I have the pleasure to frequently hack on libsoup as part of the great Igalia WebKit team. Many things are happening in libsoup but that’s a topic for some other upcoming post. Today I will talk about a new feature I landed just a few days ago and that will be shipped with the 2.40 release. I’m talking about the support for http://publicsuffix.org. What’s that? The public suffix list is a community driven initiative from Mozilla whose aim is to provide a trusted list of well known public domain suffixes, like for example: .com, .space.museum or ايران.ir. ...

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. That was not a good idea taking into account the size constraints we have for this kind of devices. That’s why I decided to embed all that info the the HTML of the feed item. Next/Prev buttons were also removed from the header. They’re now located on the right in landscape mode. ...

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. Thank you very much for the great work o/o. ...

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. Having that into libsoup is great as it potentially benefits the whole GNOME platform. So taking Xan’s SoupCache draft as basis, I started to port it to the new architecture while fixing some bugs and implementing missing features here and there. ...

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. Just select the ones you like the most and voilà, ReSiStance will automatically setup them for you. These two really nice features were developed by a University of A Coruña student called Chus Picos as part of their master thesis. She did a really great job and is currently working on some other great features I will talk about next time. So Chus congrats and thanks for the great work. PS: did I mention that translators are welcomed?

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 0.1. ...

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. They can give you ENVELOPE blazingly fast (I run a rough test and downloading a folder with ~1500 headers from AOL IMAP server lasted twice the time of downloading ENVELOPE and BODYSTRUCT, and this means minutes). Bandwidth: ENVELOPE is smaller in size than headers as the name of the headers is not transmitted over the network Future: RDF storage support in tinymail is now closer You can find this new feature in trunk.

Last week we received a very kind visitor. Tomeu Vizoso, maintainer and developer of several Sugar core modules, came to our office in A Coruña to share with us his ideas and to talk about the current status of the project. In a hole, creating technologies that help children and try to change education is really a very beautiful goal. We were shocked when Tomeu told us about the size of deployments in some countries of South America, keep rocking guys. ...