The device seems small, fast and it doesn’t required its own power source.  That’s the pros.  The con is that you need to use a software to geotag your pictures afterwards.  I mean: come on, you can easily put that directly into the EXIF data right at the moment your are taking the picture!  No need to do that afterwards!

So while this is a very interesting products, we’ll have to wait a bit more to have something that just works and isn’t a more work.

On a side note, this means that my EOG Map plug-in will be much more useful in the next years!

Here are the top features that can (or can’t) only be hacked into the current design:

1. To be able to replace the Clutter front end;
2. To have a global state for the library (ie. loading or done);
3. To have the tiles rendered on demand;
4. To have our own map sources;
5. To have a smooth animation when recentering the map;
6. To have a zoom in/out animation.

The first feature is really the one that calls for a new architecture.  The current design relays heavily on Clutter, even for internal data representation.  This breaks the golden MVC rule and it is my first goal in this redesign.

Having the tile loading code interweaved with the model really makes it more ugly to have feature #2 and #3.  With a controler actually building the model, the tiles could come from elsewhere without making the model much more complex and the loading code can be placed together resulting in less places where the states change.

And finaly, since the view is also the controler which modifies the model, having the animations code inside the view makes some animations tricky.

While at it, why not take into account some special requirements, such a non blocking calls.  Clicking on the zoom in button should call the zoom in function, which should return as fast as possible not to block the UI.

First design steps

First I thought about the visibility of each objects.  Since I want minimal impact on the current API, I will keep the View as the main interaction point between an application and libchamplain.  To fulfill feature #4, a ChamplainMapSource interface will be created.  This is how it works internally right now, but instead of an interface, there is a struct of function pointers.

The whole data model will be available to an application wishing to implement its own map source. It will have helper controler classes such as a map loader, and eventually a map renderer.

The view should be sending the user’s actions to the main controler, which will be called ChamplainEngine.  This engine will be in charge of keeping the global settings, state and a reference to the model.  When the model changes, the view will be informe through different signals and notifications on properties’ changes.

Trying the design on paper

So I went on use this very good online sequence diagram generator to define precisely who will be responsible for instanciating objects, notifying the view and loading stuff.  I tried to stick to this rule: all model changes should happen from ChamplainEngine.

So here some of the diagrams I created.

Those diagrams enabled me to test the task division and define very precisely how the view will get informed of the model’s changes.  Implementing this design should now be very fast, granted I don’t run into unattended issues!

This is a screenshot of the demo launcher displaying OpenStreetMap data for Helsinki (Finland).

Enhancements:

• Double clicking on the map will now zoom and recenter.
• When resizing a ChamplainView, the centered content will still be centered after the resizing.  Can be disabled.
• The Map’s license is displayed by default on the lower right corner. Can be hidden.

Fixes:

• Fix a memory leak
• Some code clean-up
• Fix Bug 558026 – zoom in + center_on != center_on + zoom in
• Fix missing zoom level in OpenStreetMap Mapnik

libchamplain-gtk has been version bumped to 0.2.7 - no changes since 0.2.6.

This should be the last release of the 0.2 series.  I plan to rewrite part of the internals to better follow the MVC principle, which will improve the code’s readability and allow for more complex features to be introducted in the future.

More info on the project page.

While my task did change a lot during the last year, the nature of my job didn’t.  I am still writing Open Source software.  Everything I do is available to the public and licensed in a proper way.  This is a very important aspect of my job and I like it.  But how do they make money, you ask? By finding and convincing customers that contributing to open source software is for their best.

With Collabora, I was able to travel across Western Europe (and more very soon) and meeting really interesting people.  If I had stayed at my previous job, I’d never have been to FOSDEM, GUADEC, the Maemo Summit and more.  This is one very important advantage of working for Collabora.

I was also offered chances I wouldn’t have everywhere like presenting at conferences and working on big projects.  This all makes me very glad of my decision 12 months ago, but most of all, I’m very happy to work with such a great team.

My grandmother can barely tell the difference between a launcher, the Window list and the Notification area.  She was introduced to Linux by my grandfather, who was introduced to Linux by me 2 years ago.  They have never used any other OS in their life.

Part of the issue with the notification area is that aMSN sits there constantly.  But when it is not running, she has to click on the green people on the left (the launcher).  When the window is not open, she has to click on the green people on the right (notification area).  When the window is minimized, she has to click on the green people at the bottom (Window list).

This is something MacOS X does much better.  The launcher icon transforms itself as a notification area (think of Adium).  It is also a way to bring back your windows from that application.  And it is rather easy to see which applications are running from a glimpse.

The activities concept proposed for Gnome is interesting.  I really like the idea of having a “composé” list of the currently active applications (minimized or not) and that presence (or IM) is integrated in the panel (and probably always running).  I really like the fact that there is no launcher area (although I use it constantly).  I do think the launcher area only exists because the Applications menu is just too slow to launch apps. Also in an office environment, the launch area is often used to place the sacred company applications.  Therefore, we should provide a way in the activities menu to have a set of applications that should always be on the list (before we have to click on more).  This is like the activities at the top of the Start menu in Microsoft Windows.

I do find that being unable to raise a minimized window in one click is less interesting.  But should the minimize button really exist? The minimize button is just a way to say “get out of the way, I want to see the window behind” for people always working with full screen apps.  Why not replace it with a more convenient functionality, like “swap with behind”.  More thinking needed

In conclusion, the new design is nice, it should provide a less cluttered desktop for every one.  Regular users (my grand-mother) should catch how to manage their windows and apps with more ease while power users should use something like Gnome-do or Deskbar to launch applications faster.

Willie Walker and Joanmarie Diggs were keen enough to give Marco and I a good introduction talk on a11y and how the different a11y technologies work on the Gnome stack. They also took the time to explain us how Mozilla does a11y and how WebKitGtk doesn’t do much right now.

Alp Toker did start the a11y work some weeks ago. I think he got busy as he forgot to publish all his work.  After a quick chat, he posted a patch under Bug 21546 for everyone to contribute.

Accessibility absolutely needs to be fixed before WebKitGtk can be considered for a possible inclusion in Gnome 2.26. This means we need to make this a high priority for us Gtk+ developers as no one should be left behind (para-quoting of a US act was unintentional).

To make a11y work in WebKitGtk:

• we need to get caret browsing working: Alp worked on that, but it needs work.
• we need to expose the page’s content through AT-SPI and Atk: Alp did a lot of work, who is volunteering to review the 50k patch? and continue the work?

Please take time to have a look at Gnome Accessibility Technologies and their documentation.

Unfortunately, making accessibility work will take time and it will progress only based on our free time.  But since most of the contributors to WebKitGtk are also contractors, someone willing to fund this work could easily make things progress faster.

You can grabe the code there:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/eog-plugins/trunk eog-plugin

To build it, you will need libchamplain and libchamplain 0.2.2 or later.

You can find 2 sample geotagged images on the bugzilla.

In this release of your favorite Gtk+ Map Widget you get:

• Bug fixes:
  • zoom-level property changes are notified if changed when setting a new map-source;
  • Markers are now ordered from top to bottom instead of first added, first drawn using ChamplainLayer.  This is more natural to the eye.
• Less exported symbols;
• A less error prone library (data passed as parameter is now validated); — thanks to Marco for pointing out my Engrish lol

Grab the 0.2.2 release here!

Since I forgot to blog abour libchamplain 0.2.1, here is what was improved:

• Bug fixes:
  • Markers’ position wasn’t updated when the map was recentered;
  • Build fixes for packagers;
• A more standard API: (lat, lon) is now used instead of (lon, lat);
• There is now libchamplain and libchamplain-gtk.  libchamplain can be used alone in a pure Clutter applications, where libchamplain-gtk is obviously a Gtk+ widget that wraps libchamplain.

EOG Map Plugin is now public

With this release, I am also happy to announce that I have published the code for the EOG Map plugin. You can grab it here in the Gnome Buzilla.  Download it, try it and test it, there has to be some bugs left over hehe (although I did my best to polish it!).

Ce hackfest a également été rendu possible grâce à la participation financière de la Gailaxie, la principale ligue d’improvisation qui utilise OpenImpro.  La ligue a consentie un montant forfaitaire pour réaliser les quelques fonctionnalités qu’elle désirait obtenir.

C’est ainsi que nous pouvons annoncer la sortie d’OpenImpro 1.2.  Voici les améliorations apportées dans cette version:

• Section nouvelles: vous pouvez publier des nouvelles sous forme de texte.
• Statistiques par saison dans les profils: un sélecteur de saison permet au visiteur de choisir la saison dont il désire voir les statistique lorsqu’il visite le profil d’un joueur.
• Un membre de la ligue peut maintenant cumuler plusieurs rôles.
• Vous pouvez maintenant définir vos propres rôles.
• Vous pouvez également modifier l’ordre d’affichage des rôles.
• Les réponses inchangés lorsqu’un joueur modifie son profil ne sont plus soumises systématiquement aux modérateurs.
• Vous pouvez désactiver l’accès à la section privée à des anciens joueurs.
• Vous pouvez filtrer la liste des joueurs et le calendrier dans la section privée.
• Le nom de la personne s’étant branchée la dernière fois est présélectionné dans la page d’accueil.

Comme vous le constatez, nous n’avons pas chômé ce week-end.  Il reste encore beaucoup à faire, mais d’ici là: installez OpenImpro et amusez-vous avec.

I decided to change my domain name to better reflect my on-line personality and because quite frankly, squidy.info was hard to spell.  More over, some of the letters in squidy sound the same over the phone.  While I will have to spell pierlux when giving my email, it should be less difficult.

By the way, here is my new email address: pierre-luc@pierlux.com.

squidy.info should remain in back-up for the next 5 years.

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.

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.

J’ai utilisé JOSM car bien que Potlach est bien, c’est une solution en ligne qui selon moi devrait être un dernier recours. JOSM est très rapide et on s’habitue aux raccourcis claviers.  Par contre, j’ai pas encore trouvé comment avoir les images satellites dans JOSM et ça serait apprécié si quelqu’un me disait comment.

J’ai fait les traces avec Maemo Mapper et j’ai simplifié le fichier gpx avec la commande suivante:
gpsbabel -r -i gpx -f ../beaupre.gpx -x simplify,error=0.001k -o gpx -F beaupre.gpx

Il ne reste plus qu’à attendre que les tiles soient regénérées (j’ajouterai un screenshot avant/après)!

Note: ce liens est très utile pour connaître l’orthographe officiel des noms de rues: Commission de toponymie du Québec.

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 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?

So libchamplain is a Gtk+ widget that aims to display rasterized maps (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps and others) using Clutter to have nice animations.  It is in a workable state (only zooming is limited for now, and that’s what I was planning to iron out this week-end).  See the web site for detailed feature and planned features.

You can grab the LGPLed code on gitorious.  Comments, reviews and patches/branches are welcome

Update: I created a screencast to demo it, but we can’t really see the nice animations here.  How do we do a nice screencast of a Clutter based app?

Update: I pushed the missing marshal file, thanks bpeel.

I’ve started telepathy-gabble with debug to get the right error message:

<error code=”500″ type=”wait”><resource-constraint xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas”/><text xmlns=”urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:xmpp-stanzas”>Too many stanzas sent per day.</text></error></iq>’

It all looks like my account had been suspended for sending too many messages but it isn’t the case.  It is funny because empathy was giving me “Messages is too long” error messages and pidgin was saying “Unauthorized”.

So where’s the problem? Did my account get high jacked to send spam? are there issues with the Google Talk XMPP servers (I recall people having issues yesterday)?

I think the utilmate solution will be to just create an account on a real XMPP server and drop Google Talk at once.

Update: problem solved, the service is back to normal.  Go figure what happened!

Also, NPAPI support is already in the Gecko web rendering engine.

I’d like to correct a perception here: NPAPI plugins are supported in QtWebKit (current SVN and future releases) and WebKitGtk.  In fact, Marc Ordinas i Llopis made it work months ago!

I still think we might need more labels to explicitly tell the user what is listed in the font list.  This version also has the advantage that if a font name is too large, you can always resize the window.

Anyway, that was my 2 cents I am no HIG specialist.