Thoughts 'n Stuff

Trip to California, May 2012

In anticipation of two busy conferences in the San Francisco Bay Area, the TiZen Developer Conference 2012 and the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Quetzal release, I prepared myself by arriving one week earlier. This avoids the stress of a long distance flight immediately before conferences start, but also helps to adjust yourself to the environment (e.g., get used to public transport, find your ways around the area, get used to the food, etc.).

(download)

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trip-to-california-may-2012-jqeJwfDcvCHniBycbIue.zip (21.99 MB)

My flight to California was somewhat jinxed. Instead of getting a direct flight to SFO from an European airport, I had to change over in Miami. So instead of 12 flight hours, I was already up to 17 hours. Then the flight got delayed, and I of course missed the connection flight. Being rescheduled to the next flight meant another 5 hours of extra waiting time and arriving at SFO briefly before midnight. Which means no public transport for you. Luckily, I had informed Quim Gil about my additional delays (thanks to free WiFi at Miami airport), and being the good friend that he is, he decided to pick me up from SFO.

On the next day (a warm Sunday), I had time to visit the Computer History Museam in Mountain View. Later that evening, Quim, Henri and I met for a few drinks, the outcome being this Maemo thread. Sadly, the thread itself has seemingly no positive outcome yet.

On Monday, it was time to go to San Francisco, where I spent the next days (mostly) working and preparing my TiZen session for next week. It was great to experience San Francisco from a non-tourist point of view (though I still had to visit Johnny Rockets together with Alberto, Łukasz, Kat and Dave, the milkshakes really are that good). My highlight of the week was perhaps the lunch with the ever friendly Yorba guys on Friday. I saw their awesome new T-shirts, but sadly they’re for employees-only.

On the weekend, I met with Lokesh and we drove down to Santa Cruz (great beach, lots of surfers, too) and from there to Monterey, on the famous 17-Mile Drive. I even dared to (very briefly!) swim in the Pacific Ocean, another first for me. The Pacific made me pay my courage in blood though (nothing too bad, just an annoying cut at my heel).

Then, well rested and all that, it was time for the conferences. Since there was only one keynote for Monday evening at the TiZen Developer Conference, I spent most of the day at UDS. The one thing to notice was probably that UDS had way more developers than TiZen, and to my surprise, even some high profile GNOME developers attended UDS. So much for all the silly fights about Ubuntu not being GNOME etc. I also met Daniel d'Andrader again, which was nice.

For the other two days, it was always a bit of back-and-forth between UDS and TiZen. UDS had the better food (breakfast, hm!), but TiZen probably had the better parties (California Academy of Science comes to mind). On Thursday I started to feel exhausted and on Friday, I was glad UDS was to be over soon. The beach party (without a beach) totally killed it.

The flight back was uneventful. After two weeks in California, with the second one being extremely stressful, I was glad to finally land in Berlin again.

Multi word ribbon UI for Maliit (video)

Motivated by the new Blackberry 10 virtual keyboard, I decided to spent a couple of hours on a proof of concept, this video being the result.

I had to hack the Presage engine a bit to provide word prediction in a similar fashion to what you see in the 2-3 seconds of the Blackberry video. Then I added some space between the rows of the keyboard, so that I could place additional word ribbons there. The word candidates appear next to their starting letters, though it’s only one candidate per letter. I need to find a better solution here, but then again Blackberry guys also haven’t solved it either ;–) Tapping on the word candidates inserts then into the text editor (no gestures, for now).

The code is very hackish, certainly nothing I would publish. I am going to put it onto a tablet so that I can show it around to you guys at the TiZen Developer Conference or the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Jon is going to bring a camcorder on Sunday, so perhaps we can actually record a real, youtube-worthy video then.

Maliit as your remote control (video)

There is seemingly a trend (in ideas) to use your mobile device as a remote control for stationary devices such as your TV.

We thought that experimental support for remote text input should be easy to add to Maliit, as it already comes with a server-client architecture. As soon as client and server can run on different host machines, we’d have network transparency and it should basically just work. Luckily, we use D-Bus as our IPC, and it turns out that D-Bus understands remote host addresses. If you check the README in maliit-framework you will recognize that – with the latest release (0.90.0) – it only takes an additional environment variable, MALIIT_SERVER_ADDRESS, to connect a client (that is, an application that uses the Maliit input context) to the input method server. The scary part is perhaps that one has to disable D-Bus authentication. Therefore it's a good idea to only use this inside a trusted network.

Jon created a video which demonstrates the new feature in a better way, using a laptop that is connected to a projector as a TV replacement. The great thing about this feature is that it requires no changes to the applications, nor to the Maliit input method plug-ins, it’s the framework that handles this internally (or not so internally, now that Qt 5 turned our D-Bus API into a public one).

However, to make Maliit truly useful as a remote control, at least two additional features are required:

• Have a proxy text editor widget on mobile device that allows text interactions such as copy and paste, cursor positioning and rich text formatting.
• Emulate and transmit mouse or touch events, possibly through a dedicated touch area on the touch screen of the mobile device.

The second feature requires an extension to the Maliit protocol, whereas the first is already filed as bug MALIIT#84. After that, I could use my N9 (or my N900, as Maliit also runs there) to remote control my Gnome or Ubuntu Unity desktop, which would work perfectly for my movie watching habits. Kudos goes to Krzesimir and Jon for their work on this feature.

Better GTK+ support in Maliit

So far, using Maliit's virtual keyboard in GTK+ applications required fetching and compiling a GTK+ input method brigde yourself. Not any more. With the latest release, GTK+ applications should just work out of the box, thanks to Jon's integration efforts. Right at the same time, Łukasz was looking into using Maliit together with GTK+ applications on his Ubuntu desktop. He did a great job testing Jon's improvement and also contributed patches to properly update GTK+'s input method module cache. When compared to the Qt support, the gap in terms of supported features is quite large. We would like to further improve the GTK+ support and contributions are certainly welcome.

New features in MeeGo Keyboard

This week we published new features for the MeeGo Keyboard, including accent popups (activated through long-press on certain keys) and support for Chinese Input Methods. The latter still requires an IM engine that supports Cangjie for example to be really useful (not provided by MeeGo Input Methods).

Ubuntu users can easily test it out, as I updated the packages in the MeeGo Input Methods PPA. I also enabled all language layouts by default for those packages, as we yet have no real UI for the Desktop to control such settings. You will have to install the additional layouts package manually though (package is called meego-keyboard-zh-layouts).

One can switch to another language by swiping to the left or right (on the keyboard itself), which is admittedly a bit stressful with a mouse (and nigh impossible with touchpads!). It works quite nicely though when using touch screens. I am sorry for the strange transition animation, it apparently needs some adjustments for the desktop.

We'll also have some GNOME3-related news soon, so stay tuned!

Updated MeeGo Input Methods packages

I published new versions of the MeeGo Input Methods (framework and keyboard plugin) on the project's Launchpad PPA. It contains the API/ABI break that was announced in the beginning of this month.

At first I thought I would do this packaging only for others but I have to admit that I start to enjoy using my host system for input method development - it's really easier than having to use the MeeGo SDK or scratchbox even.

I also added some patches so that the on-screen keyboard docks itself to the bottom of the screen. For MeeGo Touch applications, focus widget relocation will work on the desktop now. If that's not enough for you then how about a slightly translucent keyboard background? For this to come true, you only need to modify the keyboard's SVG file, located at:

/usr/share/themes/base/meegotouch/svg/meegotouch-virtual-keyboard.svg

Search for this section:

<g id="meegotouch-keyboard-background">
  <g>
     <rect x="100" y="100" width="64" height="64"/>
  </g>

</g>

and add a opacity style property to the rect element like so:

<rect style="opacity:0.5;" x="100" y="100" width="64" height="64"/>

You need to restart the meego-im-uiserver process to see the effects though. I will explain the other theming possibilities in another blog post.

The packaging problems I encountered in my last blog post are also solved: A Launchpad PPA keeps all packages in one repository, so one needs to explicitly mention the Ubuntu version in the package names, otherwise they can easily supersede each other.

MeeGo Input Methods for your desktop

I've been working on the MeeGo Input Methods project (codename "Maliit") for nearly a year now. The project provides a pluggable framework for input methods. It comes with a reference plug-in for a multi-touch-capable virtual keyboard.

It had bothered me that, even though our source code was available at gitorious.org, there were nearly no contributions from the outside. I attribute that to the difficulties when it comes to compiling all required components, but also to the lack of perceived openness.

We now offer packages for Ubuntu, through the Openismus PPA for MeeGo Input Methods, thanks to the packaging efforts of Jon. This is an offer for those interested in developing input methods for MeeGo. It's not targeting end-users (yet?) - a virtual keyboard might not be useful on a desktop, unless you have a touchscreen.

We also have a public wiki and if you wish you can visit us in #meego-inputmethods @ freenode.net.

The user is always right

Today I had a failing fsck during Ubuntu startup: any HDD activity would simply stop when the check claimed to have reached 89% Couldn't abort, had to cold start the box. Same result. OK, abort the check, bypass it and see what's going on. If only! Ubuntu thinks it is a great idea to drop normal users into maintenance mode. Once you leave maintenance mode, the check starts again! Same result. Did it occur to anyone that the check itself might be at fault sometimes, and that a userfriendly way to bypass this check is absolutely crucial?

(If fsck had a better reputation for finding real problems instead of being the root cause for many data losses, and if the ext4 version wasn't written by mr-lossy-file-systems-ftw himself, then perhaps I'd be worried. I am not. Fsck offers little protection if you don't have a real backup anyway. So the best advice is really to disable any automatic fsck checks.)