I am currently having a nice week working remotely from the Collabora’s Cambridge office.  They are enjoying a vast and cozy work place (compared to Montréal’s office), which makes me jealous.  Never the less, things should improve in the next months. :)  Cambridge is really nice, I am a big fans of pedestrian only cities.

Last night, we had dinner at Guillaume, Géraldine, Will and Sjoerd’s.  Marco was the actual cook.  We had wine, camembert, salame sotto grasso, salame d’asino, bread and Risotto flans (pictured above).  Quite a nice evening.

So far, life in Cambridge seems really nice but I’ll have to devote a post to English oddities.

It is quite easy to find out if you are a frequent flyer.

1. You wonder if the movie selection will have been updated because you already have seen all the movies from your previous flights;
   • Just to find out that you also saw the new selection at home…
2. You know exactly what to remove and how to speed up security checks*
3. You have flown with 4 different carrier, some more than once.
   • And you obviously know which one have the best (Air France) and the worst (Air Transat) food.
4. Flying 5,5 hours to Heatrow seems short.
5. You arrive just on time at the airport.
6. And finally, you can recite the security procedures video by heart.

* Speaking of which, they should really make a newbies lane

Update: apparently the past of fly is flown.

As it has already been pointed out, there are only 10 days left before the opening of Maemo Summit 2008. I’ll be attending this first summit with Marco Barisione, one of my colleagues from Collabora. We’ll both be presenting.

On Saturday September 20th at 15:30 for half an hour, Marco will introduce you to Telepathy, the framework used in the maemo platform for instant messaging and audio/video conferencing.

On Saturday September 20th at 16:30 for half an hour, I will introduce you to WebKit, the open source web engine. I’ll be explaining part of the internals and demonstrate how to use it in your Gtk or Qt application today (therefore this talk is oriented towards Gtk+ and Qt, which are toolkits  you can use to build applications for the maemo platform).

The summit is right after OSiM World, at headquarter of c-base in Berlin, Germany.  I hope to see you in great numbers at both our talks!

Schedule subject to changes, see the official wiki page for times and details.

I’ve been very busy in the last 2 weeks (with my brother’s emergency surgery and the work), but I did manage to work on libchamplain and code new features.

I finally fixed the limited zoom bug I had (it did take me more than one try!). There were some glitches with small zoom levels (where the map was smaller than the window), but these are history.  I also had to patch clutter-gtk (see bug #1114) to generate [the missing] scroll events to have mouse wheel zooming.

Different map sources are now available. You currently have 3 sources built-in: OpenStreetMap Mapnik, OpenArialMap and Maps For Free Relief.  You can change the map source at run time!  I’ve attempted to write support for other non free sources but their usage terms prevents their use, so I stopped.

Markers (pins on the map) were planned for 0.3, but I figured they were so important that I wrote them earlier. ChamplainMarkers are nothing more than ClutterActors placed at the right position on the map. You are free to draw anything (or load an image) as a marker. I also created a default marker for simple text markers. In the first screenshot, all markers are different because I wanted to demonstrate the parameters you can change (text, font, marker color and font color).  Markers can even be translucient!

Little fixes to the installed files, small animations and complete doc are also in. I think it is now usable in a real-life application. That is why I wrote EOG Map plugin (a very good idea of vuntz).

It is is a plugin for Eye of Gnome that adds a sidebar that displays the geolocation of the image on a map. I even toyed with the champlain API and created an annoying but yet cool throbbing marker.

I’d like to thank the people who helped me put this together. Their early reviews, comments and their help were key to keep me progressing when I was actually growing out gray hair on problems (like getting gtk-doc working).

Now, could your app benefit from a map? Think about it :)  In the mean time, someone wants to package it?