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.

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!).

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.

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.

See the plugin’s page for details.

From there, I went to look at how we can implement the same behaviour we have in one of the popular mobile browser these days.  Here’s the result: stefani.ogg (Stefani is the name of our hacking app).

In this video, you can see that each time I click on a paragraph, its content is zoomed to fill the screen.  If you click again, you get back to the full page view.  At all time the page is live and active (it isn’t a static image), although that can prove to be an issue (like mistakenly clicking on a link while in full page view).

You can try it if you want, just keep in mind that this is a quick prototype and it doesn’t really support scrolling yet.  The code is here: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/pierlux/stefani.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/pierlux-zoom 

Now more details on how this works: on double click, I do a hitTestContent() at that position.  With a patch we wrote, you can access the HitTest’s bounding box.  That is how I determine on what to zoom.  After that, it is simple mathematics, signals and QTimeLines.

Granted this method is rudimentary and does not always gives the best result, it works with patched current available API.  A more elegant solution (which we may write in the future), would be to use a DOM API and access the node that was clicked on.  From there, you could go up the DOM tree and see if a particular div would be more interesting to zoom on  (ie, if a <p> tag is contained in a <div>, zoom on that <div> might also contains the title of the paragraph).  But first, we have to write that Qt DOM API :).

I seem to always be a bit depressed the first week after a conf.  As one of my fellow traveler said, it is as if we were in a summer camp for a week: living close, eating, traveling, doing all together… no wonder I feel a little depressed back home!

Istanbul was unbelievable.  It holds so much history, more than I even expected.  The food was exquisite, in all the restaurants I’ve been.   The language was too bad, given that I had a small handbook and barely left the tourist neighbourhood. I certainly plan to visit more of Turkey someday.  You can see my pictures here.

Clutter came as a natural choice since I had already played with it back in the 0.2 days.  But I though that writing C was too much hassle for such project: I went with Python.

I did have difficulty to find documentation on how to get started at first.  After only some hours, I had a working version that provides reasonable performance and looks.

I don’t wish to recreate the whole scene rotation thing, but I am looking for help on improving it (add flickr support, better performance, turning it into an actual screensaver)!

So here is the code, GPLed: http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/pierlux/savr.git;a=summary

Have fun!  You can also come and see me to talk about it at GUADEC 2008, I will be there (I am actually already in Istanbul)!

Update 2 : Apparently, I’m being told that it was possibly a real technical problem.  I might have jumped to conclusions considering that I’ve never been able to access their Audio/video section on Linux.

For many years, Radio-Canada (Canada’s BBC in French), was streaming 2 of their radio stations in Ogg Vorbis.  Some 2 months ago, I discovered that the Espace Musique stream had been stopped but I didn’t bother to call then since I barely listened to it.  But today, they shut down the Première chaîne stream, which leaves me without any local news.  That’s enough.

They even erased the page mentioning that such streams ever existed: Radio-Canada.ca.  I’ve already sent a “technical error report” on their web site.  You may do so too here Rapport d’incident technique (only in French).  Here is what you should submit (in French too, since they only broadcast in French, copy/paste will do):

J’étais sur la page: http://ms2.radio-canada.ca/

Je voulais: Écouter vos flux Ogg Vorbis sous Linux.

Il s’est produit ceci: Vous avez interrompus vos flux.  Je ne peux donc plus écouter Radio-Canada sans briser des lois (c’est à dire installer illégalement les codecs WMA sur mon ordinateur pour écouter vos flux WMA).

Nom: <Your name>

Courrier électronique: <Your email>

I’ve also wrote an email to the team responsible for the web site as I’ve been suggested by the person who helped me when I called them.  Their Audio/vidéo section is heavily not Linux friendly, let’s not let it slip anymore!

We dove into the code: “grep selection”, GraphicsContext::drawText(), Font::drawText()… but nothing was really different (there) in the Qt or Gtk port which could explain why the text wasn’t being redrawn when changing the selection.

That’s when I discovered git bisect.  Since we had established that the bug wasn’t there when QtWebKit was snapshot for Qt 4.4.0, I had a good place to start.  So after recompiling QtWebKit some 15 times (yes, it took around 3 work days!), it pointed me to this changeset.  Lucky for us, it was related to the bug (text rendering).

After some digging into the patch, I contacted the author, Dan Bernstein at Apple, and we looked at it together.  In little time, he was able to find how to reproduce it on the Mac too.  This was now a WebKit wide bug!  Some back traces later and some trials: we came up with this fix. Pretty simple, isn’t it?  barely 16 chars.  Yet, these 16 chars cost around 1200$* in direct labour time and 3 engineers were involved.

Some will say this could have been prevented with proper tests.  It happens that it was a special case on the Mac, but all other ports always went through it.  Dan now added a pixel test.

The morals of the story are:

• bug fixing is costly (haven’t we heard that in school?)
• you never know when someone will hunt you back about your patch
• git is a cool beast (in fact, it just convinced me to use it)

One question lasts: how come it took over a month and a half before someone found it?

* This number is based on market mean hourly rate since exact rates are unknown

Side note on the WebKit party

It was really cool to get to San Francisco and finally meet IRL other WebKit devs.   Kudos for the event!