Thoughts 'n Stuff

Miniature 0.5 "London 1851" released

From the release notes: "Miniature now supports different languages thanks to a determined community of translators. Thank you for your effort! This is why we are dedicating this release to the first international chess tournament, celebrated in London on 1851.

Miniature 0.5 is being released for MeeGo Harmattan (Nokia N9 & N950) and Maemo (Nokia N900). Thanks to everybody involved in the initial Maemo attempts and the experimental version that was made available after the Miniature 0.4 release."

We also improved usability, compared to the previous release, but there's still a ton of work left.

A bit of history

I started working on Miniature – a chess client for freechess.org – in November 2009, after reading the Call for Contributors. Even though we had a pretty cool P2P feature (based on Telepathy and developed mostly by Dariusz Mikulski), it never quite reached the original goal: playing chess online. Back then I was learning how to create UI's with Qt Graphics View, which was all the rage at the time. Well, we now know that writing real UI's with that technology is a major PITA, but for my pet project, it was just too much. I got lost in the struggle.

For the next 18 months, Miniature was basically dead. Another failed project that started so promising. Quim did not want to give up though. After the N9 announcement, he launched a second Call for Contributors.

Perhaps I responded to his mail because I was embarrased at the idea of people wasting time trying to salvage the working parts of Miniature; there simply wasn't much to salvage! So I started again, this time with a very clear goal: online chess, and online chess only. Let others create the actual UI and whatnot. Focusing on one prominent feature and not having to worry about the UI worked well for me, even though I had to iterate over some architecture ideas until I felt comfortable. Quim in the meantime started to prototype the UI with QML. It was impressive to see his results, a level of polish I could have never achieved with my Qt Graphics View approach. At some point the backend was good enough to be sewn together with the frontend and suddenly we had achieved where I failed before: A touch enabled chess client for the N9 that can play chess online.

Having my own useful application available on the N9, published through OVI store, means a lot to me. I hope others will enjoy Miniature as much as we enjoyed re-creating it the second time around.

So there are people who say that Nokia's N9 isn't MeeGo …

… and those people are right, if we followed the MeeGo Compliance Spec to the letter.

But at the same time, Nokia's N9 is one of those devices that the MeeGo community has always been waiting for.

If "This is not MeeGo!" is the only thing that comes to your mind whilst reading about all the N9 excitement then you still haven't realized MeeGo's biggest problem: No. Compelling. Devices. And if - at the same time - you are one of the MeeGo project leaders, then you should do yourself and everyone else involved with MeeGo a favor and simply resign.

We need more visionary leaders than you.

Decent examples, at last!

Jon spent a lot of time in the last weeks improving our documentation for Maliit. However, while documentation is good (and necessary), Jon thinks that examples are better. I can only agree with that.

I am planning to use Jon's example material for an input method workshop at one of the upcoming MeeGo Freedays (German only) here in Berlin, just to see how useful it is for newcomers.

Maliit starts to feel more and more like a real open-source project, and I am proud of that. Just compare our wiki from end of February with the current, information-packed version, or take a look at the steady traffic on our own mailing list (started only in March this year). Or perhaps just try googling it!

I am really happy to eventually see real contributions and input method plugins from others, which makes me think that we are on a good way.

But this is still only the beginning, and more interesting news will follow soon.

Maliit Session at MeeGo Spring Conference 2011

I was attending the MeeGo Spring Conference as an invited speaker, talking about Maliit - the MeeGo Input Methods - and how to develop custom input method plugins for it.

We had more people going to the talk in Dublin than to this one, but at least the slides and the recording are available online now.

Questions for MeeGo

The MeeGo Spring Conference in San Francisco was nice, perhaps not so much for the press folks (uninspiring key note, no product announcements). As a speaker, I was fortunate enough to receive sponsorship from the Linux Foundation (special thanks to Brian Warner for the unbureaucratic approach to this). I got to meet a lot of people face-to-face and the hallway track spawned interesting discussions, circling around questions such as:

• Why would 3rd parties pick up MeeGo if it comes with an unfinished and unpolished UX?
• Why would 3rd parties perceive the MeeGo Conference as the wrong place for product annoucements?
• Is the MeeGo community inherently hostile towards the Open Core model of MeeGo?
• Where is the place for commercial engines in MeeGo?
• Why is Nokia's Qt development generally not regarded as an active MeeGo contribution coming from Nokia? QML scene graph, anyone?
• Why does a company such as Intel, which does not see itself as a MeeGo vendor, come up with its own app store?

And, of course the poisonous:

• Is MeeGo dead?

(I am going to be mean and won't answer the questions for you, as I am too opionated here, sorry.)

Other than that, San Francisco was of course great. I also spend some time travelling through California; the country side is simply gorgeous.