probably means that we'll need to think about parental controls soon! ;)

Thanks to Victor Toso for his work on Lua sources, both during and after the Summer of Code, and Juan Suarez for his mentoring and patch reviewing.