Olivier's adventures in Wonderland - Moovida

Moovida @ GCDS 2009

Olivier Tilloy — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 19:23:59 +0000

I am just back from GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit) where I gave a talk about Moovida. It was a short stay for me, as I arrived on Friday afternoon just in time for the registration process where I got a cool Qt beach towel, and left on Sunday night after the last talk.

Even though I would have liked to stay the whole week to attend more interesting talks and BOFs and to get to know more hackers, I must say I really enjoyed my stay in Las Palmas. I didn't see much of the city and nothing of the island really (except a bit of the coast from the plane), but I really liked eating next to the beach, facing the sea, and the Alfredo Kraus auditorium is an impressive building pretty well located. Good geographical conditions for such a summit, the first of its kind, bringing GNOME and KDE communities together.

It all started on Friday night at the welcome social event sponsored by Canonical (free beer and tapas) where I got to meet a bunch of interesting people, some of whom I knew from the projects they work on, some not. I got back to the hotel reasonably early and reasonably sober to do some adjustments to the presentation I was to give on Sunday.

The real stuff started on Saturday morning with three very interesting keynotes. Robert 'r0ml' Lefkowitz spoke about Liberal Software, what it is and what it is not, why he doesn't like to give credit to people and how he has a very medieval point of view in that regard. Pretty interesting and impressive as an orator. Then Walter Bender talked about Sugar and the work they are doing at Sugar Labs to promote the use of free software in education, especially in developing countries. I sure would get involved in that kind of project the day I have children. Finally Richard 'rms' Stallman took off his shoes and talked about software patents, about how evil the Spanish government is in that matter, how evil Microsoft is, why we should not write applications in C# and why we should even discourage people to do so. It would have been interesting indeed to have a confrontation with the guys behind Mono at Novell, but it seems they were not there, being kept busy with a release. And he sang the new version of the Free Software Song. And wore his costume of Saint IGNU-cius of the church of Emacs. And held an auction for a stuffed gnu that sold for 170€ (proudly acquired by Zaheer).

After a quick lunch break the afternoon was dedicated to a series of lightning talks (5 minutes each) on various topics, among which I found the following ones of interest: the Open-PC announcement by Frank Karlitschek, "Common interface bloopers and how to avoid them" by Matthew Paul Thomas, designer at Canonical, "Usability Testing for the Rest of Us" by Celeste Lyn Paul, OCRFeeder by Joaquim Rocha, and "KDE Bugzilla: Using the new options" by Alex Spehr. Of that last one I particularly liked the following statement: "~90% of the crash reports are unusable". Reminded me of a tool of ours that got a heavy face-lift recently but still needs a lot of work to produce really interesting results.

After all the conferences I got to meet Brian whom I knew through Launchpad and his multiple bug reports on elisa and moovida. Together with Philippe we sat down, had a look at a couple of problems he had running Moovida on OpenSolaris, and in no time we managed to understand and fix bug #381417. On the way back to the hotel he gave me some interesting insights on Sun's plans about OpenSolaris, his work to integrate GStreamer-based applications in it, and how from the feedback he got from users people seem to appreciate Fluendo's codecs and DVD player. It's always good to hear that of course.

After a refreshing nap I rehearsed one last time my presentation and went to sleep as there was no specific event on that night and I wanted to get early to the conference hall to test the setup of the room.

I spent the whole Sunday morning in the multimedia room and saw among others Lennart speak about audio on the free desktop, Jan on the direction GStreamer is taking towards a 1.0 version after more than 3 years of an ABI and API stable 0.10, and Olivier on integrating video conferencing in applications using Farsight.

And I gave my talk about Moovida, focused on its ease of use, the immersive experience it provides and how easy and cool it is to extend it writing plugins. I demoed some important features of the new version, and got overall some very positive feedback and interesting questions. That was a very good experience for me as my first talk in such an event, and despite the little bit of stress that may have resulted in a weird pronounciation and me forgetting things I wanted to say, I really enjoyed it. I can't wait to see the video of it to learn from my mistakes (and show it to my mum), and I'm looking forward to doing more of this in the future.

After a quick lunch in front of the sea where I joined Mark's table, I saw the opening of GUADEC with Owen presenting GNOME Shell, the presentation of GNOME Zeitgeist, a talk on how successful GNOME was in Google's Highly Open Participation Contest, and a series of lightning talks on the current state of Clutter, by Emmanuele. As the day was over for GNOME hackers I decided to attend the last KDE talk on semantic contextual menus, by Laura Dragan. They seem to have this interesting RDF data store mechanism in KDE which I'd need to have a look at one of these days.

With that it was already time to catch a cab to the airport to fly back to Barcelona. Let's make Moovida rock even more for the next event of this type!

Moovida 1.0 is out

Olivier Tilloy — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:53:15 +0000

Good news everyone!

After a very intense design and code sprint, we finally released Moovida 1.0, formerly known as Elisa. A lot has changed in this release.

The name of course, meant to better reflect the spirit and image we want to give to the project: it is fun (to use and to work on), it is moving (fast), it targets a wide audience (from your little brother to your grand mother).

The visual appearance of the whole thing is a revolution in itself: designed from the ground up with ease of use, professional look and consistency in mind, it offers a much better media experience and a world of possibilities for us to build upon and extend its functionalities.

A huge number of bugs were fixed, overall performances improved and the code was cleaned up a lot.

The last two weeks were very intense, we had a tight deadline to stick to and I think we managed quite well considering the constraints. Kudos to Florian and David who invested an incredible amount of time and energy in this milestone, and of course to the whole team: the result we achieved is a great piece of team work.

A lot remains to be done, and we are already hard at work on fixing critical bugs to make this release as stable as possible, introducing new features, polishing some parts of the UI that didn't get as much love as would have been needed, communicating, planning... In a word, making moovida better every day.

Don't hesitate any longer, try it out, you will love it. A Windows installer is available on our website, and Ubuntu packages (for Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty) are in our PPA. Questions, suggestions and bug reports are more than ever welcome: Moovida is your media center, we need your feedback!

I will be speaking of Elisa^W Moovida at GCDS in July: desktop integration and fancy UI experimentations with 3D interfaces will be on the table. GNOME and KDE folks, see you there!

News from Elisa

Olivier Tilloy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:35:11 +0000

I still don't have internet at home and little spare time during working hours so I'm blogging asynchronously. Reminds me of the good ol' days when I was writing my mails at home, then pushing them on a USB stick to send them from wherever I could find a connection... A lot of things happened since last time I wrote about Elisa and my work at Fluendo Embedded.

I have been working on re-designing and implementing the new elisa.fluendo.com, the old website being a customized wordpress, quite inadapted, neither easy to tweak nor to maintain. Not to speak about the contents and this terrible download button which I could not locate the first time I visited the website, back then as an interested potential contributor. The idea was to deliver a true community website with a professional design, and I think that to some extent we kind of managed that. The feedback is pretty good so far. David, our designer, has been working hard at sketching and Guido and I have been working equally hard at implementing it. After two weeks struggling with CSS theming, my conclusion is that CSS, in their current implemented version (2.1), suck. And their implementation in that piece of crapware that Microsoft dares to call a browser sucks incredibly more. To the contrary, coding the backend has been lightning fast and pure pleasure, using Django, of course.

In parallel, we have completed the transition from subversion to bazaar for source code versioning, the migration from Trac to Launchpad for bug tracking and from Trac to MoinMoin for the wiki. We are now using extensively Launchpad and the blueprints system to write specifications. And we have set up a public Bundle Buggy instance (which we were already using privately) to track merge requests and enforce a review process that ensures better code quality.

Meanwhile, the whole team is focused on our next release, Elisa 0.5. The new REST architecture has already proven to be as flexible as expected, yet there are lots of features we need to implement before we can release anything. We are currently designing the brand new user interface from scratch with strong usability constraints, implementing the widgets needed, writing new resource providers (Flickr, Amazon, Youtube, Shoutcast, ...), writing an efficient database backend and a new player, among other things.

Next news from the world of Elisa with the next release, stay tuned!

A big step towards Elisa 0.5

Olivier Tilloy — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:54:50 +0000

The last weeks have been quite busy workwise, and I'm proud to announce that we finally released a first glimpse of what Elisa 0.5 is going to be.

What was formerly known as the new REST architecture is now officialy the 0.5 development series. Elisa 0.5 is a complete rewrite of the core of Elisa to overcome all the problems encountered with the old architecture and make it easily extensible. The plugin system was already in place, but with the new architecture we made it much easier to write new plugins, including pieces of UI, which formerly required nasty hacks and a significant integration effort.

This early release is of course intended for developers, it is not by any means a stable version, it is not packaged and it does not even have the basic Media Center functionalities. But everything needed to start playing with it is present.

If you cannot wait to get your hands on it, check out the bzr branch from launchpad:

bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~elisa-developers/elisa/0.5 elisa

You will need a development branch of pigment for the python widgets, see http://elisa.fluendo.com/contribute for instructions on how to get started.

We are aware that so far Elisa's weak point was the lack of documentation, and we have put special efforts in improving this. The API documentation has been updated, and two brand new tutorials will help you write a plugin from scratch.

We have changed a lot of things in the development process of Elisa, and I must say it is a real pleasure to work on this project. We are now using Launchpad in conjunction with bzr to manage our source code. All the bug reports from the Trac are being migrated as I am writing. Working with bzr branches allows a tremendous gain in efficiency and code quality: before merging a branch into the main development branch, the changes have to be reviewed by at least two other developers. The whole review process is tracked by a Bundle Buggy instance (currently private, but the reviews happen on the elisa-commits public mailing list). Code quality has been reinforced with the arrival of a QA manager in the team, we now have better and more relevant tests, and code coverage statistics.

The most exciting is to come though, because we can now start writing the real Media Center features, and trust me, we are not short of ideas!

A quick word on the win32 port, our Windows team deserves it, they invested a lot of efforts into porting to Windows the 0.3 branch (formerly known as trunk). An alpha release with an installer for XP and Vista is now available, we expect to deliver a stable version in June!

Stay tuned for more exciting news and surprises, the coming weeks should not be disappointing.