LiMo Foundation Blog

GUADEC is the GNOME Users' and Developers' European Conference, and I got to go there this year, following my visit to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit last year and LiMo & GNOME's announcement of their partnership. GUADEC is the place to be if you want to find out what's going on with GNOME, catch up with key developers from a wide range of GNOME projects, get involved in writing or contributing software, or generally hang out with a bunch of scarily smart individuals.

This year as an added bonus, two days of developer training were available, which seemed like a great opportunity to fill some gaps in my GNOME knowledge, so I went along to that. The training was organised by Dave Neary, who did an excellent job of putting together a packed schedule. It's really great to see professional-level training at an event like this, as it helps dispel the myth that open source is somehow less serious. The course was well-attended with about 10 people from a very diverse group of companies and backgrounds, including one hobbyist who paid for the fun of it!

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the full second day of training, due to a schedule clash with the GNOME Advisory Board meeting. The Board meeting more than made up for it by being an excellent opportunity to hear the views of some of the organisations and companies who are investing in GNOME. It was a great opportunity to put names to faces as well, with a superstar list of representatives being part of the Board.

Following the training was the usual packed talk agenda. This is not an easy conference to attend - it kicks off at 09.30 every day, and with more than 60 talk slots over three days, not including BoFs and hacking. It's pretty intense! The talks are of a very high standard, often extremely technical, and give a very good insight into GNOME.

Some of the talks that particularly caught my eye included:

• Who makes GNOME, by Dave Neary. The statistics weren't surprising: a huge number of people are involved, and a very wide range of companies (with no single dominating company) and a good mix between large and small companies. It was good to see some hard facts to back up the GNOME open development story. A big thanks must go to Dave for publishing this report.
• State of the GNOME 3 Shell, by Owen Taylor. It was really interesting to see GNOME Shell taking shape, with a definite feeling of progress since GCDS. I've been playing with it on a horribly underspecified laptop, and can't wait to see it complete.
• GNOME's next place in the industry, by Alberto Ruiz; The future is JavaScript, by John Palmieri; My platform is bigger than yours by Xan Lopez and Gustavo Noronha. More on these below...
• Clutter: State of the Union, and Everything You Ever Wanted to Do With Clutter were sure to be crowd pleasers, given that Clutter is all about exciting user interfaces and effects. It didn't disappoint, with lions and tigers and monkeys and robot ponies:
  
  On a serious note, it's great to see continued investment in Clutter as a UI toolkit. I think it's delivering some exciting innovation in netbook UIs and elsewhere.

It's been a busy few weeks, so I'm a bit behind on writing up events.                            

At the end of July I was in Cambridge for another of the Open Source and Software SIG meetings. This time, the theme was "Open Source Software vs Commercial Hardware: When the unstoppable force hits the immovable object ".

The Cambridge Wireless events are usually quite good fun, with a wide range of individuals and a great mix of businesses represented. The format of the event includes a number of talks with ample opportunity for questions, and some networking opportunities before and after the event. They are quite informal, and this tends to result in some lively discussions. This time was no different.  (Disclosure: I'm one of the SIG champions, so I'm biased. But another of the champions, Dave Roberts of Ogma Solutions, did a lot of the heavy lifting for this event, so this is not entirely impartial praise!)

I didn't get a chance to make extensive notes on the talks themselves, but the slides can all be found online.  I did however scribble down some questions and comments - only a few of which I got to ask the presenters during the event.  As the Chair of the panel session, I felt obliged to let a few others ask questions too ;-)

James' talk on Open OS, the phone and the converged device was entertaining and provocative. His (self-confessed) increasingly wild assertions that user experience will become device agnostic feels right to me, especially with the pervasive usefulness of solutions like Dropbox and GMail. Are there any other pervasively useful cloud solutions that are as successful, by the way?

Last week, I went to Berlin for the annual LinuxTag event and to participate in the WIPJam running on the first day.

This was my first visit to LinuxTag, and it was interesting to compare it to FOSDEM, which I visited for the second time earlier this year. For those that haven't been, LinuxTag is an interesting combination of trade show, commercial exhibition, conference and community get-together.  Apparently, some 11,000 individuals were in attendance, which would make it almost three times the size of FOSDEM. But a combination of the much larger exhibition centre in place of FOSDEM's university campus, and being a 4 day event compared to FOSDEM's weekend, meant that it never really felt that busy. This is borne out by the speaking events - FOSDEM had almost 300 talks over two days, while LinuxTag only managed 231 across four. Much more leisurely! This turned out to be a good thing - it was handy to have some time to look around the show floor, hold conversations in the corridors, and generally soak up the atmosphere. On the whole, the LinuxTag talks seemed to be pitched more at introductory level, while FOSDEM felt more bleeding-edge and intensively technical. This seemed to suit the audience, which was much more mixed at LinuxTag.

The WIPJam on Wednesday turned out to be lively, with lots of good discussions.

Some of you may have missed the recent news of the v1.0 release of the LiMo-sponsored BONDI Web SDK, which is downloadable here. This tool, developed in the open by LiMo member companies Aplix and Azingo, makes it much simpler to develop mobile web widgets that conform to the OMTP BONDI v1.1 specifications. This is a key industry standard which is being considered for adoption by the global alliance of operators known as the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC).

Using only HTML, CSS and Javascript, web developers can now create advanced mobile phone apps that access mobile features such as sending and receiving SMS or email, finding the user’s current location or capturing a photo.

The SDK includes an emulator that implements most of the BONDI APIs so that it is possible to run and even debug your web widget using breakpoints without access to a BONDI-enabled handset. This doesn’t eliminate the need to test your app on real devices but it does mean that you can iron out most of the bugs earlier and it reduces the time spent getting it working well on the handset. If you happen to work for a company which is a member of the LiMo Foundation, you will find that the SDK also works with the LiMo platform simulator so your widget can be tested in that environment as well.

To assist with rapid UI prototyping, the SDK contains an “HTML Preview” window which updates immediately when any changes are made to the app’s source code.

Apple launched its iPhone 4 amidst big fanfare and it truly lived up to expectations.  In the words of Steve Jobs, the demarcation between technology and liberal arts is getting increasingly blurred. There are some truly innovative aspects to the iPhone 4 such as optically laminated glass for the screen, retina display with a 960 by 640 resolution, metal 5X stronger than steel for the edge (which also serves as the antenna), the A4 processor and more impressively, all this is packed into a form factor that is currently the thinnest smartphone on the market.

Once again, it is not always about inventing new technology.  Video mail, which is being touted as one of the most of impressive features of the new iPhone 4, has been around for years but now that Apple has repackaged it in a great format, do we have any doubts that it will be the latest craze that will take the world by storm?

This then takes us to the next question – what does this mean for the mobile industry at large?

The Wireless Industry Partnership is hosting a WIPJam developer day on Wednesday, June 9, in Berlin. The Jam is free to attend, and is running alongside LinuxTag and IT Profits -- and Jam attendees will also gain free admission to those leading open-source events too!

WIPJams are unconference-style events with the motto "No PPT, No Panels, No Ties!" The format is designed to encourage interaction and knowledge sharing, and gives participants a chance to learn about the things they're most interested in through interactive unpanels and deep-dive discussion groups. This Jam, co-hosted by IT Profits, is focused around mobile profits and the mobile enterprise. Open source in mobile is now a reality, and we'll focus on what open source enables developers and enterprises to do, rather than how open source works.

Some of the topics to be covered include:
- IT or Marketing -- who drives your mobile decisions?
- Mobile cloud technology
- Mobilizing the enterprise
- Building apps for netbooks and tablets
- App Store Placement Optimization and driving downloads
- How to make money from mobile software!
- Cross-platform development
- Augmented reality

Andrew Savory, LiMo’s Open Source Manager, will be leading the “Cross-Platform development” discussion group.

To register for your free ticket,  visit http://www.wipconnector.com/wipjam/ITProfits10_call today!

The Open Mobile Summit returned to London on May 26^th and 27^th to serve as a platform for the Great and Good to come together to debate, evangelise and predict what will happen in the coming years in this wonderful industry we live in.

So let’s get down to details and look at the key themes that emerged from Day 1 and Day 2 of the event.

Day 1

Everyone is obsessed with Apple. Despite no one from Apple being at the event, the major part of the first half of Day 1 was spent talking about Apple and its impact on the market. While some like to paint Apple as a villain of the peace, some key data points emerged such as “the best apps live for 2-3 months in the top 25 list and sell 400-500k copies a month”. As this author pointed out in his questioning of the first panel session - why not focus on learning how to replicate this as I am sure there are a lot of developers that would love to suffer this type of ill treatment!  For sure, all is not perfect with iTunes but Apple seems to have a strong, and from a quality perspective, self regulating model that proves you can make money in mobile apps.

There was also a discussion around the business case of the mobile Internet for network operators. With overloaded networks and the cost of deploying new high speed infrastructure, has the Internet become a curse for network operators?

Although there are some books on the topic of API Design and other material available on the web including, notably, an excellent presentation by Joshua Bloch of Google, the subject remains more of an art than a science.  A key reason for this is that many elements of API Design involve a social and intuitive understanding of the context in which the APIs are to be used and the overall system in which they reside.  In order to understand how to design an API, you need to understand and be able to empathise with the mindset of the developers who will use those APIs.  This may be reasonably straightforward to do when those API users are in the same team or company as the API developer, as is the case with many internal interfaces, because the developer can work directly with the customers of his or her API to ensure it works as required.  However, it becomes much harder when you are designing APIs for use by potentially thousands of external third party developers located all over the world.  In that situation, it is very difficult to determine in advance all the requirements and thus to design for real life use rather than for an ideal model.  To compound matters, once your third party APIs are published, you are typically required to maintain them perhaps for several years so it’s important to get them in good shape before you publish.  It is possible nonetheless to establish a set of guidelines to bear in mind when developing third party APIs.  These guidelines require developers to address the human aspects of API design together with software engineering best practice:

* Understand your system:

The underlying design philosophy you adopt for your API should be informed by the system as a whole which that API will comprise a part of.   This requires that you design in the vernacular of your system using design patterns, idioms and data structures in harmony with your environment.   An API designed to work well within a system just ‘feels’ right to work with.  This is partly what is meant by developers when they use the approving expression "Pythonic" in relation to elegant Python module design.  In order to successfully design in this way, you need an in-depth  technical understanding of your system.   In large software platform organisations, such knowledge often resides within a central System Architecture Group which is typically built around the most experienced platform software architects.  A primary purpose of this group is to guide and align individual engineering teams working on different parts of the platform and raise awareness of platform-centric thinking amongst them.  The role of such a System Architect should thus be global in reach but local within each sub-context.

* Adopt the principle of least surprise:

I see HTC have taken retaliatory action by lodging an ITC complaint against Apple, alleging patent infringement by the iPhone, iPad and iPod:- http://www.htc.com/www/press.aspx?id=129616〈=1033

The action apparently relates to 5 HTC patents, covering (amongst other things) a technique to extend battery life and how numbers are stored/looked up/dialled:- http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1636250/htc-sues-apple

As previously mentioned, the ITC can’t award damages but can, if a complaint is upheld, issue an order barring the import (by the respondent – Apple here) into the US of infringing product. Could the “i” family of devices be barred from entering their “home market”? Surely not…

We hear you.

We know that the LiMo SDK has been a source of repeated frustration for our developer community. We understand that we need to be more forthcoming with information for you, our developer community. We recognize the need to provide you with better lines of communication and the opportunity for an open dialog with us. And so, while we’re a bit late to our own party, we want to get things kicked off today – right here, right now.

As you know, LiMo is about collaboration and collective knowledge. Our SDK holds true to these fundamental underpinnings. The base architecture, contributed by LiMo member companies, is in place. But the last thing we want to do is to deliver something that’s half-baked, providing you with inadequate tools and lacking essential functionality. It’s a recipe for frustration and failure. So we need your help.

Developers are our lifeblood; without the support and engagement from the developer community, the LiMo Platform is just another platform kicking around in a market already crowded with OS choices. And without the next-gen apps that users want and demand, handsets are nothing more than fancy telephones that can double as paperweights. Therefore, our challenge to you today is this: help us make the LiMo SDK into something that truly delivers what you need.

Put your stamp on it by telling us precisely what you want to see and what you expect to find in the LiMo SDK. Help us learn from the mistakes of others, so that we can deliver an SDK that’s finely tuned to meet your needs as mobile developers. While we can’t promise that every single recommendation and request will find its way into the final SDK, we can promise you that we’ll listen to your ideas, seriously consider them, and if possible, implement them into the LiMo SDK.

We are dedicated to helping our developers’ success, so we hope that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And oh yes, there will be cake and it will be delicious.