A entrada é aberta a todo o mundo, só limitada pola capacidade do local.

Mais info no blogue de Tomeu (em inglês) e no blogue do master (em espanhol).

Vagalume 0.8.3

The first thing that I’d like to mention is the upcoming release of Vagalume 0.8.3 (which will probably happen during this weekend). The only changes in this version are that menus and dialogs have been fremantlized using the Hildon 2.2 style. It’s not an enourmous change, but it was about time :)

Here’s a screenshot of the new preferences dialog (click to enlarge):

Note that this release is only interesting for N900 users. There are no significant changes in v0.8.3 compared to v0.8.2 for other platforms.

Hildon development

There’s been quite a few changes in Hildon during the last weeks. The maemo.org Bugzilla has been working reasonably well and I’m glad to say that some important bugs that have been fixed lately were reported directly by end users.

Apart from tons of bug fixes and speed improvements, perhaps the most easily noticeable change in Hildon that you’ll see in the upcoming Maemo update is the new “live search” feature for tree views.

You’ve seen it in the “Contacts” application and Claudio talked about it some weeks ago. There’s been a lot of tuning since then (including the support for icon views) and now it’s essentially ready. I hope it’ll make the overall user experience of the N900 a bit better.

FOSDEM 2010

Last, but not least, tomorrow I’m flying to Brussels to attend FOSDEM 2010.

Some fellow Igalians are giving talks there (Joaquim about OCRFeeder and SeriesFinale, Victor about the dspbridge for OMAP3 and Philippe about multimedia in WebKitGTK+ with GStreamer).

We’ll arrive soon so we’ll be at the beer event on Friday night.

See you there!

For those who don’t know it, this is how arrow keys are arranged in (some) non-English layouts:

Compare to the English layout:

My N900 has an English keyboard, and I like it because I use the X terminal a lot so having separate keys for the arrows is good.

However I miss the accents (in particular ‘ and ~) as I usually write in Portuguese and Spanish, and using the additional on-screen keyboard is not that convenient for a Jabber conversation.

Fortunately, arrow keys can be re-mapped to add extra symbols by editing this file:

/usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/nokia_vndr/rx-51

Just go to the end of the file and replace the ‘arrows_4btns‘ entry with this:

xkb_symbols "arrows_4btns" {
key <UP> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Up, dead_circumflex ] };
key <LEFT> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Left, dead_acute ] };
key <DOWN> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Down, dead_tilde ] };
key <RGHT> { type[Group1] = "PC_FN_LEVEL2", symbols[Group1] = [ Right, dead_grave ] };
};

With this, Fn+Up/Down/Left/Right will produce a dead circumflex/tilde/acute accent/grave accent.

If you want these changes to take effect immediately just type ‘setxkbmap us‘.

Hope you find it useful.

Update 19 Dec 2009. Since some people have asked: of course even if you only write in English or another language that doesn’t need accents, you can still add useful symbols to the arrow keys such as ‘|‘, ‘<‘ or ‘>‘. You can use any of these keyboard layouts as an example. See also this thread and this other one.

Update 10 Jan 2010. The information on this post is now (in expanded form) in the Maemo wiki.

Here’s how it looks (click to enlarge):

We also have a new logo designed by Otto Krüja:

Many things have changed since the previous version. These are some of the highlights (read the full list here):

• Implemented the Last.fm Web Services API v2.0
• Support for Libre.fm and other Last.fm-compatible services
• Support for Maemo 5 (Nokia N900)
• New logo and other UI changes
• Sleep timer (i.e. stop playback after X minutes)
• New configuration setting to download free tracks automatically

If you are interested in Libre.fm or the support for multiple servers you should read the Vagalume FAQ.

Very important for N900 users: as you may already know, Last.fm does not allow streaming music to mobile phones. If you are Last.fm user and you have a Nokia N900 then you should really read the FAQ (and also this post).

N900 users will also notice that the UI hasn’t been completely adapted to the Maemo 5 style. That is going to happen soon, but since I didn’t want to delay this release even more, this version uses the classic UI.

A Moblin version is also in the works. Expect a release soon.

Updated 15 Dec 2009: Some users are experiencing connection problems after upgrading to Vagalume 0.8. This problem has already been fixed, so expect a new version soon.

Updated 16 Dec 2009: I’ve just released Vagalume 0.8.1 with the aforementioned fix (see changes here).

Updated 21 Dec 2009: And Vagalume 0.8.2 is out, with one more fix for another connection problem (see changes here).

Progress in Vagalume has been very slow this year, partly because of all the work we’ve been doing in Hildon Widgets.

Fortunately, the next Vagalume release will be out very soon. And yes, I know I had already said back in May that it would only take a few weeks, but this time it’s true ;-) This version is already working (you can grab the code from the GIT repository and compile it) and here’s a screenshot to prove it (click to enlarge):

And, as I promised back in May, this time it comes with support for Libre.fm.

On another note, this weekend I’m flying to Barcelona for the Maemo-Barcelona Long Weekend.

I’ll talk about GTK and the Maemo 5 UI, and my fellow Igalian Felipe will also be there, explaining how to port GNOME applications to Maemo.

In principle all training sessions are going to be in Spanish, but we’ll be around the whole weekend in case you want to talk to us.

You can see the agenda for the weekend here.

And that’s it for the moment. See you in Barcelona!

But I can’t resist :-)

I’m not going to talk about its features or its specs. I just want to say that it’s really exciting for me to see the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones releasing a high-end handset with a GNU/Linux-based operating system.

I think that this is a great milestone for the free software movement as a whole, because none of this could have been possible without all the work that Linux, GNOME, Debian and other projects have been doing before this.

Being part of the N900 team, of course I want this new device to hit the big time; but what I really want to see is not just the success of this particular model, but the proof that free software has entered the mobile phone market to stay. For good.

Let’s make it happen.

Did I say I’m excited? :-)

• Alfredo Kraus auditorium is a great venue, and its location couldn’t be better.
• The University was less spectacular, but from a functional point of view I think it was more suited to this kind of conference than the auditorium (to begin with, Internet connection worked better). Its main problems: distance to the city center and lack of places to have lunch.
• When Jos van den Oever said: we not only share specifications, we also share code, and everyone in the room started to applaud.
• Despite that, and at least for me due to the packed schedule, I couldn’t attend any of the KDE talks. I don’t know if other people had the same feeling, but I left Gran Canaria a bit skeptical about the actual usefulness of having both conferences together.
• All keynotes were good.
• Moblin 2 looks promising.
• GNOME Shell, Zeitgeist, Clutter, WebkitGTK+, client side windows.
• The hacking sessions at the hotel lobby.
• Nokia’s announcement that Maemo will switch away from GTK+. While this is a complex decision with a lot of causes (probably some of them political and some of them technical), I think it’s fair to say that this is (at least party) a failure of GNOME/GTK+, and deserves some debate inside the GNOME community.
• Few women giving talks. I hope there comes a day when the number of women in free software conferences is not a matter of mention.
• The weather was too hot for me (although at night it was fantastic).
• The beach at night.
• Canarian food at the dinner with the GNOME Hispano team.
• Fernando and Xan’s GNOME 1, 2, 3 show.
• The GNOME band.
• Kimmo using a whiteboard for his talk.

That means one thing: Summer is finally here!

That also means that in less than 10 days I’m flying to Gran Canaria, along with many other Igalians, for the Desktop Summit. We have a few talks there this year, I’ll give two: an introduction to the new Hildon 2.2 and a Git workshop (this one at the Spanish GUADEC).

I’ve already been to Gran Canaria once some years ago, and I keep very good memories of that trip. The island is not very big and has some amazing landscapes, specially in the central part. The Maspalomas Dunes in the south are worth a visit too (a trip is being arranged by the organisation, see here, and hurry up if you’re interested), although that part of the island is full of hotels and I didn’t find it particularly beautiful.

I was in Las Palmas for less than a day and I remember it as a nice city. I think it’s going to be a great place for the Summit. I’m looking forward to seeing many people that I haven’t seen for a long time, and I hope that grouping together the GNOME and KDE teams in the same place for such an important event bears fruit sooner or later.

See you in Gran Canaria!

So here is Vagalume with support for Libre.fm:

(this is not ready yet, but expect a new release in a few days/weeks)