Currently the list of core developers in Gtk+ as you can seen in the web page has 10 members. A goal would be something like this: let’s have 20 developers that deserve been in that list in 2010.

But getting people trained and productive so they deserve getting a core responsibility is hard and slow. Do we want Gtk+ grow healthier, faster, safer, with more quality? Don’t we feel that the current  core team members are heroes that can miraclously maintain and grow Gtk+ because they are really good doing their work? Can we help them? Any effort on growing the core team will take a while, so we should take this seriosly soon if we want results in a reasonable schedule.

You can read more details on the release in the blogs of other Modest developers: Dirk-Jan, Philip, and my workmates at Igalia Sergio, and Berto.

But I want to highlight here that Modest is Beta. Not in the sense of “huh, don’t blame us if it fails”, but the opposite. Just blame us, cry, shout. We want to make sure Modest is better and better, and we just need you write good bug reports, so that we can work on them.

Bug reports should go to Maemo Bugzilla. Section Communications/Modest. We’re willing to know your problems, and/or enhancement requests.

See you in bugzilla!

• Being able to get the size of the file.
• Thumbnailing support

Size of the file

The use case I found where I need this is “adding attachments in evolution”. If I want to send a mail, I usually want to avoid sending very big files as this is not very good for most mail accounts people use.

If I want to do this with Evolution/Gnome, I have to open the folder with Nautilus to check the size of the files.

In fact, you can find other interesting information you’ll want to check when you are opening a file with file chooser. For example, the id3 tags of a mp3/ogg file.

I suppose the UI design experts can point good ideas about this. For me it would be enough if the contextual menu of a file would offer a “Properties” action.

Thumbnailing

We don’t need thumbnailing only for opening a file from gimp or to attach an image. The thumbnail of a image works better than the file name to describe the contents of a file, so we should enable the user to use it to know which file he’s managing, even when the application is not a imaging related one.
So I suppose it should enable thumbnails by default.

And a last very easy to implement idea

Just provide a way to open in nautilus a folder you’re viewing in file chooser. Not sure how, as a “open folder” button would lead to confussion. Maybe “browse here”? This way you could easily access to all the operations available in nautilus for files and folder, without having to browse to a folder two times (one in file chooser and one in nautilus).

This device is fantastic, yes, but it has a limited storage capability. And you usually get a lot of mails, and some of them really big (with images, audio files or even videos). It’s not too difficult to exhaust the storage in some days or even hours.

Tinymail purge API

I added an API to Tinymail that lets you remove attachments stored locally (remove from cache in case the message is from a remote folder, or remove permanently if the folder is stored locally). The API
methods are these:

• tny_mime_part_set_purged (TnyMimePart *part): this method marks a mime part to be purged.
• tny_msg_rewrite_cache (TnyMsg *msg): this method rewrites the message to local storage (cache or not), but removing the attachments marked as purged.

Then, if you want to remove some attachments from a message, you only have to mark them as purged using the set_purged method, and then, make the change persistent with the rewrite_cache method.

Currently this is only available for IMAP and local MAILDIR provided folders, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to add support for this to other providers.

Implementation

The inners of the purge method are really simple. The only thing set_purge method does is setting the Disposition field of the mime part with the value purged. In camel backend:

camel_mime_part_set_disposition (priv->part, “purged”);

This mark is mostly innocent, and the implementation is the same for any mime part, independently of the provider (IMAP, maildir or whatever).

Then rewrite_cache simply rewrites all the message to the local representation of the message, but ignoring the contents of the mime parts marked as purged this way. What we get this way is a reduction in the local storage (we don’t expunge the header of the mime part, only the contents). We also keep more or less the same structure of the message, as the original mime part headers are still stored, even when they get empty contents.

Conclusion

The Purge API gives you more freedom to choose what you want to keep in your storage. You can not only wipe out full messages, but also wipe out specific attachments you don’t want to keep.

Briefly, if you maintain a project in Gnome, and want automatic tests running, then Gnome Buildbot may interest you. And, if you have a project built using jhbuild, then it’s easy to create a Jhbuild based buildbot as the one for Gnome. Just ask in #build-brigade.

• Talk announcement in FOSDEM web
• Announcement in his blog

I talked previously about Gnome Buildbot. Briefly, it’s a Continuous Integration based in Buildbot service that uses jhbuild to compile the full Gnome moduleset. It runs tests and returns coverage reports for many modules.

I would highlight some interesting entries:

• Overrun by Camels antipattern: avoid using CamelCaseNames, and use real language phrases (for example, name your node as “Node with contents” instead of “NodeWithContents”. This makes the wiki easier to read, and mainly, easier to search in.
• Poker pattern: put even trivial things in wiki, to show the null barrier to create new content. Trivial things as this: the scores of the frequent, after-hours poker tournaments.
• Magnet pattern: have some content exclusively in the wiki to force people to use it.

In Igalia we’ve been using wikis+mailing lists for internal communication for a long time. In Gnome we’ve got Live wiki. And many other communities have found wikis a powerful resource for communication and documentation. Good reading for all these groups.

Using check, he’s generated wonderful HTML reports, and a nice integration with the standard buildbot compilation view:

You can read more information about Iago’s work in his blog entry “Gnome buildbot and integration of unit tests”. Hopefully we’ll get a public deployment of Gnome Buildbot soon.

As many of you know, I am a worker, and one of the initial partners of Igalia. This company is organized following an assembleary model. Every partner has the same rights and power of decission. And we want all workers to become partners in a medium term.

The main representation of this assembleary model is the Assembly itself. It’s a periodic meeting (one each two months) with all the partners discussing and taking the strategic choices of the company. We’ve held 43 assemblies in the history of Igalia, the first one in September 2001.

No bosses at all, just all of us being partners, with the same responsibility. This is fair, and one of the better things of being a member of Igalia team. And this makes everybody contribute with their best efforts and ideas.That’s one of the main reasons I love working here. And other main reason may be how much extraordinary and good people my partners are.

Guademy CFH (Call for Hacking!)

This is a very interesting event that will happen this year. It stands for Guadec + aKademy = Guademy destroy myths. As the event web states, Guademy is a meeting where GNOME and KDE developers share working sessions with other people interested in collaborating with both projects. It will be in March in A Coruña (Galicia - Spain), and is being organized by GPUL. Good idea and best wishes!

Snes emulators and touch screens

Last week I’ve been playing a bit with some emulators, in order to try to get one of them running in Maemo. The one I’ve been testing more deeply is Snes9x. It compiles without too much problems, and it should be easy to make it run a confortable UI with some hildon work.

But there’s a problem. Nokia N800 and 770 haven’t got too many hardware buttons, and a good Super NES emulator should get 6 fire buttons plus start and select buttons. My idea would be add support for showing buttons in the screen replacing some hard buttons in the screen, in order to use the touch screen for providing 4 fire buttons. Unfortunately, I suppose the main drawback of this idea is that AFAIK the touchscreen of these devices can’t handle more than one “touch” simultaneously . Any idea about this?

The other problem will probably be hardware performance, but I didn’t test the emulator in the device yet.

• Here at Igalia we’ve been doing lots of interesting things last months. A very interesting project is our Gnome Handhelds project, which has been awarded with public founding from Xunta de Galicia.
• Nokia has released a new device based in Maemo platform: the n800. FIC is releasing soon the Neo1973, with the OpenMoko. Very promising devices. I don’t know yet about the OpenMoko platform, but it’s based in Gtk. About the Maemo platform, I’ve been playing with the bleeding edge distribution and it’s really interesting. The kind of toys I would love to receive as a present. Congratulations to Nokia and FIC!
• We’re hiring! We’re looking for smart hackers, willing to work in free software projects. Galicia is a lovely place to live, and much better when you work in what you love.

Last month I’ve moved to a flat in Vigo with my girlfriend. Lovely city, pretty flat and very nice to be living with her! We’ve been very busy with the move and preparing our wedding. It seems next months won’t be more relaxed…