Monday, March 26, 2007

BOSSA - Browser Lunch BOF

During the BOSSA conference we had a very productive discussion about browser trends in mobile/embedded market, some Mozilla plans in this regard (not only minimo=), as well as ideas for pushing minimo on linux embedded, SoC projects (???) and so on. It was there Ilias, Henry, Anderson and I (from INdT) and Chris Hoffman and Marcio Galli (from Mozilla).
  • Porting some WinCE specific features to linux:
    • Context sensitive menus (partially done)
    • minimo/components/gps/
    • minimo/components/softkb (ported to maemo already)
    • minimo/components/phone/
    • minimo/components/device/
  • SoC:
    • "webpage content summary": a graph model of a single web page is made up of hundreds of basic elements that are linked to each other in a very complex manner. Such structure is similar to the whole Internet, which is also made up of many interrelated web pages. The main point here is applying Information Retrieval techniques into webpages, providing a content zoomed page. Focus: reduced screen mobile devices.
    • Development of mobile web applications which use FOF for relationship networks.
  • Joey Project: Marcio, Doug and Chis are behind this.
  • Launching Minimo 0.2 . They believe minimo has reached a mature enough stage so that it can get launched ... lets wait ! ;)
  • "Local web served widgets as a means to access the OS built-in apps and
    functions". It rocks, but I can talk much ... ;)
  • Usability improvements of minimo for not-so-educed-screen devices, like n800 and n770. Some SVG stuff already done by Marcio, and already available at newest minimo maemo port releases. What else do we need ?
Well, time to put hands on them.

--Antonio Gomes

Sunday, March 18, 2007

BOSSA conference was a success

From March 12th to 14th, BOSSA conference took place in Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, Brazil, one of the sites of INdT. It was a great experience for all who attended, from both the technical and non-technical point of views: high quatily talks during the days, and *free* dinners, parties and delicious food and drinks after that.
  • 1st Day:
    • Milko Boic's talk about "Building Digital Media Solutions with Helix DNA Client" - specially the demos part - showed how powerful this open source multimedia framework is. However, what really paid me attention was its robust plugin-able capabilities. After the talk, I came to him and asked if he was aware of any work being done around an embeddable Helix based plugin for mozilla browsers, and he said there are some already , and I am going to follow them :-).
    • Chris Hoffman's talk about "Minimo: lessons learned, and New directions for Mozilla Mobile Development" was the best of the day (at least for me). He pointed out
      • the evolution of Minimo and Firefox in the market share;
      • pictures of minimo getting mature since its conception;
      • some problems of web sites design in the mobile world;
      • plans of mozilla for for reduced resource devices. VERY COOL !!!
  • 2nd Day:
    • Win Taymans (Gstreamer), John (J5) Palmieri (D-Bus Desktop Glue - reshaping our thinking of application development from embedded to the desktop) and the showman Marcelo Oliveira/INdT (Canola) both proofed how simple and efficient their technologies are.
    • Furthermore, Chis Hoffman (Mozilla), Marcio Galli (Mozilla), Ilias (INdT) and I (INdT) had a productive talk about how we can push minimo and mozilla to linux based embedded devices during a "Browser Lunch BOF". Btw, I am going to blog about in separate.
    • Juho Paasonen (Interaction design in open source environment: introducing the Movial Widescreen UI) was very interesting as well, showing some cool GL-like stuff.
  • 3rd Day:
    • Johan Bilien (latest evolutions on Hildon) and Johan Dahlin
      (PyGTK) were the highlights.

To be continued ... =)

--Antonio Gomes

Friday, March 09, 2007

Patching minimo

Dougt from MiniMo has improved and checked in a patch I sent to him applied against the spatial navigation mozilla extension.

** new minimo maemo port release is coming.

** we are heading to BOSSA 2007 =) !!!!!

--Antonio Gomes