Blog backlog, Post 1, Emoji

Short version

dnf copr enable hadess/emoji
dnf update cairo
dnf install eosrei-emojione-fonts 

Long version

A little while ago, I was reading this article, called "Emoji: how do you get from U+1F355 to 🍕?", which said, and I reluctantly quote: "[...] and I don’t know what Linux does, but it’s probably black and white and who cares [...]".

Well. I care. And you probably do as well if your pizza slice above is black and white.

So I set out to check on the status of Behdad Esfahbod (or just "Behdad" as we know him)'s patches to add colour font support to cairo, which he presented at GUADEC in Strasbourg Gothenburg. It adds support for the "bitmap in font" as Android does, and as freetype supports.

It kind of worked, and Matthias Clasen reworked the patches a few times, completing the support. This is probably not the code that will be worked on and will land in cairo, but it's a good enough base for people interested in contributing to use.

After that, we needed something to display using that feature. We ended up using the same font recommended in this article, the Emoji One font.

There's still plenty to be done to support emojis, even after the cairo support is merged. We'd need a way to input emojis (maybe Lalo Martins is listening), and support in a lot of toolkits other than GNOME (Firefox only supports the SVG-in-OTF format, WebKit, Chrome, LibreOffice don't seem to know about colour fonts either).

You can find more information about design interests in GNOME around Emoji on the Wiki.

Update: Behdad's presentation was in Gothenburg, not Strasbourg. You can also see the video on YouTube.

Watch out for DRI3 regressions

DRI3 has plenty of necessary fixes for X.org and Wayland, but it's still young in its integration. It's been integrated in the upcoming Fedora 21, and recently in Arch as well.

If WebKitGTK+ applications hang or become unusably slow when an HTML5 video is supposed to be, you might be hitting this bug.

If Totem crashes on startup, it's likely this problem, reported against cogl for now.

Feel free to add a comment if you see other bugs related to DRI3, or have more information about those.

Update: Wayland is already perfect, and doesn't use DRI3. The "DRI2" structures in Mesa are just that, structures. With Wayland, the DRI2 protocol isn't actually used.

GNOME Web hacks

After the Pocket integration earlier this week, I've cooked up or landed a couple more patches.

Mailman passwords

Those darn mailman administrator passwords. There's no "forgot password" button and the password is shared amongst all the administrators of a mailing-list. Now Epiphany remembers them and I don't need to go through my inbox trying to recover them.

Glow button fixes

Epiphany was using Totem's glow button, a button which glows a couple of times to bring your attention to it. It's used in Totem's browser plugin, to show that it's ready to play, and Epiphany to show finished downloads. It broke due to GTK+ changes, and it's now reimplemented using CSS animations instead of horrible hacks.

Analytics removal

A little privacy hack, inspired by the PureURL Firefox extension. This removes tracking information from URLs when tracking is disabled in the preferences.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest: Day 5

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!