GNOME

This past week I’ve spent some time explaining to my mates at Samsung the basics about how accessibility works and is implemented in WebKitGTK+. I realized, yet again, of how messy and confusing everything can be the first time you encounter these things. After all, WebKit is quite a complex project already and accessibility is not a simple matter either. In order to help them better understand this topic, I wrote a summary to have as reference that explains in my own words which the main pieces of the whole puzzle are, and how they relate to one another. In my experience, it’s not always easy to understand the big picture quickly, and I think this kind of documentation can be quite useful for anyone willing to contribute to accessibility in WebKitGTK+. At least it would have been useful for me when I started working on this. I only regret not having written it before, but better late than never, right? ...

So, after almost 3 months of “holidays”, I’ve finally started working on my new job this Tuesday in Samsung Electronics Research Institute UK (aka SERI), where I’ll join a team mainly working in A/V and DTV related stuff while, at the same time, I’ll keep contributing to WebKit and WebKitGTK+. As you can imagine, being the first week means that I mostly spent my time learning a lot of stuff about my new job and the tools I’d be using, as well as setting up my development environment and getting to know my colleagues and the things we’ll be working on. ...

During the last weeks, I decided to make the most of some spare time I had while still in “nowhere land” (see my previous post) and so I’ve been working in frogr to see if I could release the 0.8 version before the end of the year. In my mind it looked like kind of a nice and humble Christmas present to the world and, at the same time, a interesting way to spent this time I had between my depart from my previous job and the start of the new one. ...

Two months ago it was an important day for me. It was the day that I finally told my partners at Igalia that I’d be leaving the company, after almost seven years. It hasn’t been an easy decision to make and so this hasn’t been an easy post to write either… yet one I’d like to write anyway. But let’s push the rewind button for a moment now… I’ve joined Igalia on November 2005, initially as a trainee while I was finishing my studies of Computer Science Engineering, and got quickly hooked by the company, the people that was part of it back then and the kind of project they were trying to build. ...

As you might already know, the new and shiny 3.6 release of the GNOME desktop is right around the corner, and so it’s the next release of WebKitGTK+, the port of the WebKit web rendering engine to the GTK+ platform. And it turns out that such a release is going to be a very special one for us, members of the WebKit team at Igalia, since it comes with some very interesting features, like those I already mentioned in the talk I gave during the past GUADEC, mainly: ...

It seems this year GUADEC is going to be pretty close to my place and so I will surely attend, but this time I won’t go by plane but by bike, which since some months ago has become my main vehicle for moving around the beautiful city where I live in: A Coruña. Also, besides hanging around the venue and trying to help as much as possible as the local I am, I’ll be talking about WebKitGTK+ in the afternoon on Thursday 26th, so feel free to come round the room if you feel curious about the current status of the whole thing and the current plans for the short and medium term, which are mostly focused around WebKit2 and the roadmap we’re already following. ...

As you might already know Flickr has added support for OAuth a while ago, which is meant to be the obvious replacement to the old Flickr auth API that has been available since a long long time ago, which has been used by many applications our there, like frogr. But the important point here for apps using the old auth method is that it won’t be longer available after July 31st, which means they should get updated if they want to keep working as so far. ...

So it seems I’m going to FOSDEM this year (yay!), together with a bunch of other Igalians who will be attending as well, coming from different places from across the globe (well, mainly from Europe this time). I know some people will probably disagree with me on this, but for me FOSDEM is one of the greatest events of this kind, and so I’m quite happy to go there this time, specially after not being able to attend last year due to some unexpected (and unavoidable) personal matters. ...

As Piñeiro already mentioned in some posts, last week a bunch of hackers attended the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest 2012 here at the Igalia offices, in the lovely city of Coruña. As the guy working on accessibility support for WebKitGTK+, I attended the hackfest to join some other great people representing different projects, such as Mozilla, Orca, AT-SPI, ATK, GTK+ and Qt. So, apart from helping with some “local” organizational details of the hackfest and taking some pictures, I spent some time hacking in WebKitGTK+’s accessibility code and participating in some discussions. ...

Some posts have been already published about this during the last days, but just in case you missed them I will mention it here again: Last week, a bunch of hackers gathered together in the Igalia office in Coruña for the third edition of the WebKitGTK+ hackfest , and a lot of work has been done, as Juanjo has already summarized in his “WebKitGTK+ hackfest wrap up” post. ...

Last May, I wrote about some initial tests I did back then with AtkSocket and AtkPlug, just to learn a bit about that API that allows connecting accessibility trees in different processes, thanks to the magic of the ATK bridge. I did that in order to prepare for the work that would probably be needed when adding accessibility support in WebKit2GTK+, so browsers using the new version of this web engine could be at least as much accessible as those using the single-process WebKitGTK+ library. Looking back, I think that the effort has definitely payed off… ...

Shit happens in many ways, and sometimes that means you release an application with some bugs you just can’t stand and need to roll out a bugfixing release as soon as possible. Does this sound familiar to you? :) So that’s why this new release of frogr, just one week after the 0.6 version had been published, has arrived, taking care exclusively of fixing the following problems, as stated in the NEWS file: ...

After some changes here and there frogr 0.6 is finally out. Besides the usual bugfixing work, the main new features on this release are: Integration with the GNOME general proxy settings (optional). Open pictures in the default image viewer from the details dialog and the main view. Allow users to specify the license to be set for the pictures. A new User Manual, under "Help > Contents". Some UI improvements. As usual, you can get frogr through different ways: you can grab the source code from its git repository or via the xz and bzip2 tarballs, specific packages for Fedora or for Ubuntu (ranging from Karmic to Oneiric) and even a version for MacOSX, if you dare to use it. By the way, at the moment frogr is already being packaged in some distros (see this) and others might follow, so perhaps it could be that you already were able to install it by just using your favorite package manager with the standard repos. Otherwise, it might be just a matter of time, I guess… ...

Now announcing that the new release of frogr is finally out. This time, I’m afraid you won’t find huge changes in the application, but a bunch of small improvements instead, in the way of subtle -yet handy- new features, bug fixes and new and uptaded translations mainly. Still, I can mention some of the new small features that I specially like, since I use it a lot: Uploading pictures stored in remote machines via well-known protocols like smb, ssh, ftp... well anything supported by GVFS, basically. Sort pictures in the interface by title and date taken (and keep the pictures sorted as you add more pictures!). Allow disabling tags autocompletion (seems to slow frogr down when you have thousands of tags). Tooltips with basic info about the pictures in the icon view (title, size, date taken). Show the total amount of data to be uploaded in the status bar. Allow filling the details for pictures right from the photoset details, when creating a new one. Correct picture orientation in the icon view, if needed (rotation). Support both for Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 (now this is the default toolkit for building). Support for generating MacOSX packages, thanks to the GTK-OSX project. As usual, several other bug fixes, improvements and nitpicky stuff. As usual, you can get it through different ways: Source code: clone from the git repository at gnome.org. Tarballs: both in xz and bzip2 formats. Pre-compiled packages for Fedora: at my personal public folder in gnome.org. For the specific case of Ubuntu you can use this PPA at LaunchPad. MacOSX packages (Intel) in the GNOME FTP server (experimental, yet ready for everyday use) [Update 31/05/2011]: If you have already installed frogr 0.5 for Ubuntu from my PPA or from the pre-compiled packages, please do upgrade to the latest version of the Ubuntu packages as soon as possible, as available in my PPA. If you already have the PPA configured in your system, you can upgrade just frogr by simply doing this: sudo apt-get update && sudo install frogr There was a problem with the generation of the previous version of the packages for Ubuntu (files being installed under /tmp/frogr, instead of /usr/share) and all of them are broken and need to be updated. Sorry for the hassle. If you want to contribute, remember you can do it by proposing ideas, translating, coding, discussing or filing and/or fixing bugs. ...

Today, while at the ATK/AT-SPI hackfest, I received a mail in my INBOX from a well known guy from the GNOME community stating just the following: Don't know if you read Hackers news, but this one is pretty nice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532790 -- Regards So I followed the link and I found a nice thread titled "Love in GIT" where people were commenting about something which remind me of one of the last commits I did in frogr, which became my favourite one so far in the project, by the way. But the big surprise for me came when I realized that the thread was actually about the commit I innocently made last week, when I realized that the so-much-important THANKS file was outdated since almost one year ago, right when I got married, so I decided to update it. Then I understood that there was actually a good reason for the thread to remind me of that change… Yes, I know, sometimes I’m “a little bit too slow” :-) ...

Last week some of the members of the Igalia WebKit team, attended to the second edition of the WebKit Contributors Meeting in Cupertino, California, in order to gather round with other WebKit contributors to discuss and work around our favorite web engine, away from IRC and with a more personal and “human” touch. As for me, it was the first time I attended this unconference and I have to say it was a great experience overall, even if accessibility (the field I usually work on through the GTK port of WebKit) was not precisely a hot topic there. But in the other hand, I managed to put some faces to people I just knew from IRC, attended to several interesting discussions and sessions, did some actual work (tm) and met Chris Fleizach, the guy from Apple involved in accessibility for the Mac port, who attended the meeting on Tuesday morning and discussed with me some interesting topics, mainly about the implementation of the accessibility support in the Mac port of WebKit2. ...

As I said some days ago, in theory I should be releasing Frogr 0.4 this weekend while at FOSDEM, after a 2-week period of feature and string freeze to work on stabilization and bugfixing tasks only. Well, bad news (mainly for myself) is that I did not make it to FOSDEM at the end, due to unavoidable personal matters, but good news is that I’m finally making the release anyway today :-) ...

Too many things have happened to me during the last weeks (some good and some bad, as usual), but I still have found some time to continue improving frogr towards the 0.4 release, which I hope it’s gonna be, at least thinking of my very particular use cases, a very complete and functional release. Still, the UI won’t be great (I’d really need help with this), I know that… but I said “complete and functional”, right? I do not remember having mentioned “beautiful”, “eye candy”, or the like… that’s a matter, though, I’ll probably consider for following releases, but not for now. ...

After more than one year without writing almost anything related to my other pet project “frogr”, I finally found some time, motivation and energy to put all the loose parts I already had more or less in place together and evolve them towards what finally made a new release of this -yet another- GNOME flickr uploader. That way, I finally released frogr 0.3 two days ago (see the announcement here), featuring the following changes: ...

After the daily reports written by Diego in his blog, few more things can be told about the WebKitGTK+ hackfest hosted at the Igalia offices last week, but I’d like to comment anyway some impressions from my personal point of view, if you don’t mind reading them. First of all, this was the second time I attended to this hackfest (I “kind of” attended last year hackfest as well) but now things were pretty different for me, basically because one year ago I was not part of the Igalia WebKit team yet, hence my contributions in the hackfest were pretty small (see my post back then for more details). However, this time I attended full-time to the event and I must say I’m really proud of the work I’ve been doing right there, which I hope will eventually lead to the resolution of this WebKit metabug, which was about fixing bugs blocking ORCA support from WebKitGTK based applications. ...