Le Weblog à Cassidy

GNOME 3.4 Brussels party this Thursday at 'Chaff'

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:12:00 +0200

GNOME 3.4 has been released since a short while and we didn't find the time to properly celebrate it here in Brussels. It's time to fix this critical mistake and so I'm glad to announce the GNOME Brussels Beer 3.4 party this Thursday. Feel free to join us if you're around and want to share some beers with us.

GNOME Beer event at FOSDEM 2012

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:58:00 +0100

Despite what some stats may say, my biggest contribution to GNOME is not in bugs or code but in the organization of beer related events!

So I'm pleased to announce that, like each year, we'll have a GNOME Beer party on the Saturday night of FOSDEM (4th Feb). People seemed happy of the location of last year, so we decided to stay at "La Bécasse" in the city center. Feel free to add yourself to the wiki if you are planning to attend.

See you at FOSDEM!

Calling phone numbers in GNOME 3.2

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:10:00 +0200

One of my favourite feature of my N900 is the ability to very easily call a contact using my SIP account. Calling phone numbers in Empathy through SIP is possible since a while using the New Call dialog but you have to enter the number manually which can be annoying. Thanks to Folks's evolution-data-server backend, GNOME 3.2 will allow you to very easily call contacts from your address book!

First step is to mark a SIP account as being able to call phone numbers. We added an option for that in the accounts dialog.

Then if an IM contact is linked to an Evolution one having at least a phone field, you can call him from the contact list! Soon you should be able to call IM contacts publishing their phone numbers in their personal personal info as well.

You can also call any contact using gnome-contact directly; just click on the phone icon next to the phone number.

This is pretty cool because thanks to gnome-shell's contact integration it's now easier than ever to call a contact. Just search for him in the Shell overview and then start the call from gnome-contacts. That's the kind of integration we were aiming for when we started the Telepathy and Folks projects and it's great to see that we are finally getting there!

GNOME Brussels Beer 3.2

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 16:42:00 +0200

It's been a while since our first beer event and the GNOME 3.0 release party so I'm please to announce that the GNOME Brussels Beer 3.2 event will be the 22th Sept (next Thursday).

As you can see I synced the version with GNOME releases as a I think it's a good idea to have at least one per release. :)

So if you're around, feel free to add your name on the event page and join us!

See you there!

Shiny new UI in Empathy 3.2

Guillaume Desmottes — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 17:06:00 +0200

One of our main goals during this developement cycle was to continue improving Empathy's user experience by re-designing different parts of the UI. To do so our Empathy team at Collabora worked closely with designers from the awesome GNOME Design Team.

The log viewer has been completely re-written based on an original design from Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical). As you can see, this new log viewer now displays calls and offers different options to easily search through the mass of logs.

Empathy 3.2 will also introduce a whole new experimental user interface for audio and video calls designed by Nick Richards (Intel). The new UI is based on Clutter and allows users to select the webcam and microphone used during the call, move the video preview around, etc. It should also gain support for video effects once Raluca finishes integrating her work with Nick's design. This new UI will be optional in 3.2 as it relies on new Telepathy API but will definitely become the default as soon as those API are stabilised.

Not actually me

I have to say that working closely with designers is a really enjoyable experience. It's good to have people to ask to when we are unsure about the best way to present a feature or an option to users. I'm really looking forward to continuing to improve Empathy with them.

GNOME IM integration BoF today at 4

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:08:00 +0200

As some people have to leave earlier today, the GNOME IM Integration BoF will a start at 4 rather than 5 today. See you there, room 1.204

Desktop Summit schedule on your N900

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 22:51:00 +0200

Thanks to Olivier and Will you can very easily check the full schedule of the Desktop Summit on your N900. Just install the latest version of sojourner and enjoy!

GNOME IM integration BoF during the Desktop Summit

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:15:00 +0200

Like 36 other Collaborans, I'm going to attend to the Desktop Summit in Berlin.

I'll lead the GNOME IM integration BoF session on Thursday. It will basically be a follow up of our Hackfest in June so if you are interested into instant messaging integration in GNOME feel free to join us.

IM, Contacts & Social hackfest

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 15:55:00 +0200

I'm happy to announce that next week a bunch of developers and designers from Telepathy, libsocialweb, Empathy, Folks and GNOME will meet in Cambridge (UK) for the first IM, Contacts & Social GNOME hackfest.

We are going to work on making GNOME a more social desktop. This includes improve IM and contacts integration into the Shell, the new Contact app, the Online accounts panel, etc.

Thanks to my employer, Collabora, for hosting and allowing me to organise this event.

So stay tune next week for more info. :)

GNOME 3.0 Brussels party this Wednesday at 'Chaff'

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:19:00 +0200

The GNOME 3.0 Brussels Launch Party will be this Wednesday at Chaff (the same place where we did our first GNOME beer event) from 6:30 pm.

We'll order food around 8 and we'll have a bunch of GNOME 3 goodies to give away.

I know it's pretty short notice, sorry for that, but we had some troubles to find a place. We were initially looking for a place that would have allowed us to do some presentations but didn't find any. Anyway, we'll have beers which is certainly the most important thing. :)

See you there!

New Empathy icon!

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 15:19:00 +0100

Since its first release, Empathy was using the Telepathy logo as icon.

This icon suffers different problems, the main ones being its look in smaller sizes. Also, 2 blue heads may not be the best way to present an IM client to users.

So, after lot of discussions and different propositions, Empathy has now, thanks to Jakub Steiner, a new icon! As you can see, we now have slightly different versions depending on the size.

I hope you'll like it!

GNOME at FOSDEM 2011

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 15:30:00 +0100

Just 2 days before FOSDEM! Like most years, I helped a bit with the organisation on the GNOME side. So I can already tell you that we'll have stickers and brand new t-shirts available at our stand.

But my most important contribution is certainly the organisation of the GNOME Beer event. The most common complain regarding this event was the massive amount of smoke at La Porte Noire, so we decided this year to look for a new place. It wasn't an easy task as it's pretty hard finding a big enough place having a decent choice of beers and a non smoking policy. But I'm glad to say that La Bécasse fits all these requierements so I'm sure we'll have a great time.

See the wiki for all the details and an extensive FAQ where I tried to reply to most of the questions you may have. If I forgot anything please just ask.

See you there!

edit: humm looking at the top 3 posts of this blog, it seems that my main contribution to GNOME is now organizing beer-oriented events; I'm still not sure if that's a good thing or not...

GNOME Brussels Beer : change of place!

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 14:13:00 +0100

So, tonight is the first GNOME Brussels Beer. The good news is, 11 people have planned to attend! That's a lot more that I would have expected, cool. :)

The bad news is, there has been a problem with the place where we initially planned to go. So it's not at La porteuse d'eau any more but at Chaff. Check the wiki for the exact address, but don't worry, it's pretty close to the initial place.

I'm really sorry for this last minute change. I already contacted all the people on the wiki, so hopefully that shouldn't be too much of an issue.

GNOME Brussels Beer 1.0

Guillaume Desmottes — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:27:00 +0100

We have a ressonably good Belgian GNOME community (for such a small country) but even so we only see each other once or twice per year. In order to try to improve that I'm happy to announce the first GNOME Brussels Beer event which will take place the 15th December^[1].

The idea is pretty similar to the London Beer events: meet at some nice place to discuss around some beers (except ours will be proper beers ;).

So if you're around Brussels this day, feel free to join us!

Notes

[1] I know it's a bit short notice, sorry for that. Hopefully the next ones will be announce earlier

What's new in Empathy 2.32.0?

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:45:00 +0200

GNOME 2.32 was released a few days ago. As most of the developers focused on the upcoming 3.0 it's not exactly the most exciting release ever but I'm glad to say that Empathy is one of the modules with the most user-visible changes.

The main one is definitely meta-contacts. Thanks to the awesome work of Travis Reitter and Philip Withnall, it is now possible to easily link contacts together. This has been achieved using Folks, our new contacts aggregator library. See Travis's post if you want to know more about Folks.

Another new feature I really like is the contacts list live search implemented by Felix Kaser and Xavier Claessens. It allows you to very quickly find any of your contact by typing in the contact list. I hope to see more GNOME applications using this feature in the future as it's a very efficient way to dig through a treeview. Xavier even proposed to add this feature directly to GTK+. See Felix's post if you want to see it in action.

Notifications bubbles now have actions buttons allowing you to quickly accept or decline incoming events such as calls, file transfers, room invitations, etc.

Server certificates have been improved thanks to Cosimo Cecchi. Empathy can now ask the user if he wants to accept an untrusted certificate.

The IRC account widget has been improved to make it easier to select your IRC network. You can easily search through the list of networks using the live search feature and you can now create IRC accounts using the accounts assistant.

Empathy is now able to display vCard of your contacts and allow you to edit your own.

The audio/video pane gained a Details page displaying technical info about the call such as the codecs used which is always nice when you want to know what's going one without digging the logs

Some preferences have been added, by popular request, such as the ability to disable chat logging or automatically display incoming events (without blinking in the status area).

Connection error messages have been improved. Hopefully it should now be easier to understand the problem when an account fails to connect.

Empathy is now using status icons from the theme so artists can easily tweak them to fit well with the rest of your desktop.

Once you'll update your distribution you'll probably also update your Telepathy components. These upgrades should bring you some nice new features as well:

GTalk compatible p2p file transfers allowing you to exchange files with users of Google's GTalk desktop client. See Youness's post for details.

MSN file transfers and the return of MSN audio/video calls

And, last but not least, proxy support! Telepathy-gabble and telepathy-butterfly should now be able to make use of your proxy settings when connecting. Once again, best to check the blog of the one who implemented the feature if you are interested in details: Nicolas

Most of this work has been sponsored by my employer Collabora. But let's not forget all the contributors who have done a great job at reporting and triaging bugs, submitting patches, writing documentation, translating, etc. Your hard work is greatly appreciated!

GUADEC: Collabora party and Telepathy/Empathy talk

Guillaume Desmottes — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:40:00 +0200

Once again I'm attending GUADEC thanks to my employer Collabora. There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on during these 3 days but I'd like to highlight 2 events that you certainly don't want to miss.

The traditional Collabora GUADEC party will take place on Thursday night at 7pm and will be a barbecue over the beach! Check the parties map for the exact location.

Friday at 9:30 am I'll give a talk called GNOME 3: the Telepathic Desktop. The first part of the talk will be some kind of overview of the cool new stuff we have recently added to the Telepathy framework or which should land soon. I'll also talk about the work we have done to make Telepathy easier to use by third party applications. The second part of the talk will present new features we have added to Empathy during this cycle. I'll also focus on integration of Telepathy in the GNOME desktop in general. I'll have some demos to show hoping they won't fail horribly. :)

Hope to see you there. I know that's pretty early in the morning, especially after the Collabora party but I'll be there in time so you don't have any excuse. :p

edit: Seems there is a live stream of sessions so you should be able to watch the talk even if you are not at the conference.

Empathy ported to GTK+3

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:00:00 +0200

As a good GNOME citizen, Empathy 3.0 will have to be able to build with GTK+3. As Ubuntu is not going to ship GTK+3 by default in its next release, we decided to stay compatible with GTK+2 for this cycle.

Empathy already built with GSEAL checks so porting was just a matter of playing with autoconf. Libraries linking to GTK+ itself have to be updated as we can't use GTK+2 and GTK+3 in the same process:

libcanberra-gtk, webkit-gtk and libunique now have releases using GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 so all we had to do was to change the PKG_CHECK_MODULES calls to check for the -3 flavour of the libs.

nautilus-sendto plugin has been ported as well since 2.90.0 but it breaks its public API so we had to do some #ifdef magic to stay compatible with older versions.

Since 0.5.1 libnotify doesn't link on GTK+ any more but use GModule instead (Thanks Bastien!) so we just had to make sure that this version was used when building with GTK+3.

Unfortunately clutter-gtk and champlain haven't been ported to GTK+3 yet so we had to disable champlain support for now. I hope to see a port of these libs soon.

During configure, we check if GTK+3 is present; if it is then we check for these new version of the deps. If it's not or if Empathy has been configured with --enable-gtk3=no then we continue to use GTK+2 and the old versions of the libs.

If you're interested in details, everything has been merged to master so you just have to look at Empathy's configure.ac file.

This should hopefully make all the distributions happy during the transition. Once Empathy 3.0 is released we'll drop GTK+2 compatiblity and will start using the fancy new features offered by GTK+3.

Interview in Linux Pratique Essentiel

Guillaume Desmottes — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:45:00 +0200

Few weeks ago I answered some questions to Anthony Carré (yeKcim) for a French Linux magazine oriented end-users. The interview is now available in Linux Pratique Essentiel no 14.

I talk about the Empathy and Telepathy projects: what are our goals, what we are trying to achieve, our plan for the future, how to contribute, etc.

You can skim through the magazine on their website but this is what the 3 pages of the interview look like:

Azimuth 0.2 released

Guillaume Desmottes — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:40:00 +0200

I just uploaded the second release of Azimuth, the Maemo application allowing to publish your location to your contacts.

Lot of cool stuff in this new release! Thanks to Alban Crequy Azimuth gained a control panel menu. It can be used to easily enable/disable publishing so you can now safely install Azimuth even if you don't want to always publish your location (be aware that this option is turned on by default though). We also added an option to reduce the accuracy of the published position if you don't want to publish your exact location to your contacts. There is a third button than can be used to quickly turn the GPS on/off but be aware that letting the GPS always running will drain your battery.

Azimuth in the settings panel

Azimuth's control panel

Last but not least, Azimuth now has its own icon! Anthony Carré (yeKcim) designed a great icon which fit pretty well with the existing Maemo icons. I hope you'll like it as much as I do. Anthony is well known for his graphic work on the Wormux game.

I'm glad that my small pet project already attracted 2 contributors. :)

Here is the NEWS file:

* Add control panel
* Add option to enable/disable Azimuth
* Add option to reduce accuracy of the published position
* Add option to enable the GPS
* Use Maemo GPS icon
* Set Maemo display name
* New icon thanks to Anthony Carré (yeKcim)

Introducing "Azimuth" for Maemo

Guillaume Desmottes — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0200

Here is a small project I've been working on in my copious spare time.

The Nokia N900 is a great device but I felt kinda frustrated not being able to publish my location to my contacts in a way that Empathy can display it. Good news is the N900 uses Telepathy so that's something that can easily be fixed.

Here comes Azimuth a small daemon publishing your location using the Telepathy Location interface. The interface is only implemented in telepathy-gabble at the moment^[1]. That means that your Jabber server has to support Pubsub to be able to publish. Unfortunately, Google Talk servers don't^[2]; see the Telepathy FAQ for details.

I just uploaded the first version of Azimuth to Extras-devel (thanks Bigon for the package!) so you should be able to easily install it. This is my first Maemo application so I kept it pretty simple for now. Azimuth doesn't enable the GPS itself so you have to start another application using the GPS (as OVI Maps or Map Buddy for example) to publish.

So, if you want to test it you have to:

Install Azimuth
Reboot your N900 (the package doesn't start it automatically; suggestions about how to fix that properly are welcome^[3]).
Set your IM presence to online
Start an application making use of the GPS

Be aware that once installed Azimuth will always publish your location when an application is using the GPS and your IM accounts are connected!

Plans for future versions include:

Add UI (probably a settings widget) to easily enable/disable publishing.
Allow Azimuth to poke the GPS for a position every $N minutes/hours
Add an option to reduce location accuracy for privacy reasons.
Allow using the Cell to get a position?
If you have more artistic skills than I have, an icon would be much appreciated.

If you experience issues or have nice ideas for improvements feel free to mail me. You can also use the Garage page if you feel brave enough. :)

Empathy displaying location using libchamplain

Notes

[1] XEP-0080 if you're into XMPP

[2] Google, I hate you for this

[3] The trick is to start the daemon as user and not root