Hacking

Hi dear readers, it’s awesome to see people-really-excited (including our friends at Bloomberg) about CSS Grid Layout, specially after Rachel Andrew’s talk in CSSConf. I really believe CSS Grid Layout will be a revolution for web designers as it will help them to build amazing responsive web sites without having to add hacks all around. Me and my fellow Igalians keep working on adjusting the code to match the specification, polishing the code, adding new features and even drastically improving the performance of grid....

For a while now Igalia and Bloomberg have been collaborating to advance Web technologies. As part of that, I’ve been lately involved on improving some editing capabilities of WebKit (posts to follow soon). As you probably know, in HTML5 any element can be editable. The feature was introduced some time ago, but was finally standardized by the WHATWG. It’s as easy as adding the attribute contenteditable=true and voilà, the magic unfolds (check it out!...

Every now and then I try to devote some spare time to add new features to ReSiStance. For this release there are 3 major changes: Item window new appearance Open links in external browser Labels support The item window (aka the window that shows the contents of a particular blog post/news/whatever) has been completely reworked. The header (with the title of the post, the name of the author and the date) used to be an static label on the top that was always visible....

I delayed a bit ReSiStance development during last months because we had a lot of work in Igalia’s WebKit team. But I managed to find some time during Xmass to advance some work and to review a couple of pending patches. The most important ones were by far, the Google Reader support ones. It all started with some sensational work done by Chus Picos. She did almost all the research regarding the status of Google Reader API (check here if you’re interested) and cooked a very nice set of initial patches....

It’s being a while since I joined the Igalia’s WebKitGtk+ team. Mainly focused on network stuff, I managed to tackle several issues during this time although nothing like what I call “the one”. Last week, after really a lot of work, we landed the patches that add HTTP cache support to WebKitGtk+. It all started in libsoup. The idea was to create an HTTP cache inside libsoup using the new-io branch started by Dan during the past WebKitGtk+ hackfest....

I released yesterday ReSiStance 0.5 with some bug fixes and two new really cool features: OMPL Import/Export: moving from other clients to ReSiStance should be easier now, and you can use the export feature also to backup your feed lists. Feed auto-discovery: this is THE killer feature of this release. Currently it uses the syndic8.com services. Just type a couple of words and ReSiStance will give you back a list of feeds that could be interesting for you....

I have released ReSiStance 0.3 (in case if you wonder what about v0.2, it is just that I didn’t blog about it, but it was released on Monday). I don’t know how it could happen, but I totally overlooked the presence of WebKitGtk python bindings in the Maemo repos by the time I started to code ReSiStance. I decided to move to WebKit as soon as I noticed my mistake, specially knowing all the cool features of WebKit Gtk port from the Igalia mates hacking on it....

After all the hard work required to release Modest and Tinymail I finally found some energy to start a new pet project. I have never really liked the RSS reader that comes with the Nokia N900 Igalia gave me. I looks too “Diablo” and it’s not consistent at all with Fremantle look&feel. That’s why I decided to write my own and, at the same time, regain contact with Python. The result is ReSiStance 0....

I’m really proud to announce the release of Tinymail 1.0. New packages are available here. It has been more than 3 years since the project started, and after all the hard work we think now it is time to release the first version of our beloved framework to build e-mail applications for mobile devices. Thank you very much to all contributors! Specially thanks to Philip, Dape, Dirk-Jan and Rob, you all rock guys!...

Thanks to the hackfest time Igalia gently gives me every week I could resume the work I had previously started to add ENVELOPE support to tinymail. What’s this stuff about? Well basically what we can do now is ask the server for ENVELOPE instead of fetching a random set of headers (like ‘From:’, ‘Subject:’ …). Why is this cool? For several reasons: Speed: IMAP servers do cache ENVELOPE information so they do not have to inspect every email message to extract the requested headers....