Porting to PySide/QML: Notification Bar

I keep hearing about how great QML is to learn so I'm a bit baffled as to why I am still having such a hard time with getting more than a toy program written.  I'm trying to save my rant about that once I've gotten an application completed and can help provide more useful feedback.  In the mean time I wanted to cover a set of changes to my python code that will made the QML port a bit easier.  This is regarding code to make it easy both for users to provide good bug reports and for me to figure out what went wrong.

tl;dr

Some sample programs that demonstrate the ideas in this post

• Reporting python logging events to the user
• Logging helpers

A Swipe UX Idea

Over my desk at work I have a sign that says "On my deathbed I would design a better deathbed".

I've been using the N950 now for several weeks and I can't help thinking about how I would do things differently.  This is not meant to criticize Nokia's work on Swipe.  Swipe works well as a universal gesture.  Even if there are issues with it you and I should recognize this is beta software.  I've heard Nokia has already made one change to swipe since my software build and who knows what else might change before release.

I'm just curious about how else things could be done and the effect they might have on the user experience.  I don't think Nokia should immediately drop everything and switch to my idea.  I first would like to see what they come up with in the finished project.  If I still think mine is better?  Oh well.  People think and act differently, especially programmers, and they are probably targeting others.

Swipe UX

I'd recommend these demos for a quick introduction into swipe.  The main swipes will bring you back to the last home screen you used.  When wanting to swipe to a specific screen you swipe back to the home screen you were on, pause to see which it was, and then swipe over.  You can go about it faster by remembering what screen you were on.  I usually think I know where I was but I tend to be wrong leading me to swipe a few more times.

My variant on Swipe UX

My idea centers on a spatial model that spans home screens, the lock screen, and applications.  This could roughly be translated to virtual desktops with rules controlling which desktop different windows get launched on based on the desktop's role.

Launch an app, no matter from what screen?  As it is opening the device also slides home screens over to the task switcher.  Now with the app up a swipe down reveals the task switcher below.  If instead you swipe up the app closes.  Also you can swipe to the right to move to the launcher or left to move to the events feed.

Idea: Swipe up or down from the lock screen to unlock and reveal the feed

The device goes to sleep?  The lock screen is above the events feed.  A swipe up or down reveals the feed below.  Instead a swipe right moves to the task switcher and left for the launcher.

Idea: Swipe left on the lock screen to unlock and move to the launcher

Open up a folder of icons? The subfolder opens up above the launcher.  A swipe up or down to reveals the main launcher below.    This would provide a simple UI for subfolders to be built into the launcher..  Again instead a swipe right moves to the events feed, and left for the task switcher.

Idea: Swipe Right on the lock screen to unlock and move to task switcher

Applications, home screens, and the lock screen would operate on a more consistent set of simpler rules using a spatial model for the home screens rather than most-recently-used.  From where you are you would always know how to get to where you want to be with one swipe without a pause to think of which screen you are on and what direction you need to go to get to where you want or having to keep an accurate mental copy of the device state.

*Note: The images are mockups only and were hacked together from screenshots I found through Google.

Python Packaging for Harmattan

Right now I am taking a break from learning QML.  Instead I've been adding support for Harmattan to my existing QWidget projects.  It might seem pretty pointless because of how aweful QWidget can be with the default theme.  I will at least have the apps available if I need them in a bind.  Also taking working apps and repackaging them rather than new untested apps provides the benefit of controlling the number of variables to debug when things go wrong.

I will be focusing on packaging for OBS seeing as a QWidget-based application isn't worth pushing through OVI.

Packaging

I had to switch my applications packaging over from my py2deb fork to the distutils-based sdist_maemo.  A big reason is sdist_maemo already has Harmattan support.  I also figured it was a good idea to switch to distutils as it is more "proper" python packaging and because it is pluggable for various target packaging systems.  That last part will allow me to continue to support Maemo 4.1/5 and in the future support regular MeeGo.

So first I've moved all of my files to a proper distutils based layout

• ./setup.py
• ./LauncherName
• ./package-name/*.py
• ./data/package-name.desktop
• ./data/package-name.png

I try to reuse code and packaging infrastructure between my projects so this means I need an easy way to diff between them, so I added a symlink from "./package-name/" to "./src".

I then wrote my setup.py file with an sdist_maemo command configured for each of my target deb-based distributions.  A nice thing to know is that for Maemo 5 the python module will be optified for you.

An annoying thing is each platform has different packaging requirements.  Some examples include:

• Different ".desktop" file locations
• Different ways of launching the app from within a desktop file.
• Everything seems different with the app launcher icon
• 80x80 pixels
• SVG recommended
• Stored in /usr/share/themes/base/meegotouch/icons/
• Different icon sizes for the Maemo-Icon-26 field
• Different .deb sections
• Different dependency names
• Aegis file support (not needed for current apps so skipped over)

Already the differences between Maemo 4.1 and Maemo 5 were annoying from a packaging perspective.  This makes the problem even bigger.  One approach I've always rejected was maintaining separate packaging scripts for each distribution requiring me to keep duplicate information like the version number.  The approach I used with py2deb was passing a parameter in to my script to change what was passed to py2deb.  That doesn't seem to jive with distutils.  So I threw in a touch of code-gen using a nifty tool called cog.
To minimize my need for using code-gen my setup.py file creates multiple instances of sdist_maemo, one for each platform.

The app icon caused me some problems.  I had assumed it would operate like previous versions of Maemo and desktop Linux, that if you just said "ejpi" or "gonvert" it would look for the appropriate icon size in "/usr/share/icons/hicolor".  I'm glad I found that document explaining otherwise.  As an alternative some of the apps in the OVI Store just hard code an absolute path. When you do make a mistake on this, Harmattan seems to have two different default icons.  The red square came up for me when "ejpi" didn't map to an icon.  The green curved icon came up when I had an absolute path that pointed at nothing.

My makefile creates the needed icons, code-gens my desktop files, code-gens my setup.py files, and then runs "setup.*.py sdist_*".

Odds and Ends

I do not believe PyQt is available for Harmattan, so I had to finish adding support for PySide in my applications.  I've made it easy to use both bindings by centralizing all knowledge of the differences between the two.

I've tried to make the switch a couple of times already but each time I came across new bugs that the old bugs prevented me from seeing.  Luckily the PySide people are quick at resolving these issues and by 1.0.5 my applications ran smoothly.

I went ahead and made the simple switch to XDG and Harmattan-style icons though I'm not yet seeking OVI compliance.  I decided to redo the icons.  They weren't all that great, no where near the icon guidelines, and I wanted SVGs so I could use the Harmattan Icon Generator.  Not being an expert at graphics tools, the icon generator definitely saved me a good amount of work.  The main drawback is that basing the icons background gradient on the base icon's content seems to produce results without enough contrast.  I ended up using the "mean" setting to force gray backgrounds.

Distributing

Now that we have all that wrapped up, time to upload onto the OBS.  The Getting Started Guide has been updated and now is pretty good.  I setup a harmattan-specific subproject due to my code-gen specializing the source-packages per distribution.  Once everything was uploaded to my project, I logged in as root, added my sources, and away I went.

So for the fruit of my work:

• ejpi and gonvert source including support for Maemo 4.1, Maemo 5, and Harmattan
• my Harmattan OBS project
• my Harmattan repository

Well I guess this means I need to get back to learning QML.

Resources

Desktop File:

• Desktop File Spec
• Desktop File location change since Maemo 5
• Speed Booster
  

XDG

• Spec
  

Icon

• Guidelines
• Icon Generator with Color suggestions
• Finding icons
• The Noun Project
• Icon Finder
• Find Icons
  

Package

• Debian official section list 
• .deb policy addendum

OBS

• Getting Started with OBS (including both MeeGo and Harmattan)
• Plan for Apps

N950 Arrival and My Development Plans

A couple of weeks ago I was notified by Quim Gil that I was selected for the MeeGo Community Developer Device Program for a Nokia N950 devkit.  Prior to this I had been quiet in Maemo-land for a little bit while I worked on an experimental rewrite of one of my applications that uses PyGame.  Seeing as PyGame isn't on the N950 I hurried up in getting it to a state I could put aside and moved on to learning QML.

The excitement increased as I saw the box personalized with my name regardless of that personalization just being a piece of tape

MeeGo Development

My development plans have changed (and frustration increased) over time as the MeeGo development story has gotten refined.  This is due to both changes in the UI toolkit availability and rules for distribution of applications.

Originally when things shifted to Qt I chose QWidget because it was ready now, includes widgets, and was recommended by Nokia (you know, the people who own Qt) for the types of apps I write (which recommendation was removed on June 22, 2011).  At MeeGo Conference I found out that some (most? all?) MeeGo instances are not including QWdget themes (which without a theme its basically dead).  QWidget in Qt5 will be optional and will probably not be included on those same MeeGo instances that currently don't ship a theme.  So there goes that work.

I am still a bit frustrated with QML in that there is not even a subset of common QML Components between platforms though some disagree on it being a problem.  I've just seen really terrible QML applications which mostly stem from everyone reinventing the same bugs when writing widgets from scratch.  I also find it a wonderful experience having the widgets available for the desktop such that I can write apps in a desktop environment that are targeted for small screens without the need for any pesky IDEs and emulation.  When it comes to testing, I am much more efficient testing and debugging natively on the desktop and just need to spot check how it translates to my devices.

I do not look forward to packaging for generic MeeGo.  I found out at MeeGo conference that dependency management isn't guaranteed to be included and one has to include in their package any dependencies outside of core MeeGo.  This is fine for compiled applications, you just pull in static libs.  This is not as simple for Python developers where part of the beauty is your program isn't compiled and any compiled extensions are distributed and maintained separately.  I have contemplated some tools to simplify this (based on cx-freeze and Hatchet) but that is a good amount of work and focused away from what makes all of this fun.

At MeeGo conference I raised my concern for packaging Python applications during the apps.meego.com lunch time BoF.  The impression I got then (no clue if things have changed) is that they will focus on MeeGo compliant apps at first and might later support others.  Even with that concession this is a stark contrast to the original vision that helped bring me on board from Maemo about (what was then called) Surrounds which would serve both as an app repo and as a place for third-party dependencies.  If I chose to not bundle all of my libraries then I also am not available for any of the other distribution channels (and any contests they might be running).  I don't program for the reward of the contests but it isn't fun feeling excluded.

The beauty of developing for Maemo was it had very low friction in the development story thanks to Python that I was able to spend more time focusing on what was fun: designing software for end-users to enjoy.  I feel that this is being lost in MeeGo.

MeeGo and Nokia

The picture can be better when focusing on a individual vendors.  Vendors may keep things a bit more lax with their distribution channels.  The problem is then you are customizing per vendor which requires device availability for testing and a lot more work.  That vendor has to be worth it.

Nokia is worth it (even without the DDP).  Nokia actually shipped a great device previously (N900 running Maemo5) and is committed to shipping the N9.  That is a lot more than other vendors can say.  On top of that Nokia offers a great experience with the software and hardware.  So as a user, Nokia is worth it.  What about as a developer?  Nokia has Qt Quick Components to provide reusable QML widgets.  They also will support dependencies and have Python/PySide available in their store.

The Way Forward

For my initial ports I will continue to focus on what keeps this fun, writing apps for end-users despite any downsides of being vendor specific.  After that I will bite the bullet of making my applications MeeGo compliant to make them available for a wider audience.

The default date.  It's good to see somebody at Nokia has a sense of humor

I have work to do on all of my applications but I will be focus on the ones that still use GTK first, especially since they are fairly simple.   I am using QuickNote as my playground for learning QML.  Expect further posts regarding progress updates and lessons learned regarding QML and MeeGo 1.2 Haramattan.

Google CR-48

Today I was asked my opinion on my CR-48 ChromeOS netbook to help with a purchasing decision for a Chromebook.  I thought I'd share my thoughts of having used it for the last 6 months.

I have a plethora of devices including most of the Maemo family (just missing the n800), some netbooks I got free through various (legal) means, and my desktop.

Whenever I am out and am needing something bigger than a handheld, I rarely choose something other than my CR-48.  This is because most of what I use are the various Google web apps and I can limp along on other use cases that don't fit in as well.  As an example, my CR-48 leaves the house once a week for my church meetings to assist me in my current responsibilities which is facilitating administrative matters so our congregational leaders get to focus more on assisting people.  An example of when I might chose another device is when I travel to various Maemo/MeeGo events where I'd want something that is a bit more prepared for python development.

The other main use of my CR-48 is what I'll refer to as opportunistic internet usage.  What I am referring to is the reduction in friction when having the thoughts "Oh, I'd like to look up ..." or "I should record ... so I don't forget" enough that you will act upon that thought more often.  This is when I am sitting about the apartment (or out and about) and my phone isn't quite enough to satisfy my need.  This is something harder to quantify when doing comparisons so it is usually not even thought of.  A tablet could also serve this purpose well except they are pricier and don't have a physical keyboard.

With any netbook you have to be honest with yourself about the reduced functionality due to their design, it is just more so the case for the CR-48 as you only have access to a web browser.  This can have some benefits though.  I remember an observation made to me back in the days of PalmOS.  My father preferred PalmOS because it wasn't imitating the desktop.  Why is that good?  When the imitation is too close you are more likely to get frustrated at the gaps when you come across them, sort of an uncanny valley of features.

So what devices should someone have?  It depends on your use case.  I've generally been a person who has preferred a cheap portable with the work horse being their desktop.  This has the benefit of being less paranoid about the portable device and making it easier to replace it when needed combined with the cost savings of a desktops (especially when you go 6 years without replacing them).  It is hard to say what I would get myself when left to my own devices (pun intended) since so many of my devices have been free.

ps If you are reading this and dream of robbing me, look further at the specs, release dates, and niche role of the various devices I listed.  It won't be worth it.

Meego Conference First Impressions

I am grateful for the opportunity to have gone to MeeGo Conference this week.

As has been discussed, the keynote was a let down. I very much appreciate Jaffa's analysis of the keynote.  The only thing I have to add is that there were rumors that the keynote was reworked at the last minute for various reasons and if this is the case we should be somewhat understanding, it is difficult pulling off a change like that.

So what were my favorite things about MeeGo Conference?

First, spending time with various members of the Maemo and MeeGo communities.  It was a lot of fun spending time together whether in sessions, meals, trips around town, or playing werewolf together.  It was great to see GeneralAntilles, Jaffa, Qole, sjgadsby, fiferboy, texrat, timsamoff, wazd, and many more.

My second favorite aspect of the conference was the collaboration.  I caught word of an apps.meego.com QA lunch BoF which was good as I don't remember if there were any other community app developers at the table to provide input from that perspective.  It was great to see the collaboration between geekygirldawn, xfade, lbt, bergie, and others.

The main problems I see with where we are at with maemo.org extras is (1) the monotonically increasing version numbers between repos, causing pain if you have a "1.3" in extras-testing but need to push through a "1.2.1" due to say Google changing an API making the app in extras completely worthless, (2) the friction in the workflow for providing both testing and user feedback, (3) noise in extras-testing due to lack of cleanup, and (4) use of extras-devel rather than a PPA.  (3) and (4) are resolved, so hopefully we also get (1) and (2).

Another aspect to the collaboration that I participated in was thp's Python presentation.  During the Q&A we had a bit of a discussion on viability for Python for various instances of Meego.  I'll cover this more in another post.

The final part to collaboration which I got to observe was thp et al taking the loaner Exo PC's and creating a multi-touch pong game.

The third and final of my favorite parts of the conference was the sessions.

Arjan Van De Ven's presentation was the best I saw due to his passion, his call to action, and audience (particularly Jaffa) raising issues with the internal communication within Intel being at friction with keeping MeeGo open.  A couple months ago he announced replacing several pieces of key software with other variants.  People took issue with no previous open discussion, few if any bug reports regarding Intel's complaints, possible NIH syndrome, and how much of this was spite towards Nokia for the switch.  Some interesting tidbits from what little I caught of that flame war were that some of the software being reverted to (evolution) has the same problems as what it is replacing (tracker) and the suggestion that software shouldn't be accepted until it is ready being at odds with the call to use innovative technologies.  Add on top of that last one the risk of "ready software" being more likely to be announced through unilateral big-reveals, shunning the in-the-open from-the-beginning software (here is looking at you MeeGo QML Components which I'll discuss more in a follow up post).  The main disappointment were a couple of potshots made at Nokia during the discussion.

I do understand that there is a conflict between always-innovative/always-beta software and getting quality releases out now using tried and true software.  I think the main thing people take issue with is how this was done and how much more this will be done with Nokia taking a backseat role.

The presentations on the future of Qt were also great even if they did raise my eyebrows on a few points (again, in a follow up post).  I got to see the Qt5 plans, Lighthouse, and QtQuick 2 presentations.  Unfortunately it wasn't until after-the-fact that I found out I should have also gone to MeeGo UX Components presentation (again, that promised follow up post).

As I've previously mentioned, thp's Python presentation was great.  I also expect wazd's presentation to be good but forgot to go (and he even used some of my programs, shame on me).  I also have to say I was impressed with hopbeat's use of Prezi and would wish to never see a traditional power point again.

Despite the let downs, MeeGo Conference was great.  It was also good to get some time dedicated to programming and to see more of San Francisco compared to my last visit (I was a lot less lost thanks to a real GPS).

And what do I do now?

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. 

That quote was the first thing that went through my mind when I heard the announcement about the MS/Nokia partnership.  As a community member I feel betrayed but I feel even worse for the employees.  Nokia has been building up a strategy that attracts a very passionate group.  The main supplier of your mobile platform switching strategies away from your needs is a drop in the bucket to your employer switching strategies to the exact opposite of where your passion lies.  Whether you quit, get layed off, switch to developing a product you dislike, or even move to a project in the forgotten shed that gets no attention are all options that are not fun.

So drop in the bucket time.

I first switched to Nokia Linux-based products from Palm because I needed pocketable internet access.  I was moving to a lot of internet services so my Palm wasn't doing a good job fulfilling my needs.  I was annoyed with the Linux support which was purely a community effort.  Momentum is important so that I will have the apps I need and the lifetime to make the switch worth while.  I bought the 770 more as an experiment and found it fulfilled my needs.

I started developing applications for it to fit different needs and have come to appreciate it as a development platform.  I can develop and use my applications on the desktop and have them also work on Maemo.  That makes development easier and means I can make greater use of my work.  I've also come to appreciate a flexible architecture with things like Telepathy allowing VOIP/IM service to be first-class, sharing system, libsocialweb (Meego), and hopefully in the future libfolks for contact aggregation.

Writing mobile applications has grown beyond fulfilling my needs as a user.  I enjoy the opportunity to provide benefit for people as well as the chance to experiment and play with things that I don't get to in my job.  Releasing my applications for free changes the feeling of user support, fixes, and new features from have-to to get-to and keeps things very liberating and fun.


Where do I go from here?

Meego: Intel is sticking with Meego.  I am curious to see what all devices are announced next week.  If they look like they have life to them then maybe I'll stick around.  Nokia is still keeping Meego development around as a project and is releasing a device this year.  I wonder if this is to fulfill some item in a contract with Intel.  If so and when the contract ends, this is dead.  If not, I wonder how long it will survive.  I am sure the financial analysts will be telling them to kill it to shift even greater investment to money pot they will expect WP7 to be.

Android: Android would probably offer me the apps I need.  Linux being under the hood is meaningless when you don't have the full Linux experience.  I feel no motivation to develop for it, either in Java, C++ and the Python supported seems grotesque at first brush.  I dislike the siloed approach that apps focus on.  You don't get the power of frameworks like Telepathy, libsocialweb, or libfolks where the backend is decoupled from the front end, allowing for choosing the front-end and back-ends that best fulfill your needs rather than sacrificing one over the other.  I dislike the idea of a manufacturer holding back updates and feel too lazy to always be following the latest custom ROMs (or some of the feats you need to go through to load one on some devices).   I've played with friends Android devices and follow high level developments in the Android community but I could be mistaken on some things either good or bad.


webOS, something else? WP7 and iOS are out of the question.  webOS seems a bit limited in both apps and development platform but does offer "synergy" which sounds like it provides a similar experience of a plugin architecture that Maemo has.  I feel a bit concerned over the momentum of the platform especially in terms of how well it'll stick around.  Being from a single vendor adds to that risk and limits device options (which was why I was glad Nokia partnered with Intel to create Meego).  I only have cursory knowledge of webOS and have never played with a device whether this biases me in its favor or against it is to be seen.

I think I'll wait for next week to see what Meego devices come out of MWC before making my decision.

In the mean time I'd be curious if people have recommendations:

• Pocketable (3-5 inches) devices with modern specs (Required)
• Google Voice / VOIP Support regardless of network connection (Required)
• Good support for desktop Linux (Required)
• Support for Google services (GMail, Reader, Calendar, etc) (Option because I'm used to using the mobile website)
• Access to a Linux command line with VIM and SSH (Optional but encouraged)
• Support for Python or some other higher level language (maybe I'd even be willing to venture into Javascript which always felt dirty to me). (Optional but encouraged)
• Apps run on both desktop and handheld without modification or emulation (Optional but encouraged)
• Official way to distribute free apps without charge (Optional but encouraged)

I'd also be curious what users of my applications will do.  There have been some stalwarts on Maemo 4.1 (n800, n810).  Will you all be sticking around or giving up on it?  Will there be a similar stalwart community on Maemo 5 (n900)?  If I move from Maemo to Meego and everyone jumps ship from Maemo 4.1 and Maemo 5 then there is no reason for me to put in the extra effort to maintain compatibility with Maemo.

Porting Dialcentral: The Last "10%"

I had thought I was "almost done" with the rewrite of DialCentral from GTK to Qt.  I've even started investigating my Meego ports and started helping package / develop a new project.  Oh the joy of rewriting software and reimplementing old bugs and the creation of all new ones.

Maemo 4.1 was leading in being the least polished.  Somehow I kept missing the setIconSize method on QTabWidget to override the default tab size on that platform which was incredibly small.

I also had to fix some modality issues.  I had not set the parent window of my dialogs because rather than a new window appearing, the dialog's contents would be drawn on the parent window on top of everything else.  It took me a bit to discover the variant of setParent that I also needed to set the Qt::WindowsFlags which you can conveniently do both with a setParent overload.  The other side of this modality issue was with close buttons on Ubuntu on tap-out-of-window on Maemo 5, I forgot close buttons on some dialogs.

The last major user complaint is for those who haven't yet installed a Qt application on Maemo 4.1.  The Application Manager reports the size of a package as its own size plus all of its dependencies.  This makes sense for if a program has a separate data package or uses a rare but large library.  The downside is if you see 5 packages listed at 24 MB "each" then that is a bit discouraging for installing any of them.  Not much can be done about this one though.

I think most of the other Maemo 4.1 issues have been resolved or are "good enough".

Maemo 5 is now presenting the bigger challenge.  Take a look at the following screenshot.

If you can't tell "Tell Me" is my number of choice for testing DialCentral.

Problems:

• The box/line in the text box are an artifact of scrolling
• The "Cancel Call" button is marked as not-visible but the "Send SMS" and "Call" buttons are marked as visible.  Sure doesn't look that way in the UI.  Well, until you press on part of "Cancel Call", then the "Call" button is drawn on top.

The best I can figure is that it is glitches in Qt dealing with the compositing.  While the window is hidden and in the time that it is sliding in I am changing up the UI in response to changes in the model.  If you cause something in the UI to change, like going back and adding another contact or entering some text, some or all of the glitches go away.

I could just chalk this up as a Qt bug, file it, and move on.  Even if I can find a simpler reproduction case what is the chance that Maemo 5 users will see the fix?  Even if there is a chance that they do see it, how does that help them in the mean time?  I've been experimenting with update, activate, enableUpdate with and without delays aimed to arrive after the slide-in animation and have not gotten any results.  I might just have to queue up the UI changes for a timed delay after show to hope it is after the animation.  This will take a bit of rewriting this dialog for a problem that is only on one platform.  I'm not looking forward to this.

Primitive Debugging

At the end of a release at work our product has to be tested mixed in with other products.  In development we tend to be focused on our individual product and we try to keep things simple for reproducibility sake.  Our customers focus on a problem and need multiple products to be used in complex ways.  This helps give us some comfort that things won't break terribly in the customer's environment.

These are no the most fun issues to be had.  It is difficult if at all possible to reproduce these issues outside of the test lab.  The test lab also exists on an isolated network.  These combine to reproduce some interesting challenges when debugging.

By dumb luck I ended up being the one to usually go down to look at these problems.  This time around a different developer got wrangled in.  This is an experienced person who previously only dealt in app software.  His favorite tools like remote desktop and Visual Studio debugging (remote or even local) are thrown out the window.
 
Normally I end up using WinDBG but some quick looking leads us to believe it is an issue with the startup of a service we have.  Debuggers aren't much use in these situations because you can't start the service from inside it and you can't always attach in time.  So even though my coworker dreads WinDBG, he can't even use this tool.  That leaves us with print messages from a debug build of our service.  I am the one to generally maintain the service in question and I've been sure to put in debug messages in all the most useful spots.  I also showed my fellow developer a few tricks with debugging through DebugView.

This just gave me pause to reflect on how useful it is to use (in my case exclusively) these "primitive" tools.  In regular day-to-day debugging I can use the right tool (user space debugger, kernel space debugger, prints).  In addition I have the experience to deal with these more extreme debugging situations.  This is another great benefit for tools like VIM which you can use in a GUI, local command prompt, and through SSH.

Porting DialCentral: Meaningless Results

I'm not sure why I like to wrap up each port with these meaningless results but here we go.

Qt Version

• Near feature parity with GTK version (no custom callbacks, not re-implemented Alarm UI, no rotation for now)
• Access to call cancel
• Divider on various lists (for time ones, tried to balance heavy/light phone users)
• Condensed history
• Changed SMS Entry letter count style from GV to Nokia
• Tabs are cached between launches
• Display when history/messages tabs where last refreshed
• 4,866 LOCs
• From August 18th to December 2nd

GTK Version

• 7,207 LOCs
• For forever :)

That is quite an impressive difference in size.   I think a lot of that is owed to a cleaned up design that only needs to worry about Google Voice and not Grand Central.

I've still got some things to clean up, a couple bugs to fix, and improving some UI glitches on Maemo 4.1.  After that my plan is to get all of my applications into the Community OBS so they are available for Meego.

Threading in Dialcentral

So this is a bit more boring of a post.  Pretty much everything went as expected.  The only annoyance  as part of my zeal to avoid concrete inheritance was that Maemo 4.1 seems to have too old of a version of Qt to avoid inheriting from QThread.  That page has some better practice listings for QThread.

DialCentral original used threading to be lazy about startup and to avoid the slowest of operations from blocking the UI thread.  I've now pushed all blocking operations to a thread.  The main question was what approach I would take to  threading in PyQt.  I was tempted to keep using Python threads using GObject callbacks but I keep to one toolkit for simplicity.

In The One Ring I had some code that used generators to trampoline code to the worker thread.  I just had to refactor it so that there were toolkit specific and toolkit agnostic components.

I was glad that python logging works smoothly with QThreads.  The messages get marked with some kind of distinguishing identifier.

See, nice and boring.  No real issue which to me is a plus.

Latest Lessons on Widgets from Dialcentral

This is a bit of a catch-all post to go back over some previously covered items with some new things learned.

TreeViews

HTML Delegates

I previously couldn't find the way to do custom cell renderers.  In part the oddity is that they provide default ways to render that are meaningless when you provide Delegates.  I did some searching and found an example HTML Delegate.  It had some issues with dark themes so I had to fix several bugs in it.

Simple heirarchy

Next I wanted Dialcentral to have letter separators in the contact list.  I never messed with hierarchical views in GTK before so I can't really compare.  My first time branching out to applying this to Messages and History turned out bad because it seems to have the parent items' columns aligned with the child's columns.  The original History view had 3 columns with the left two scrunched together.  These didn't provide much space for the parent row's text.  When I switched to a condensed history view this became moot.

Condensed history view, allowing the parent text to fit.

When learning about hierarchical views I found out that the root expander decorator is given space by default even if there are no children and it isn't shown.  This saved some space in the UI and will clean up the look of my other applications.

Layouts

The only real comment I have for layouts regards QGridLayout which I've not used before this.  Early on I was looking at using my pie menus for the buttons which had some issues, so I setup the alignment.  This didn't help but when I switched to buttons I eventually found out that it caused the buttons to fit to their minimum size rather than expand.  I probably fixed the pie menu issue without realizing I had thwarted myself.

Combo Box

The only real trouble I ran into with QComboBox was when I wanted it editable.  I was going to use this to allow choosing an existing GV configured callback or a custom one.  On the desktop the only way I've gotten it to insert into the list the item I'm creating is when there is nothing else to capture the enter key press.  Otherwise what gets activated is the "Apply" button (or worst "Clear Account" button when I remove the "Apply" button).  I've not found my way around this issue yet.

Callback Combobox caused problems on desktop Qt

Porting Dialcentral to Qt

GrandCentral Dialer

Dialcentral started its life as Grand Central Dialer for the 770.  I got involved by adding support for desktop Linux (which also made possible porting to future versions of Maemo).  Soon after the name change to Dialcentral (out of trademark paranoia) I took over maintaining it.  Google Voice support was added while maintaining Grand Central support as long as possible.  Over time other features were added like texting and group texts.  Eventually I provided an alternate way of interacting with Google Voice through a telepathy connection manager called The One Ring.

DialCentral 1.0.7

This port to Qt has taken longer for many reasons.  The backend has slowly become more compartmentalized over time but the complexity grew faster.  I ended up needing to rewrite everything but the direct wrapper around Google Voice.  Besides some other misc parts of life during this time I was also contacted by a recruiter from a very good company, an opportunity I felt I shouldn't pass up.  My interests have have focused on system programming, programming practices, and software architecture and so I've ended up ignoring algorithms a bit too much.  Their process spread over 2 months which I spent refreshing and expanding my knowledge of algorithms rather than working on Dialcentral.  After a couple trips out seeing the company and the office's city I came to the conclusion that Austin and the company I work for are the place for me to remain for now.  Location was the biggest clincher to me and that was after I researched all of their branch locations and interviewed for one of two I found that I had a chance of liking.

DialCentral 1.2 Beta

I'm still putting some finishing touches on this port.  I'm cautiously testing the waters with releasing this to extras out of concern that Google might break the brittle unofficial API and i have to do an immediate release.  I released a snapshot and have moved on to putting it in extras-devel with dire warnings especially since if an issue arises I might start having the GTK/Qt versions leapfrogging each other (joy of not having PPAs or a stable API).

For me the interesting part is this was my first Qt app that involves threading.  Related to this is that I want to maintain as much common code with The One Ring as possible.  Also with more UI work comes more insight into the better ways of doing things.  I try to keep all of my UIs fairly simple but this is one of the more involved ones.

Dublin and Meego Conference

Thanks to the generosity of the Linux Foundation I flew out and attended Meego Conference this year as well as payed for a couple extra days to see Dublin.  This is my first time out of the United States (I did pop across the border into western Canada for 10 minutes but I don't think that counts).  I've been a Maemo user since the 770 but I never before attended any of the Maemo Summits.  This was a great experience.

I arrived on Saturday the 13th and left on Friday the 19th.  I ended up site seeing rather than participating in any of the early bird events.

On Day 1 I attended Rob Bradford's location/social aware presentation.  I had not known about libsocialweb before which I thought was interesting.  More interesting is I got some ideas of things to do with geoclue.  I also went to a presentation about the Touch Input Method Framework.  The thing that saddens me about these frameworks being created is that they are in-process and limit you to developing in C++ unless someone goes through the effort for each one to write a proxy plugin.  I try to exclusively deal with Python because it let's me focus more of my time on developing rather than worrying about cross-compiling, debugging, etc.  I can understand that there can be performance issues for some frameworks passing a lot of data over dbus, that was the reason I was given for libfolk.  At the evenings receptions, timeless and I had some interesting conversation.  I just hope I remember all the UI feedback he gave.

On Day 2 I attended the two telepathy related sessions (the project, not the super power though that would have made an interesting and confusing unconference day session).  I am looking forward to telepathy 1.0 despite the extra work it is going to put on me for updating The One Ring (and any future CMs I write).  It will be disappointing if I end up having to drop a couple of platforms (currently I support Maemo 4.1, Maemo 5, and desktop Ubuntu with work being done to prep for Meego).

Some worries of fcrochik and I were eased a bit when Mikhail brought up the QtContact plugin backed by libfolk (a bit before a blogpost hit the various planets).  It still seems odd that QtContacts is built with support for plugins yet you would either need some kind of layer on top to aggregate the plugins (needing retrofits for apps using the old API) or else only have one plugin and it aggregates things that plugin to it (plugin for plugins, joy).

The third day was unconference which is more of a good-chaotic everyone-present-what-they-want kind of day.  Sadly due to a conflict I missed Christian's Wayland presentation.

During one of the slots is when I picked up my Lenovo Ideapad that they were giving away.  A bit weird that it comes with a UK power chord and keyboard (I suspect I'm not the only American that set it to US layout to our confusion).  Sadly there is still some work that needs being done which is not giving people the best perception of the netbook/tablet and of Meego.  Hopefully it'll all be worked out in the thread on f.m.c.

I ended the unconference with leading a session about experiences porting from Maemo to Meego but due to conflicts and being the end of the last day I only had fcrochik in attendance.  We still had the good time.

Being from the US and having seen pretty much no professional football games, I enjoyed the Ireland v Norway game.  I heard from others later that both teams weren't playing all that well.  We had free tickets, the pre-game premium lounge with drinks and pretty good snacks.  We had a good number of rounds of the food because they came in such small bowls.  Thankfully texrat was nearby to take all of our dishes.  I didn't take part much in the half-time or pot-game festivities since the lines were long.

I have to say the venue was great, having the hacker's lounge was great, and it all felt top notch.  Amy, Dawn, Quim, and everyone else involved did a great job and there are many thanks to go around. One lesson learned I think was to have more power (and maybe even power converters at the "Power Plant" for people like me who forgot one).  If my laptop I brought actually had power, it would have been fun to have a day like what I heard happened in Barcelona.

I enjoyed being out in Dublin on the other days.  I managed to do everything by foot besides going from and to the airport (so 10+ km of walking on non-conference days).

On Saturday I spent my time at the city centre.  I saw Marions Square, St Stephen's Green, Dublin Castle, Christ Church Cathedral, and walked Grafton Street.  I enjoyed exploring the city but none of those sites really moved me.  I had some good lamb stew at some place near Dublin Castle.  Coming from Austin and freezing out in Dublin, that stew hit the spot.  That evening I also went and saw Tosca performed at the Gaiety Theatre.  That was a very powerful production.

On the Thursday after the Conference I ended up going to some of the further out spots.  I saw the National Gallery and then walked out to O'Connell Street to see the Spire, the James Joye Statue, the Remembrance Garden (very beautiful both in design and in idea), and the James Joyce Centre.  I then went out west and saw the Leprechaun Museum on my way.  Eventually I was at Kilmainham Gaol and the Ireland Museum of Modern Art.  I then had to rush back real quick to get on the internet to see when I flew back.

Those last three sites ended up being my favorite.  It was fascinating to learn the political history of Ireland from the perspective of a jail, including the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising.  The Garden of Remembrance was a great place to contemplate.  The Leprechaun Museum was fascinating for learning Irish Mythology.

The things I sadly didn't get to see are the Ireland Botanical Gardens, Mallahide Castle, Knowth/Newgrange, the War Memorial Gardens, and a Famine Memorial I saw on my tour map (if it exists, couldn't find it).  I wasn't even sure how I would get to Knowth/Newgrange but at the Leprechaun Museum they aid that the Dublin Tourism place on O'Connell does a tour up in those parts, you jut need to arrange it a head of time it sounded like.  Something to know for the next trip out to Dublin.

I find it interesting that a friend had recommended I see a lot of the Churches but instead I saw or at least tried to see war memorials, jails, execution sites, ancient burial tombs, etc.  A bit different of priorities I guess.

See Pictures

DAQpy

Once upon a time I needed to write an application that interfaced with the real world.  I decided I wanted to use a data acquisition device from NI but I'm picky.  I want easy prototyping with fine control in the finished product.  That kicks out LabVIEW (luckily I'm forgetful or else I could write post after post about the good and bad of LabVIEW).

So I decided to use the C with DAQmx.  For prototyping I decided to use Python with its ctypes library.  I found some example bindings on a scipy page but they were hand generated and didn't seem very pythonic.  So I wrote my own generator and then added some custom helpers on top to make common operations more pythonic.  Unlike pydaqmx (which I just now found out about) I include my code-gen tool and I don't try to create a fake OOP system on top of the DAQmx API.

I even took some of the basic examples included with DAQmx and created the Python equivelants.

You can find a copy of DAQpy on github.  I would caution I re-organized the code on my Linux box which means I don't have access to DAQmx to validate things.  Patches welcome :)

Porting ejpi: Meaningless Results

So let's see how the two versions of ejpi compare:

Qt Version

• Feature parity with the GTK version
• Improved pie menu performance but two pie menu display bugs
• Simplified layout with the potential for rotation
  
• 3382 LOCs
• From June 8th to July 16th
  

GTK Version

• 4473 LOCs
• From January 30th to February 25th
  

LOCs are measured by "wc -l" rather than getting fancy.  I wrote both apps and they were written in a similar style with similar amounts of whitespace and documentation.


The LOC counts look nice, more drastic than my Gonvert port for what it is worth.  I had a lot more distractions going on during my port of ejpi so a comparison of implementation times between Gtk/Qt or Gonvert/ejpi is as meaningless as the title of this post suggests.

My main Qt disappointment in this port is what seems like high coupling both in Qt itself and in code written by others (the example pie menus).

Now for some of the upsides.  Though I implemented them differently, the similarity in the drawing code between Qt and Cairo helped.  Also finding out about QStandardItemModel made my life easier.

I'm split on which direction I want to go in my learning of Qt.  Originally I had planned on porting Dialcentral for gaining experience with threading.  I have too many ideas though and not enough time.  Possible directions include: porting other apps of mine, a new app using QGraphicsView, or some QtMobility contacts (and eventually calendar) plugins (though then I'd also have to learn the quirks of Qt in C++ and deploying compiled apps to Maemo).

Learning Ruby: Vampire Numbers

Instead of the traditional book group at work I'm in a group where each person chooses to learn a new language.  For me to make it feel worth while it either needs easy C bindings, existing bindings, or be used for scripting at work.  That left me with Go, Lua, Io, and Ruby.  Go was out due to error handling and generics.  I decided to stick with Ruby so it would be work practical (Python is heavily used by the company-wide build tools but my group has a lot of Perl and Ruby scripts).

Our first assignment was simple, identify vampire numbers.  They seem arbitrary and useless but oh well.

One of the first things I did was "gem install rubydoctest".  I like doctests from Python for their providing examples for the code and that they provide very low friction low coverage tests.

My work computer is sadly running Windows.  I did not have tool chains setup to install ruby-prof from source and I couldn't figure out how to install the pre-built version referenced from their site.

A quick summary of my initial thoughts

• rubydoctest has poor error output but I love that "!!!" drops you into irb (though I didn't find out about it until I was done).
• I was kind of surprised Ruby doesn't have a factorial function.  I'm not as surprised about a lack of a permutation function, Python's just special like that.
• Very few examples show how to separate module logic from executable logic (Python's "if __name__ == "__main__" idiom)
• Optional return's are ugly for most code.  The one place they work well is used inside of a block as a predicate for a function (like the comparator for sorting).
• Optional parenthesis make it confusing what is a property or method.  Not knowing what is going on feels sloppy to me
• I got thrown off by changing fairly standard names (exception handling, next/continue) and at first didn't think "next" existed.
• Find it a strange concept to use next, break, retry, redo inside of blocks.  I'd be curious what the underlying principles are for how the block communicates with its caller to execute those.
• Retry and redo seem cool though I am unsure how often I would ever use them
• I like Python's separation of repr from str which makes debug output easy.  I was wanting to figure out what some lists I was using were doing but each element was printed on a separate line, making it take up a lot of space and making it hard to distinguish one array from another.  I didn't notice some of the pretty print functions till later and haven't had a chance to try them yet.
• My program was slow and according to profiling most of it was in iterating.  (0...5).each was the fastest, next was 0.upto(5), and then last was doing the looping raw (I think).  All of that kind of surprised me, most especially how slow looping was in Ruby.  I was impressed the closures for blocks didn't add much overhead (or at least it isn't noticeable compared to how slow ruby is in general).
• I kept mixing up whether I was working with an actual iterator and an Enumerable (and it took me a while to notice the difference)
• I really miss the composable iterators of Python (enumerate plus everything in itertools)
• Remembering  ".." vs "..." is annoying and I end up having to look it up every time (which is very bad for code readability).
• A problem that drove me nuts for a while is "x = false or true".  The "=" has higher precedence than "or".  What I needed is "x = false || true".  A blogpost I later came across tries to frame "or" and "and" as flow control operators rather than logical operations. I think there are way too many operators.  Can you name the difference between ".."/"...", "=="/"==="/"eq?"/"equal?", etc?

Porting ejpi: Tree Models in Qt

For me, one thing that differentiates the quality of a calculator on a mouse or touch driven device is having a calculation history and having it be interactive.  In Gtk I implemented this with a TreeView and a ListStore.  I had never implemented a custom model in Gtk, the included models were simple enough and flexible enough that I didn't have the need.

When I ported Gonvert to Qt, all I could find information for was custom models with QAbstractItemModel and QTreeWidget/QTreeWidgetItem.  QTreeWidgetItem's seem to only be good for Text.  This worked for parts of Gonvert but not for others so I went through the complicated affair of implementing a QAbstractItemModel.  I never felt like I fully understood the relationships of various items which usually worries me.  I also found it slow due to all of the protection I "should" have in my code which causes a lot of calling back and forth between C++ and Python.

I'm unsure how I missed it but when I started on ejpi I came across QStandardItemModel/QStandardItem.  This seems to at least allow a little more flexibility.  I can put icons and checkboxes in as well as text into the model.  I can also attach random python objects to each item.  The downside to a stock model is that you have to externally maintain any invariants but I was already managing those with my Gtk version.

I would be curious about the various performance merits to each approach but I'll have to pass on that for now.  The two main things I found frustrating was finding out about these and how each API was helpful in its own way, sometimes better, sometimes worse than its fellow approaches.

Most of my API issues were due to being unfamiliar with them and having to fight with the different approaches each model system took to presenting itself to the developer.  I still have one unfortunate piece of code in ejpi's calucation history which implements peek through a pop and a push.

I've not messed with setting the font on any of these (I should have for Gonvert and also for ejpi) so I'm unsure how the font experience is in Qt.  Mainly I'm interested in what formatting Pango html-esque tags allowed, changing relative size and basic formatting while keeping everything else to theme defaults.  A quick look through the API seems to suggest this is simple but that is yet to be determined.
I still miss GTK's generic way of handling rendering with its use of CellRenderers.  You don't have to be stuck with the built-in choices for representing items in your model.  It also keeps presentation information away from the model.

I did enjoy how easy QStandardItem's made user edits (sadly only seems to work on the desktop) and activating of individual items.  I didn't get around to exploring drag and drop for history re-arrangement (helpful for RPN calculators) but I don't think I implemented that for the GTK version either.

My GTK version and my Qt version of my ejpi history are available for comparison.

I guess the summary would be that overall I'm a fan of QStandardItemModel and wish I had found it sooner.

Porting ejpi: Icon Theming

ejpi includes some custom icons as well as using theme icons.

The custom icons are used for a couple of buttons.  I know the path to the custom icons and I load them up and everything works as expected.

The stock icons are used for deleting items in the calculator's history as well as a severity indicator and close button for the error info box.

I ported the GTK code from using theme icon names to QIcon.fromTheme.  It was fun for me to find out that fromTheme was added in Qt 4.6 (I still support Maemo 4.1 with my applications and it only has Qt 4.2 I think).  How did applications do this before 4.6?  I don't think I've used KDE since v2 but I think its generally supported icon theming along with everything else which precludes the application building all icons in as resources.

I also had fun with fd.o icon names not being available on all platforms so I had to find alternatives for each and put in fallback code.

I guess chock this up as another thing to abstract away when running on various platforms.

I'm not saying this was hard or anything but just another lessons learned in porting to Qt.

"Antenna-gate", Fanboys, and Trolls

I just saw a good post on this from the Google Testing Bog.

Despite my dislike of Apple and their treatment of developers (and my disgust that developers are flocking to receive their flogging) I think we should be careful how we react to this.  Problems happen.  There is both good and bad to how Apple handled this. If we feel a bit annoyed in how they handled this we should have that same annoyance no matter the source rather than giving in to fanboy-ism

Do we look at this and think how much better our platform is but get annoyed when others point out the problems with our platform of choice?

This is a general problem whether it be long standing technology flamewars (VI is better btw), to religion, or to politics.  Sometimes the very nature of having two groups forms an automatic antagonism (see also George Washington's Farewell address).

I find Krister Stendahl's rules for religious understanding to be very applicable to all of these areas of our life:

1. When you are trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
2. Don't compare your best to their worst.
3. Leave room for "holy envy."