My open sourced activities

Animating the Web(Kit)

2009-11-05T05:55:00.000-08:00

After the landing of QGraphicsWebView implementation (in summary, a mimic of QWebView widget but for the QGraphicsView world) in WebKit trunk, your creativity is your guide :-)

A week ago, I tried to quickly exercise what it is up to, and inspired in Kent's flipin widget idea, I got some cool rotation effects on the Web content. See the (amateur) show off below:

Nice stuff thanks to Qt and its QGraphicsView and QStateMachine flexibility.

--
--Antonio Gomes

Cool news on QtWebKit

2009-10-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Two months past the last time I wrote something here, I realized things like:

1) these (trendy) micro-blogging thing make some people (including me) extremely accommodated and too lazy to blog;
2) I need vacations.

:-)

Well, now apart from these irrelevant personal feelings, I'd say that a bunch has happened in that meanwhile, and I will try to (slowly) get my to-be-blogged list freed ...

For now I will be sharing a some cool stuff that have recently happened in the QtWebKit land, project I am mostly spending my time on:

Kenneth and I landed the QWebGraphicsItem (now called QGraphicsWebView) implementation. In summary class makes it possible in an easy and fast way to have native GraphicsItem based object for Web rendering. See bug 28862 ([Qt][API] Add a new QGraphicsWidget based version of the "QWebView"). It makes it possible to have all supported transformations to happen on Web content.
Among other follow-ups to the above, bug 30162 made the "animated flip" feature a nice show case to the Demo browser.
Girish has landed support for "windowless" plugin to QtWebKit. See progresses and details in bug 20081.
"Holger landed his rewrite of ImageDecoderQt that significantly improves the memory footprint", said Simon Hausman is his blog :).
Bug 27214 created a webkit-qt dedicated mailing list.
Ongoing text drawing improvements in bug 24468.
Bunch of API reviews, clean up and bug fixes toward Qt 4.6.

Some remarkable related stuff include:

Qt 4.6 beta1 package preview for N900 released by QtSoftware/Nokia.
StarLight Multitouch support for QtWebKit draft implementation also made avaliable by Nokia. See cool demostration videos in here.
Arora browser 0.10.1 released.

Afonso Costa and I are working on some nice stuff embedding all the above for maemo ... so I'd say to keep tuned ..

--
Antônio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

WebKit/EFL 0.1 released

2009-06-16T11:12:00.000-07:00

The Browser team at INdT's OpenBossa Labs is proud to announce the 0.1 release of WebKit/EFL, a development milestone targeted the Enlightenment community.

We hope the release will give feedback about the overall usage of the web runtime and embedding API, as well as encouraging people in contributing to the port. Due to a change in focus, our team at INdT will have to minimize our envolvement somewhat, but we will still do maintenance and patch reviews.

Since the first announcement of the port during December last year, the code has been refactored in many of its crucial parts, resulting in good performance improvements. Now, six months later, we believe the project is mature enough to gain wider testing.

Quick start

1) About WebKit

WebKit is an open source web contents engine powering products such as Google Chrome and Android browser, Apple's Safari and iPhone browser, as well as Nokia's web runtime for S60.

2) About EFL

The Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL for short) are a set of graphical libraries intended to provide easy-to-use resources for building rich user interfaces based applications. It is the core of the Enlightenment window environment. As mentioned in its official web site, "the libraries are meant to be portable and optimized to be functional even on devices such as mobile devices". Its core components are:

Evas: Highly optimized raster canvas
Edje: Declarative UI library
Ecore: Event loop and utility classes
Eina: Basic data types
Embryo: Scripting

3) About the port

WebKit was born to be toolkit independent: "WebKit's HTML and JavaScript code began as a branch of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE. As part of KDE framework KHTML was based on Qt but during their porting efforts Apple's engineers made WebKit toolkit independent". Currently there are browser components based on WebKit for the following toolkits (officially upstream only): Qt, Gtk+, wxWidgets, Windows, among others. This port is about adding EFL to the list of supported toolkits, providing an easy-to-embed browser component/widget into EFL based applications. As the developers also work on the Qt port, we try to keep the implementation as close as possible to that of QtWebKit. The build system was based on Gtk+'s though.

WebKit/EFL currently compiles and runs on Linux, and is not yet upstreamed, however tries to follow WebKit trunk as much as possible, though it might be a week or two behind.

_Painting

Painting is performed using Cairo on an offscreen surface, thus all painting is double buffered. For this to work on 16 bit devices such as the Nokia Internet Tablet, some patches needs to be applied to the shipped Cairo version.

_Networking:

Networking is based on Libcurl, which is used elsewhere by EFL, and was thus a natural choice. Cookies are supported.

What is in this version ?

API for navigation browsing (back, forward, reload, stop), session and global history, zooming, among others. See API here.
Configurable flash plugin via the "--enable-glib-integration" configure option. Default: true.
Configurable Windows like panning support via the "--enable-pan-scrolling" configure option. Default: false.

Performance

In order to better demostrate its performance (which is just great on Desktop), we have ran it on an Linux embedded device (in our case, an n810 running manoma). Alecrim, also from INdT, has written some nice blogposts about it. Below are two of the videos he made showing WebKit/EFL running on a n810 with mamona.

Andre Pedralho is also updating EVE browser to work with this version.

Some highlights about the performance is the startup time: ~3 secs on cold launch and ~1 second on hot launch.

Known issues

Flash crash on GMail.
Flash content not zooming synced with page content zooming (This has been disabled due to Flash Player issue (FP-2140).

Building and Running WebKit/EFL (trunk)

git clone git://gitorious.org/webkit-efl/webkit-efl.git webkit
cd webkit
git checkout origin/master
git checkout -b <> # e.g. webkit-efl
get all dependencies installed - run |configure| to get a list of needed packages
WebKitTools/Scripts/build-webkit --efl --makeargs=<-s -jXX> --no-video # OR ./autogen.sh --with-port=efl --disable-video
WebKitTools/Scripts/run-launcher --efl

This 0.1 release has been tagged to "webkit-efl-0.1". Feel free to use it as well.

Where to get in touch

Join #webkit-efl channel on irc.freenode.net, send patches and emails ... Your contributions are be very welcome.

About the Development Team

Kenneth Christiansen (lead programmer) - kenneth dot christiansen at openbossa dot org
André Pedralho - andre dot pedralho at openbossa dot org
Antônio Gomes - antonio dot gomes at openbossa dot org
Diego Gonzalez - diego dot gonzalez at openbossa dot org
Afonso Costa - afonso dot costa at openbossa dot org
Marcelo Morais - marcelo dot morais at openbossa dot org

Running a text search engine in N810: CLucene

2009-03-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

A search engine is, from a high level view, a computer program that comprises at least two tools: an indexer and a "searcher", both to work over some given content. Going deeper a bit on it, the indexer part would be the responsible to identify all of the terms in a document or corpus and builds a table (or whatever) that indicates where the terms are used. Basically it maps a term to documents it appears. On the other hand, the searcher is what makes it possible to perform quick queries over this indexed content.

Well, what about all this, on a maemo context ?

Scenario

Lately, André Pedralho (a co-worker at INdT) and I got a demand for a product we are working on to benchmark a text-based search engine on an ARM platform having as final goal to find out a feasible candidate to be embedded into a web browser.

After some research for good, stable and open source search engines available, CLucene (a C++ port of popular Java Lucene) came to scene as promising option, and so we ran a couple of tests against it to check its feasibility as described below.

Environment and requirements:

clucene (0.9.21b) source code.

scratchbox set up with rootstrap and compilers for building to maemo platforms, as described here.

a patch to be applied against CLucene (only some files in clucence/src/demo change), that makes it possible to perform some stress tests over it.

Benchmark (stress test)

To perform the tests, it was indexed a 16Mb textual base set (by using CLucene itself) resulting in a 18Mb index ready to use.

In the patched CLucene demo, there are 850 words to be used to query the indexed base against each of them programatically, and measure the time taken by complete the batch, as well as reliability, leakage and CPU and RAM memory usage of CLucene during this stress test.

Results: (from a N810 device w/ chinook)

850 queries were executed in around 45 seconds (so it took in avarage 0.05 seconds per query). It is also interesting to mention that it was on ARM 5 seconds slower than my Desktop machine, with dual core processor, 4Gb of RAM and so and so ...
Out of 850 queries, 80 failed (for some reason) and 770 succeeded.
No crash observed.
Minor leaks (a few k's) observed in valgrind during the tests.
Acceptable memory and CPU usage (given the amount of queries performed in so short period) as shown in the figures below

Virtual and physical memory usage during the tests.

CPU % use during the tests.

First impression

Although CLucene has been shown itseft as a promising option and others (i.e. the mozilla-based browser Flock) have successfully embedded it as a content search engine, it is pretty much early to say something more concrete as a conclusion about CLucene. A next round of tests will be performed soon these days, including a measure of how fast it updates its index on-the-go, as well as how good its concurrency handling is, and all it running over a bigger indexed content.

Please comment if any idea comes.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Fennec (Mozilla Mobile) beta 1 released for n8x0 devices.

2009-03-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

So, I am happy to broadcast the announcement of Fennec beta1 for the Nokia Linux devices. As pointed out by some Mozillia guys, this current release keeps agressively improving performance of the browser, giving to its users a boost of stability and responsiveness while surfing on the Web ... A

Feature-wise, flash player is supported now.

On the platform side, and the mozilla JS - JIT implementation is ON by default.

About the UI, I have not seen much huge differential changes for this beta, but fixes in what was already available have been making rendering, painting and panning a lot more usable then before too.

Startup time has been also hugely reduced, and it is really acceptable (~8 sec) now.

So, I'd say for those who have not installed it yet to give it a try, and so those who have, upgrading to this new beta should be automatic and smoooooth ...

There is a walkthrough video for this release. Check it out !

ps: also there is an on-going implementation of a gesture engine for fennec being driven by another Brazilian (Felipe Gomes) that can give it a taste of what is about to come soon ;)

Enjoy

--
Antonio Gomes

Running crossover'ed Google Chrome browser on Linux ...

2009-03-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

Quick sharing: for those who do not want to install Windows just to test Google Chromium browser :), run it on Linux by grabbing a crossover'ed version from here ... or follow instruction here.

--Antonio Gomes

firefox 2.0.x and 3.0.x + gcc 4.3.2 and Ubuntu Intrepid.

2009-01-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

For those who do Mozilla development on Linux, and have upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), it might be important to notice that the gcc 4.3.2 shipped in that release fixes an old bug, and Firefox 2.0.x and 3.0.x built from source on Ubutu 8.10 will abort immediately after launching due to "buffer overflow". Problem is reported here and fixed partially on the mozilla trunk (1.9.2 and on the forked Firefox 3.1 tree), but many parts of the big patch are still missing checking AND they did not land in Firefox 2.0.x and 3.0.x development trees (old CVS system).

That is the patch that solves the problem for on both crashy trees, from Fedore mozilla team, iirc.

--Antonio Gomes

2008 Wrap up !!

2009-01-08T08:14:00.000-08:00

2008 was a extremely busy year. Many many sleepless nights and that is basically why I have not blogged that often.

Some personal highlights:

I got married and a beautiful little baby girl came.

At INdT, after almost 3 years working on Mozilla related projects, started doing some stuff with WebKit in the second half of 2008, and now I am officially full time allocated to work on the Webkit port to EFL (which is an extremely exciting project and deserves a dedicated blog post). I am right now working on my first not so foo patch :)

As I am still in love with Mozilla, I could not leave that passion aside, and I am extremely happy of also being working as consultant of two US companies (GetWellNetwork and Skyfire) on projects related to Mozilla technologies.

In the beginning of 2008, I joined the Master Degree program, at UFAM and I am excited to be working with Information Retrieval and a bunch of other cool TechWeb stuff. It is supposed to finished by of the year.

I could not do as much as I would like to help on some cool other open source projects, including Microb, Fennec and Prism, although whenever I got a overdose of coffee and can not get to sleep, I try to send some patches.

--Antonio Gomes

New wave of Mozilla coming: Fennec

2008-10-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

Woot !!!

The first alpha of Fennec (Mozilla Mobile) is just out of the closet, aiming mainly to get feedback about the user experience ... If you have a n800 or n810, give it a try and file bugs on it.

Check a video of it in action here.

One-click install available here. Localizers, addon developer and whoever do not have a device in hand, desktop (x86) builds are available as well for Linux, Windows and Mac.

Performance is now under attack.

Stay tuned.

--Antonio gomes
tonikitoo at gmail

Using wired connections from you tablet.

2008-10-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

This hack was originally needed mainly because I am usually under a proxied network at work, and for some security issues this connection can not be broadcast'ed by access points or routers, but I do want my tablet connected to the same wired network of my desktop.

So that is my way of doing that:

1. On the desktop, setup an adhoc connection manually using the pc's wlan interface (eth1).
2. And enable ip_forward in order make it to bridge to the wired network interface (eth0).

For (1) and (2) I use to use the following bash script (to be ran as root):

modprobe iptable_nat
iwconfig eth1 essid tonikitoo mode ad-hoc key off
ifconfig eth1 10.0.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

3. Set an ad hoc connection in the tablet as following (sshots taken by using system's Connection Manager):

Note is to be replaced by whatever name here.

Note: the SSID (also 'tonikitoo' here) has to match to the essid value set in line #2 of the pc script above.
Also note the value 'ad hoc' in 'network mode'.
Note2: Set proper 'Security method' here.

If your wired connection is under a proxy, set the same proxy address for your adhoc (in Advanced Settings palette).
Note: if the wired network requires no proxy, just ignore this step.

Set your ip, router and dns.
note: 'IP address' has to be in the same network of 'Router'.
note2: The IP set in 'Router' has to match the IP set in line #3 of the pc script above.
note3: 'Primary DNS address' has to match your pc's one (run 'cat /etc/resolv.conf' on the pc to check that).

Maybe this can help someone else, maybe not ... Maybe someone wants the tablet to be adhoc'ed to his laptop and also sharing its connection (wired, ppp, usb), maybe not ...

--Antonio Gomes

New Prism-Maemo repository

2008-09-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

INdT has got me some space for my personal stuff, including prism-maemo port. So, please if you are interested in Prism-Maemo, use THIS REPOSITORY for newer updates. Obviously, the two previous repositories won't be updated any further (due to technical problems w/ the server).

Sorry about that.

--Antonio Gomes

(Smart)Find for Firefox 3.*

2008-08-29T18:15:00.000-07:00

Inspired by our own need and other's, a couple of friends (André, Roberto and Tomaz) and I decided to increment Firefox' default find feature.

Story

If you use Firefox, you had probably used the Firefox' findBar already. It is the simple and intuitive way users have to search for words in a web page. The main thing we "miss" is that it requires the user to type the exact (set of) word(s) he searches for to actually find it. Sometimes, however, lazy enough users *like us* want to just give the findbar a "clue" of what we want to find in the page, and even often just do not know. The result of that was the SmartFind addon for Firefox 3.x. From its site we have some usecases of SmartFind:

"Schwarzenegger". This looks easy when you are looking at the word, but what if you do not have any idea what to write? Then you wonder "I would like to write something like "chuazenger" and for it to find similar words in the page".
As another example, when you are on a page where accents are used and your keyboard is not configured to type such accents (~^`), the traditional find method will not be able to match with any word.
You are just lazy like us and terrible in orthography :)

HOW

Smartfind ranks how similar each word in the page (yeah, that might take time depending on the webpage ... heuristics exists to speed it up, but new ones are welcome) is to the given word (input by the user). For such, we are implementing the levenshtein distance metric. The "how similar" can be trigged by the user through the Edit->SmartFind menu, to be more or less restrictive.

Well, in practical terms, whenever Firefox' original find method does not find something, SmartFind takes place and hitting a aditional "enter" fires its actition ...

If it is still not clear, see sshots bellow:

User is not from Austria and does not know how to spell this-big-name-above.

SmartFind finds it for him.

Disclaimer: This is just the first and quickly implemented public release, so there are some known problems:

Improve the way it gets text content from the webpage (better xpath expression, which ignores "object" , "style" , "script" tags' text content).
Fix problems with line break (lack of "br" tag) .
Implement an user-intuitive way to walk through the list of most similar items found: currently we are static to the top of the list.
Implement a fuzzy third state (similars ?) while comparing chars that could make SmartFind work much better: "for example, consider 'ë' as not completely different from 'e' or 'é' but similar". That done, the Finnish word "päivää" would be more similar to "paivaa" and so on ...
Port it to Fennec (Firefox-Mobile) browser.
Make it work with other Firefox addons, including FindInTabs.
Implement SoundEx into it (?).

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Open source browsers war: Mozilla and Webkit raw builds numbers on Maemo (ARM)

2008-08-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

The big picture

Bosses are only pleased when they get numbers and charts in reports on top of their tables. At this round, we (André, Diego, Fernanda and I) had to benchmark Mozilla and Gtk-Webkit on arm, and so we did ... Text below is an informal summary of the official report.

Scenario

Experiments were performed using Nokia N810 Internet tablets (400MHz CPU and 128Mb of RAM memory) with Chinook installed.
Applications under test were GTK+ embedding sample browsers from both Mozilla (TestGtkEmbed - available from the mozilla-central repository) and WebKit (GtkLauncher - from the WebKit trunk), cross-compiled in Scratchbox 1.0.8, gcc-2005q3-2.

About the tests

These were the items measured:

1. Page load speed

The page load test focuses on measuring the absolute and relative time needed by each browser to open a given set of locally stored webpages. The test is driven by a JavaScript script that fires the load of each page in the test set. Both the time speed for each Web page to load (relative time) and the total time taken by loading the whole set (absolute time) are measured. The test set is formed by 37 real-world webpages fetched using the httrack crawler and is accessible over an Ad-hoc wi-fi network via the Apache Web server.

2. Memory and CPU consumption of 1)

The goal of this test is to evaluate how well browsers manage system memory during the page load test (above): virtual and physical memory allocated by each browser were monitored and printed out in a comparing chart. As such, a Bash script was developed to "watch" system memory and CPU numbers. It is basically a timer used to poll at every 1 second the browser's virtual and physical memory values from "/proc", and CPU usage from "top" (in batch mode).

3. Javascript engine performance.

Both browsers were ran against Dromaeo and SunSpider Javascript test suites and memory consumption during these tests was measure (same way as in 2).

4. CSS compliance

Both browsers were ran against Acid3 CSS test suite.

Results and Charts

As there is no such general browser benchmark suite (is this even possible ?), we just developed your own tools (bash and JS) for those item above that do not have renowned public benchmarks available (pageload and resource consumption).

ps: I tried Mozilla's Talos suite, which seems fine to test Mozilla but it is not portable for other browsers.

1. Page load speed

Mozilla's and Webkit's page load speed against the given pageset (see table below).

Individual pageload speeds (in ms).

DISCLAIMER

Original page set was formed by 85 webpages, from Talos Mozilla Test Suite. Although TestGtkEmbed ran well through the entire original testset, GtkLauncher always got OOM-killed after a while running the page load test, due to lack of memory (see memory chart in Memory Consumption section). Then, from the original 85 webpages, 37 were chosen to make GtkLauncher to finish this test.
10 out of 37 of the remaining webpages in the pageset contain non UTF-8 characters (Russian, Japanese, Chinese, ...). While WebKit misrendered most these fonts, Mozilla went fine for all. Example showed below:

www.3721.com in TestGtkEmbed

www.3721.com in GtkLauncher

2. Memory and CPU consumption during 1)

Memory consumption while doing page load test in 1).

UPDATE: VIRTUAL AND PHYSICAL MEMORY LABELS ARE CHANGED HERE.

CPU load while doing page load test in 1).

3. Javascript engine performance.

Dromaeo numbers.

SunSpider numbers.

Browsers memory use while doing Dromaeo.

Browsers memory use while doing SunSpider.

4. CSS compliance

Mozilla on Acid3.

Webkit on Acid3.

Conclusion

Some outstandings from the numbers:

Mozilla managed better memory while doing page load tests, although Webkit was faster. It might probably been had affected by the fact that Mozilla rendered well all non-western chars, Webkit fails.
Webkit was faster and used less memory while doing both Dromaeo and SunSpider test.

UPDATE: Some things that have to be pointed out about my Mozilla build are:

I do not jemalloc enabled, but would love to.
Mozilla guys are doing some amazing job on speeding up their Javascript engine: tracemonkey will probably get things much (5x at least ?) faster.

ps: I personally would not mind to do a 2nd recond of tests and charts w/ these two items above enabled in my Mozilla build.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Prism for maemo updates

2008-08-13T23:25:00.000-07:00

The Mozilla Prism guys mfinkle and plasticmillion are doing a great job heading to 1.0, and happily we are about to start to get prism changes for maemo upstream.

Below some nice sshots of the current prism maemo port, prism-maemo_0.0.7-1 (which is just out), running on chinook.

Prism on meebo.com

Prism on mibbit.com

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Mozilla/Firefox Summit 2008

2008-08-05T02:48:00.000-07:00

So, the much anticipated Mozilla Summit 08 has just finished, and regardless some unforeseen, I truly believe that most of the 400 (+-) attendees had an amazing time, as so did I. Follows some of my highlights:

Dan's team did really well on organization ...
I had chance to see some really nice mozilla guys again including: both the father and grand-pa :) of mozilla mobile, dougt and choffman, respectively; the long term mozilla contributor on linux and always elegant, cblizzard; the mozilla brazil driver mgalli; as well as the nice leoz, romaxa and timeless from the microb project.
From prism (+maemo), I got a fast but good talk to mfinkle: the point was mainly pushing prism forward on maemo and linux, and make it a fennec friend on the platform.
The new mozilla embedding system is not just promising but real.
I met the famous Stuart ‘Pavlov’ Parmenter and got some nice advices about browser benchmarks, steps toward a rendering server firefox, as well as about some of the huge Javascripts speed up they are about to land in Firefox 3.1 (new JS is going +- 10x faster then the current) ...
Percy and blassey are also nice guys.
It is great to see fennec and microb joining efforts toward a great mobile user internet experience.

Some not accomplished things after the event:

I wish I had met Daniel Glazman and John Resig.
I wish to have had a shorter trip back: 7hs (from whistler to vancouver) + 5 hous waiting + 5 hous from vacouver to toronto + one hour waiting + 12 hours from toronto to são paulo + 12 hours waiting + 4 hours from sp to manaus = 46 !

Long life mozilla ...

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Keeping device's display on

2008-07-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

Copy and paste the following gconf lines in the terminal if it is interesting for you to avoid your n8*0 display to light off:

gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/turn_off_display 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/brightness_period 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /system/osso/dsm/display/display_dim_timeout 6000000
gconftool-2 --type int --set /system/osso/dsm/display/display_blank_timeout 6000000

Might be useful for someone.

**update - in order to undo the changes:

gconftool-2 --unset /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/turn_off_display
gconftool-2 --unset /apps/osso/applet/osso-applet-display/brightness_period
gconftool-2 --unset /system/osso/dsm/display/display_dim_timeout
gconftool-2 --unset /system/osso/dsm/display/display_blank_timeout

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Mozilla Prism for maemo

2008-06-09T19:29:00.000-07:00

It sounds like another buzz-word candidate on the internet field is the term "RIA": many big guys commercially interested on RIA seem to concept it differently. My understanding about the term stands on its origin: RIA are applications running of top of browsers essential features and infrastructure: connectivity, interoperability, cloud storage (data available anywhere, any time), responsiveness, and so on, and IMO this is what drives the real meaning of RIA or "Rich Internet Applications".

PS: To avoid ambiguity we are generally referring RIA by "web applications".

In that sense, the Mozilla Prism project was launched w/ the intention of "integrate web applications with the desktop, allowing them to be launched from the desktop and configured independently of the default web browser". The project implements new concepts including "SSBs" and "distraction free browsers". Ok then, lets analyse what we have here from different perspectives:

On the pc (w/ satisfactory processing capabilities), users can have their web browser w/ many tabs opened, their RIAs living each one on their own process and windows, as well as many other OS applications all at the same time and their PC are able to run great.
But what about it all on the mobile space ? To be honest I am not really sure about the answer, *but* that is what this port job is mainly about: getting feedback about what maemo users get when they can somehow to integrate common WebApps (meebo.com, gmail, gdocs, gchat, ...) with their mobile desktop environment.

Although the TODO list is still big, the DONE list is accomplished so that it worth making "Prism to Maemo" project public.

1) Installation

While I am still having trouble to get my upload account to 'Maemo Extras" repository working fine, I've set up one living under my personal web dir: .install file here.

2) Warnings

I will be working on this more seriously from now on with guys (luckily on #prism - irc.mozilla.org) to see what features are really interesting to have available on the mobile/maemo space.

It is still an "under porting" work. so bugs are likely to be found and new releases are likely to appear.

.deb sizes 10Mb and installed it takes 30Mb on disk.

Hope you enjoy.

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Prism + Webapps + Maemo = ?

2008-03-23T03:51:00.000-07:00

Since a while I've being paying some attention into the promising Mozilla Prism project (old WebRunner), specially over a mobile developer perspective. Prism is a Mozilla Labs advanced development project that provides "a simple XULRunner based browser that hosts web applications without the normal web browser user interface". More interesting over is that the project came to me at the same time philip van hoof blogposted about "Web 2.0 email clients" (or something like this). My post could even get titled "mozilla-based web 2.0 email client" (or something like this), but Prism goes far away forward from that.

Main concepts here are two: Site Specific Browsers (SSB) and Distraction Free Browser:

SSB: applications with an embedded browser designed to work exclusively with a single web application (whereas typical browser chrome are rarely used). It doesn’t have the menus, toolbars and accoutrements of a normal web browser . An SSB also has a tighter integration with the OS and desktop than a typical web application running through a web browser.

Distraction free browsing: "This is nice for those times when your have to have your web based email and docs open but you don’t need the distraction of the rest of the Internet keeping you from your work. Plus the memory footprint is kept to a minimum because it isn’t the ‘full’ browser and all of its extensions."

Could that interest users of mobile devices ?

Not sure about the answer, but I put some effort on that these days to answer this question with some practical stuff. First, I got blassey's xulrunner armel build for maemo, checked out prism source from svn, pulled Firefox 3 pre beta 5 source base (to work as my mozilla build system), built them all together and after some hacks I got Prism running on maemo OS 2008 w/ some webapps (meebo and gmail for instance).

I will try to get some thumb enabled set UI for it, as well as making a .deb/.install available for Prism to see how things go from a mobile user perspective ...

PS: Prism has nothing to do with web application development, it's simply providing a more desktop-application-like interface for web applications. Mozilla claims: "Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we're not building a proprietary platform to replace the web ... Prism isn't a new platform, it's simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience. Web developers don't have to target it separately, because".

UPDATE: Greetings to MFinkle and other for all work on this.

UPDATE2: Here is Prism as a Firefox 3 addon.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

RSS Feeding in MicroB

2008-03-10T08:25:00.000-07:00

Feature's already implemented (and landed on microb svn).

--
Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Fixed Greasemonkey (MicroB port) installation problem on Chinook

2008-01-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

Greasemonkey webaddon port for MicroB is now installable on Chinook again. Some have reported installation problems on chinook due to a libhildonmime0 incompatibility problem, but it is just fixed.

Tested on both bora (n800) and chinook (n800 and n810).

Have a nice browsing.

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Major security update recommended to all Microb Adblock Plus port users

2008-01-02T08:02:00.000-08:00

Wladimir Palant, the original Adblock and Adblock Plus Firefox web-addon developer, among other complainings, has pointed out an important security hole in initial version of the Adblock Plus Microb port :

"... So I downloaded this Adblock Plus version and soon it was obvious that it is inserting an Adblock Plus button into all web pages the user visits — using my favicon as the image on the button. Which makes me the lucky guy who can track every move MicroB users do on the Internet (at least if I decide to send HTTP headers preventing caching)."

Happily, Andre Pedralho quickly fixed this issue and uploaded the 0.0.2-1 version of Adblock Plus MicroB port in a few minutes. It is highly recommend for all Adblock Plus (maemo port) users to update their packages to the newest as soon as possible. For the other raised issues by Wladimir in the post entry, including changing the addon port name, we are investigation how much we've changed from the original source to take the proper action.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

MicroB's spellchecker extension

2007-12-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

These past days, I've been testing the just released version of Spellcheck extension for MicroB, and I'd say that even with all MicroB UI constraints for addon development including no XUL, XBL, overlay (no extensible UI) it is a great work.

Follows some usability scenarios that could be improved, though (spellcheck has to be installed).

Through "about:config" page, set the "layout.spellcheckDefault" to '2' and go to default browser home page.
Install the russian dictionary, and change you default input method language to Russian as well.
Mistype any word in Russian and it won't get underlined (indication a mistyping), once the default 'en-US' dictionary is the one in use.

It is not possible right now to users to switch the a dictionary w/out having to mistype any word in the currently used dictionary language, double tap it, and change the dictionary from the prompted Select dialog. Suggestions ?

I am a user and I want to know what is the currently used dictionary , how to do this ? Only going to 'about:config' and searching for 'spellcheker.dictionary' value.

Couldn't it get indicated in any of the dialogs' title that spellchecker prompts out ?

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

A better google search experience on Microb with Greasemonkey

2007-12-05T11:45:00.001-08:00

After installing Greasemonkey addon on MicroB, my n800 browsers much better: first I showed how users could better youtube from MicroB, and now just a quick update on how users can also better google search on your device: mine install google greasemonkey script, for example, add videos, images and wikipedia top 5 search results alongside normal google searches.. All this through AJAX !!!! It ends up like:

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

A better youtube experience on MicroB with Greasemonkey

2007-11-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

Some Greasemonkey scripts can help those who use to watch youtube videos from the MicroB Browser to get a better experience on that:

Download Video: download current video (in .flv format) in one click.

BlockFlash2: blocks/unblock flash.

Video download in yellow and blockflash2 in red.

YousableTubeFix: let you resize video for better view.

YousableTube options in green.

Btw, to install Greasemonkey itself on MicroB just tap here.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Browser-extras: great project even with all issues.

2007-11-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

Better than surfing on the Web from everywhere is doing it all on your way ! On that regard, Firefox is really a pioneer: its robust Addon backend and online support make possible to customize your browsing experience in a few clicks. think that Browser-extras project is a way to go in order to get MicroB closer to Firefox.

From an user point of view, I see it as a really great and promissing initiative but how about from a MicroB extension developer's prospective ?

Some differences between MicroB's Addon system and Firefox' one make extension development for MicroB a bit more painful then it should: Firefox counts on some built-in mozilla technologies that are disabled in compile time in microb-engine:

XBL (XML Binding Language): "an XML-based markup language used to declare the behavior and look of XUL Widgets and XML Elements".

XUL: Firefox' UI language.

Overlay: "XUL files used to describe extra content in the UI".

XPI support: only .deb

No debugging tools (DOM Inspector, Firebug, Error Console) available.

We lack manpower to improve this development environment specifically ... =/ But the project is on regardless that, work is being done, and some results are already out there.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

MicroB community development building

2007-08-30T10:15:00.000-07:00

Some nice ongoing work happening around MicroB Browser (mozilla for maemo): Browser-Extras is a good example:

Nice Firefox extensions for MicroB: follow it here ;)

Chinese and Arabic font packages available.

Arabic

chinese

ps: pics from leoz' blog.

--Antonio Gomes

mozilla on maemo !

2007-07-17T09:10:00.000-07:00

And *we* are finally out !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Trip to São Carlos (SP/Br) and Mozilla Community Build Brazil Event

2007-06-28T12:48:00.000-07:00

So, since Monday (Jun/25) I've been in São Carlos (São Paulo) in order to get in touch with Marcio Galli (taboca - thanks for the hospitality) and brainstorm about some ideas we have. In resume, what I can say is it was very productive trip.

Marcio has been involved with web technologies and mainly Mozilla stuff since early Netscape times (back to 1997 or so), so his background in his area is notable. Basically, we talked about some general MiniMo issues, like usability and features, as well as ways of pushing it to Linux devices (maybe OpenMoko ?).

In that sense, I could show him MiniMo running on the n800 device, and I asked him about what could be done (UI-wise) to improve n800 users' web surfing experience. I got good input on this, and I hope to be packing them up in minimo 0.21 for maemo soon.

The last day (Jun/27) was the best one. I got some minimo upstream Linux specific bugs under my responsibility, which is great and will take me definitively to the XUL world. Furthermore, Offline Browsering and OS Firefox were subjects of a nice talk we had in taboca's office. I will be blogging about it specifically soon as well. Loooooots of ideas came up .....

Happily, I could also participate to the Mozilla Community Build Brazil, an community effort event which intends to learn more about Internet habits of specific countries and find out local ways to spread and increase market share of Firefox in them. It is been headed by Asa and JT from Mozilla. Here are some pics of it. They realized, for example, the potential of orkut in Brazil, and so why not making "Firefox as an easier Orkut tool" for almost 20 million users here ;).

Btw, I will be working on a Firefox extension for orkut my free time (more about it later on) !!!

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Minimo 0.2 maemo port release and NEW REPOSITORY

2007-06-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

After a while I got some time to pack up a new minimo maemo port version. It pretty stable, based on the just launched minimo 0.2 .

$ cat debian/changelog

minimo (0.20) unstable; urgency=low

* Updated Sourcebase (Jun/08/07) - Minimo 0.2 !!!!!
* Fixed crash during closing, and further stability improvements.
* Some UI clean up - not working stuff like, download, open file, cache ...

NEW REPOSITORY - IMPORTANT !!!!!

I am hosting minimo in a new server now at http://www.maemo.org.br/minimo/ domain (note the .br suffix), which is more trustable than the previous host server.

INSTALLING MINIMO 0.2

From minimo.install

go to http://www.maemo.org.br/minimo/
click on 'minimo.install'
tap ok for all further dialogs :)

from AppManager

Add/Edit this entry into "new catalogue":

web address: http://www.maemo.org.br/minimo/

Distribution: bora

Components: user

"Refresh list"

Go to "Browser Installable applications"

pick "Minimo".

Enjoy your browsing ...

tonikitoo at gmail dot com
--Antonio Gomes

"Mozilla Brazil -- Community building events" - UPDATE

2007-06-06T10:35:00.001-07:00

Just spreading Jt's post about the Mozilla-Br meeting here in Brazil this month. I would really love to attend, and I am working hard on it ;)

UPDATE: Official schedule available here.

tonikitoo at gmail dot com
--Antonio Gomes

Minimo 0.2 on OLPC

2007-05-24T09:34:00.000-07:00

Today Francisco Keppler and I took a free time off to check the feasibility of running Minimo on OLPC and these what we got:

minimo on OLPC

hack hack hack ...

Nice, isn't it ? Results are really promissing: minimo fits to the environment, scrolls fast and it is now very user friendly. Well, it is basically a raw version on minimo 0.2 (pulled down from MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH on Mozilla CVS) running on a debian running a OLPC hardware (by francisco keppler).

ps: a HOWTO is coming ...
ps2: minimo maemo port 0.2 is coming soon as well ;)

Adding GTalk client into your website ...

2007-04-04T10:10:00.001-07:00

Do you want to have a GTalk client running on the website ? Just add this piece of code in yours

really cool !!!!

BOSSA - Browser Lunch BOF

2007-03-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

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/

Adding XPCOM-DBUS and GCONF support on minimo.

Testing helix-mozilla plugin with minimo on n800.

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

Minimo maemo port 0.16.12-1 available and TODO list.

2007-03-22T18:49:00.000-07:00

New Minimo/Mozilla maemo port 0.16.12-1 now available. This is a minor release which just implements some easy-to-reach feedbacks I got.

$ more debian/changelog

minimo (0.16.12-1) unstable; urgency=low

* Made 'scroll by arrow keys' default instead of spatial navigation (toggling still possible through menu).
* Added 'Launch in fullscreen mode' checkbutton in general-panel/preferences.
* Set minimo default zoom level to 1.1.
* Removed 'Set minimo as default browser' and "dump js at shutdown" checkbuttons from preferences - WinCE specific implementation.

Follows how the current TODO list looks like:

Automatic connection establishing.
Make panning default instead of text selection.
Automatic proxy setup from the environment.
Select text in urlbar when it is focused.
Making menu to show up when menu HW key gets pressed.
Implement timers to context sensitive menus (it works only on x86 through right-button mouse click - have to file this as a bug).
implement command line parser support bug 334019.
implement dbus service for minimo. It would avoid having more then one instance of it running at the same time (btw, dbus-xpcom binding has been announced recently).
fix fs browsing support (it crashes when I type /usr or /etc - although it works for /etf/fstab).
fix segfault on window closing.
maybe implement a portrait mode view ?!

What did I miss ? List is opened.

I hope to be working with "quilt" for patchset management soon ;) it sucks !!!

--Antonio Gomes

Minimo maemo port 0.16.11-1 available.

2007-03-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

New Minimo/Mozilla maemo port 0.16.11-1 now available.

$ more debian/changelog

minimo (0.16.11-1) unstable; urgency=low
* links entered through urlbar open in the current tab

minimo (0.16.10-1) unstable; urgency=low
* updated sourcebase (dated from 13/Mar/07).
* HUGE UI changes by marcio and chris hoff.
* some device (nokia 800) specific customizations.

The outstanding of this release is the fact that we are about to have Minimo 0.2 officially launched by Mozilla, and users are going to see basically what is available in this new minimo maemo port release.

Another huge improvement are the bigger buttons available in the main toolbar, made of svg graphics generated on-the-fly according to screen resolutions - thanks to marcio galli (TABOCA / MOZILLA). Browsing through fingers is great ;-). See pics bellow.

Chis Hoffmain's idea of HOMEBASE is taking place as well in this release. It compiles you bookmarks, history in your main homepage.

Preferences Tab makes possible to set:

proxy

skin color setup (pink looks great for your girlfriend :-)).

customized toolbar - choose the buttons that you want to be visible there.

Menu is shown by clicking on the "... " icon on right of the main toolbar. It make possible:

open/close tabs

tooggle on/off spatial navigation / scroll through HW keys

launch prefs tab.

Some further SCREENSHOTS:

Google docs, bottom main toolbar (without urlbar), and many tab on the top of the window.

Google mail, fullscreen mode, url and find bars showed.

Please, get minimo installed on your nokia 800 following the steps here.

Enjoy your browsing.

--Antonio Gomes

BOSSA conference was a success

2007-03-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

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

Minimo maemo port 0.16.9-1 available.

2007-03-09T15:11:00.000-08:00

After some time, I got a new release. Follows changelog:

$ more debian/changelog
minimo (0.16.9-1) unstable; urgency=low

updated sourcebase (dated from 26/Jan/07).
Virtual Keyboard reimplementation
Fixed broken proxy setup
implemented HW key support (ongoing)
Removed "Open file" menuitem
Fixed minimo.postrm script
updated minimo sourcebase dependencies
created bora repository
disable caret browsing in webpages (pressing F7).

Some crash fixes mainly related to virtual keyboard interaction.

I have created also a BORA repository.

from AppManager

Add this entry into "new catalogue":

web address: http://home.ufam.edu.br/~agan/minimo/

Distribution: bora

Components: user

"Refresh list"

Go to "Browser Installable applications"

pick "Minimo".

Next steps before BOSSA are update sourcebase, get some spatial navigation changes checked in.

Enjoy your browsing ;)

--Antonio Gomes

Patching minimo

2007-03-09T11:49:00.000-08:00

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

back blogging: life, work stuff and browser war

2007-03-01T14:39:00.000-08:00

Well, I haven't had much time to anything else beside work stuff: I am far away from my blog, from my personal stuff (read open source contributions - ohhhh minimo), from mailing list discussions. Happily, though, not from browsers and Internet application development. At INdT I have been hardly working on it, with good results.

It is also good to see that maemo community is not apart from the famous browser war we have seen along the last years on desktop, and some discussions about browser alternatives to opera. Clearly, people expect more of it, and mainly more AJAX support and robustness. Epiphany and Galeon were cited but it seems like no one is putting your hands on so far. Minimo is a work-fine alternative, but the fact of it not to be "hildonizable" seems to scare non-geeks from it. But at the end, what makes me satisfied is that mozilla is on the basis of almost all alternatives pointed out.
But, from a developer point of view, what do you think ?

"is mozilla ready for a resource reduced gadgets ?".
"What about all that XPCOM abstraction stuff ? Is this fast enough or at least 'optimizable' for us ?".
"XULRunner, XUL and other mozilla built-in technologies running on embedded ... interesting".
Is a XUL<->Hildon bindings/map a good SoC candidate ??? =)

Hum ... I will be attending to BOSSA 2007 Conference at Porto de Galinhas, PE, Brazil to talk more about it ... It is nice to see INdT pushing such a nice open source opportunity ahead. I will try to arrange some free time to be back on hacking minimo, to get a more usable as possible demo of mozilla/minimo on n800.

so see you soon there.

--
--Antonio Gomes

Nokia n800 discount developer program.

2007-01-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

Nokians seem to see my port hacks on minimo/mozilla stuff somewhere =). I just got my nokia 800 discount-for-purchase code via email. Now, the hardest part: I have to find someone in USA/Europe that I know and that is also coming back to Brazil these days, so that I can ask him/her to buy me one.

Luckily, the troubles people had faced buying it through nokiausa.com seem to work out now, so I will give it a try ...

ps: I am back ...

--Antonio Gomes

Taking some days off

2006-12-22T10:39:00.000-08:00

I will be taking some days off (from 26th Dec into 8th Jan) traveling around "Brazilian Paradises" like Fortaleza, Recife and Aracaju. Beautiful beaches and sun all the days long are wanting for me there.

Talking about 2007 open sourced activities, Minimo still has an extense list of TODO tasks, I am planning to accomplish it all. Project is not dead at all ... ;)

Merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone. Enjoy our relatives and friends ...

What is about to come ???? - update

2006-11-24T03:36:00.000-08:00

Follows a list of features I'll be working for minimo maemo port for the next couple days:

Add hardware key support (especially zoom_in/out and fullscreen).
Updating minimo through default Maemo's Application Manager has problems.
implement context sensitive menus for a stylus-oriented device.
missing "home bar". (where is it ???)
bookmark are not being properly persisted. (not yet implemented in minimo ???)
Hack built-in flash plugin to make it work with minimo.
make proxy work for FTP and HTTPS protocols.
default home setting does not work.
investigate crash on https://agenor.equipement.gouv.fr/ - maybe certificate ?
problems inputting hebrew, russian, finish characters via vkb.

minor ones:

clipboard operations (cut, copy and paste)
track mozilla bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313665 (minimo exits crashing if X button if pressed)
try to fix download dialog crash.
'open file' does not work.
remove 'pushd/popd' commands from run-minimo script uses - they seem to be not supported. (FIXED in 0.16.8-1)
proxy are not being set properly via vkb. (FIXED in 0.16.8-1)
keep tarsbar on the top on fullscreen mode by default. (FIXED in 0.16.8-1)
add menu item for toggle on/off spatial navigation / scrolling via arrow buttons. (FIXED in 0.16.8-1)
remove 'enable ssr' and 'Set minimo as default browser' check buttons from preferences-general tab. (FIXED in 0.16.8-1)
addind back ' X' button for tab closing. (FIXED in 0.16.8-2)
look for a rotate screen solution.

ps : this list might grow up. It depends only on your feedback. Feel free to suggest anything.

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

minimo 016.7 (maemo port) available

2006-11-21T14:33:00.000-08:00

New minimo maemo port 016.7 available.

*******************
* RELEASE NOTES *
*******************

This release does not bring outstanding new features, but lots of stability improvements instead, once this release is based on a MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH cvs snapshot dated from Novembed 18th (btw, this branch is also sourcebase of firefox 2.x ).

Follows an overview of supported features so far:

traditional browser funcionalities like: reload, go, back and forward.
tabbed browsing (no new window at all, even for popups)
preferences tab with

proxy set up,
enable/disable VKB,
launch in full-screen mode option
display (or not) images
cache setting

a built-in bookmark component
basic panning component
find in webpage
text zooming.

The outstanding thing of this release is the fact that patches applied against mozilla cvs snapshot are cleaned up and you will be able to build it yourself soon. To make it possible, I've created a simple automated build system for minimo (see this). I haven't uploaded them so far due to lack of a good enought server to host them (garage.maemo ?!?!?).

Another cool point is that minimo maemo port stuff are about to be hosted in garage.maemo.org domains, but garage's resources were not that enought good by the time I checked it out. Anyway, I've created a project already, and please feel free to join it

ps: Find instructions about minimo instalation on the nokia 770 (maemo 2.x) via maemo's application manager here.

please, feel free to feedback at tonikitoo at gmail dot com

--Antonio Gomes

Newest minimo coming with patches available.

2006-11-19T12:15:00.000-08:00

Wow, after a "busy" Sunday (actually I woke up at 2 PM :)) I finally I got newest mozilla minimo cvs snapshot (18th Nov) built on maemo i386 environment. Even better, I got all my patches uptodated as well as a directory struture for building it. It looks like:

[sbox-maemo2-i386: ~/minimo/newest] > ls -R minimo/newest/
build/:
mozilla/

./do_it_all.sh

patches/:
armel-specific failed general maemo-specific old ongoing

patches/armel-specific:
buildfix_lots.diff buildfix_missing_chk_files.diff buildfix_preparea_and_dispatch_arm_sbox.diff old

patches/armel-specific/old:
075_OPTIMIZATIONS_xpcom_arm.diff 145_MAEMO_cs_mthumb_hack.diff 185_MAEMO_CODESOURCERY_hack_prdtoa.diff buildfix_shligsign_arm_sbox.diff

patches/failed:
185_MAEMO_CODESOURCERY_hack_prdtoa.diff minimo_shared.patch

patches/general:
ongoing runfix_encryto.diff runfix_gtkmozembed.diff

patches/general/ongoing:
command_line_parser.diff

patches/maemo-specific:
adding_debian_folder.diff adding_maemo_specific_files.diff disable_ssr_component.diff fullscreen_stuff_and_disable_google_view.diff prefs.diff softkb.diff~
adding_maemo_specific_code.diff bigger_menu_default_font_size.diff fix_loggin_bustage_mika.diff linking_against_dbus_and_osso_stuff.diff softkb.diff

patches/old:
adding_debian_folder.diff psm_working_on_minimo.diff.bak update_linux_package.patch

tarballs/
mozilla.tar.bz2

I am building it to armel right now, tomorrow I will see how good it runs on maemo 2.1. Hopefully, minimo will also completely move to garage.maemo soon. Keep tuned.

--Antonio Gomes

Firefox 2.0 and Helsinki Lauching Party - update

2006-11-08T05:34:00.000-08:00

ps: This post is TOO LATE :)

We have a launching party also here in Helsinki for celebrating Firefox 2.0 releasing. Some goods shots ...

Check some of its new features out.

--Antonio Gomes

minimo on SU-18_2006SE_2.2006.39-14_PR_F5_MR0_ARM.bin

2006-11-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

I just flashed my nokia 770 with newest public image [1] and I also installed minimo maemo port newest binaries [2]. Everything works fine.

btw, I've realized major improvements on system stability as announced. Built-in Opera Browser seems much stable also. Apart from that, gservices are still issues (gchat, gcalendar and so on). Also meebo.com is a bit buggy. So, try them with minimo instead :)

[1] http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HOWTO_FlashLatestNokiaImageWithLinux
[2] http://tonikitoo.blogspot.com/2006/09/minimomozilla-maemo-port-repository.html

Bad server for minimo maemo port

2006-10-25T00:07:00.000-07:00

My host place for minimo maemo port stuff seems to be not a good one at all: it's always either out of service or slow, or sometimes both. Actually there is a reason: it is not a development host place, bla bla bla , it is just my old student home space at university servers, which is passing to changes currently.

So I apologize for all problems accessing it ... I am looking for a place to move it to (SF seems to be a intuitive choice).

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

minimo 016.6 (maemo port) available

2006-10-18T15:25:00.000-07:00

New minimo 0.16.6-1 maemo-port available featuring:

$ cat debian/changelog

minimo (0.16.6-1) unstable; urgency=low

* loggins bustage fix (now it works for yahoo mail and many other).

This release basically fixes the problem reported here, no others. For instructions about installing it, check it out ( NOTE: distribution field has changed from binary-arm to mistral).

ps: I felt myself free to quote Mika's (who was responsible for this hacking) last email about this:

(...)

Anyway, I find out the reason behind the form submit problem. The problem was in the html form content code itself which for some reason changes the charset encoding to "windows-1252" if it detects the "ISO-8859-1" encoding.

The problem does not propably happen in wince because it has the support for windows-1252 encoding but because that is not available in 770, the encoding fails there. The cause of the problem is GetEncoder() method in content/html/content/src/nsFormSubmission.cpp and there following lines:

if (charset.EqualsLiteral("ISO-8859-1")) {
charset.AssignLiteral("windows-1252");
}

If those lines are removed from the GetEncoder method , charset encoding works ok in Minimo Linux for forms and then also the form submit works ok. I am just not 100 % sure how to fix this, because maybe this windows-1252 encoding is required in windows. (and also in desktop linux for some clue I have not find out yet.)

(...)

Next Steps:

Hardware keys support.
Mozilla/minimo sourcebase update.

ps: this was an excelent hack job, Mika (lamikr).
ps: I haven't tested it TOO much. It just installed and ran , and I went bed. Tomorrow I will ... :)

--Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

hack days

2006-10-02T11:37:00.000-07:00

picture of our staying in finland . It has being a busy and hackie time even at "home" :)

--Antonio Gomes

I've been abroad

2006-09-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

from last week until december, I believe, I'll be out for work stuff in Helsinki, Finland ...

helsinki and espoo are great cities, nice people and bealtifil girls. Nokia build and infrastructure are also very good ...

Some logins failings on minimo maemo

2006-09-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

Some of you that have tried minimo maemo port have noticed/reported some logins failings. Lamikr got me an url that might help to find out what is going wrong.

Open MiniMo,
go to http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_form_submit
submit any values.

user+passwd values are not being passed correctly, so it fails as an empty login. The funny is that it happens only when I build minimo inside scratchbox, outside it works fine. Have to file this bug ...

--Antonio Gomes

Minimo/Mozilla (maemo port) repository - UPDATE

2006-09-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Note: for 'mistral' distribution has changed :)
Note 2: find BORA setup notes at http://tonikitoo.blogspot.com/2007/03/minimo-maemo-port-0169-1-available.html

Since last maemo port release, Minimo/Mozilla Browser has an arm repository for an easier installation/upgrade on the nokia 770. Follows instruction of how to set it up:

from command line:

"gainroot"

$ echo "deb http://home.ufam.edu.br/~agan/minimo/ mistral/ " >> /etc/apt/source.list

$ apt-get update && aptitude minimo

from AppManager

Add this entry into "new catalogue":

web address: http://home.ufam.edu.br/~agan/minimo/

Distribution: mistral/

Components: n/a

"Refresh list"

Go to "Install new applications"

pick minimo up.

This way, minimo's runtime dependencies (libxt6, libsm6 and libice6) were also up uploaded and are pulled down and installed if needed.

ps: the set up itself is quite easy and I'll maybe blog about it soon.
ps2: the trailing back slash is needed, I believe !!!! :)
--Antonio Gomes

minimo 016.4 (maemo port) available

2006-08-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

New minimo 0.16.4-1 maemo-port available featuring:

$ cat debian/changelog
minimo (0.16.4-1) unstable; urgency=low

* improvements on softkb interaction (thanks to tim).
* arm and i386 repositories set at home.ufam.edu.br/~agan (thanks to rbelem).
* built with distcc (arm-linux-gcc/g++) (thanks to rbelem again)

Disclaimer:

VKB Thumb mode and handwriting recognition support were not tested/implemented so far
VKB will jump up only if minimo got started up after connection is up.
Some secure sites failed to loggin maybe due to some parameters not being passed in uri, broken submit methods ??.
Flash plugin is not supposed to work.
Most of preferences not implemented yet for linux.

Installing from command line:

"gainroot"
$ echo "deb http://home.ufam.edu.br/~agan/minimo/ binary-arm/ " >> /etc/apt/source.list
$ apt-get update && aptitude minimo

or via AppManager

Add this entry into "new catalogue":

web address: http://home.ufam.edu.br/~agan/minimo/
Distribution: binary-arm/
Components: n/a

Refresh list
Install new applications

pick minimo up.

Future work:

Fix security site browsing
Fix 'go' button
ZoomIN press crashes it.
Autocomplete "suckage"

--Antonio Gomes

X level solution for VKB and Minimo interaction

2006-08-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

These days I have been in touch with some low level (at least in my option) code. I've gone deeply down toward the "ugly" X level programming. Lots of Display, Window, RootWindow, Atom , blablabla ...

Anyways, it was good to have an idea about it , and mainly because through this I got the built-in maemo's virtual keyboard popping up/hiding when focus in/out event occur on minimo, without any gtk-based stuff.

Follows some lines of code that popup vbk manually for you:

(...)
// same as XOpenDisplay (0)?
Display *display = GDK_DISPLAY ();
if (!display) return ;

Atom hildonWindow;

hildonWindow = XInternAtom (display, "_HILDON_IM_WINDOW", true); // original code from Tim.

static char *XAtomNames[] = {"WINDOW"};
static Atom XAtoms[ARRAY_LENGTH(XAtomNames)];

// get needed atoms
XInternAtoms(display, XAtomNames, ARRAY_LENGTH(XAtomNames), False, XAtoms);

if (hildonWindow != None) {
Atom atomType;
int atomFormat;
int res;
unsigned long atomItems;
unsigned long atomBytes;
unsigned char* atomProperties;
::Window imWindow;

// this code fragment, I can get from widget/src/gtksuperwin/gtkmozarea.c:310
// gdk_property_get ?????
res=XGetWindowProperty(display,
RootWindow (display,XDefaultScreen(display)), hildonWindow, 0, 1, false, XAtoms[0],
&atomType, &atomFormat, &atomItems, &atomBytes, &atomProperties);

if (res!=Success || atomProperties==NULL) {
std::cout << "Cannot get IM window" <<>

imWindow=reinterpret_cast< ::Window*>(atomProperties)[0];
std::cout << "Acquire " <<>window << " " <<>

::XEvent event;

memset(&event,0,sizeof(event));
event.xclient.type=ClientMessage;
event.xclient.window=imWindow;
event.xclient.message_type=XInternAtom(display,"_HILDON_IM_ACTIVATE",False);
event.xclient.format=8;
// event.xclient.data.l[0]=RootWindow (display,XDefaultScreen(display));
// event.xclient.data.l[1]=RootWindow (display,XDefaultScreen(display));
event.xclient.data.l[2]=0x08;
event.xclient.data.l[3]=0x00400007;
event.xclient.data.l[4]=0;
if (XSendEvent(display,imWindow,False,NoEventMask,&event)==0) {
std::cerr << "Error while sending vk-1" <<>

event.xclient.message_type= XInternAtom(display,"_HILDON_IM_ACTIVATE",False);
event.xclient.data.l[2]=0x09;

if (XSendEvent(display,imWindow,False,NoEventMask,&event)==0) {
std::cerr << "Error while sending vk-7" <<>
} // end
(...)

ps: I got great support on this coming from Tim (nice German guy) who is also porting a non-gtk application to maemo 2.0. Most of the code above comes from his Illumination app.

--Antonio Gomes

Msc. proposal makes me busy ...

2006-08-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

just to tell that I have stopped minimo development during past two weeks because I have spent most of my free time studying and thinking of ideas for master degree proposal submition. The deadline for this first draft is today ...

Next week, minimo maemo port will be back ...

minimo special effort (part II) - update

2006-07-25T05:02:00.000-07:00

After releasing 3 RC .debs of the maemo/nokia 770 minimo port, and having got lots of feedback, bugs and suggestion, I decided to blog about them. Follows what I think are the most relevant issues to be done:

fix browsing through security site (PARTIALLY DONE - mail.yahoo.com(.xx) works with some magic tricks only).
implement an easy way to leave fullscreen mode (DONE - via bottombar).
improve input fields and virtual keyboard interaction.
autocomplete widget forces you to click twice to remove focus from it (maybe this is no device specific bug, I have to file this into bugzilla)
improving my way of packing up: set up a repository for minimo and its dependecies missing on maemo 2.0 image.
make all patches available asap.

implement 770 Hardware keys support (e.g. ZOOM_IN crashes it)
implement timers to context sensitive menus (it works only on x86 through right-button mouse click - have to file this as a bug).
implement command line parser support bug 334019
implement dbus service for minimo. It would avoid having more then one instance of it running at the same time (btw, dbus-xpcom binding has been announced recently).
fix fs browsing support (it crashes when I type /usr or /etc - although it works for /etf/fstab)

improve ssr (css file) - it makes rendering extremely ugly if on SSR mode (disabled)
make default font bigger (possible adding an observer on preference system) (workarounded)
fix segfault on window closing.
maybe implement a portrait mode view ???

read - critical
blue - that'd be great
black - I could live without it

Other issues:

- gmaps misvisualizing - works for me, though.
- lacking of svg, mathml and cairo.
- testing rendering of some Chinese, Japanese and Arabian encoded websites (ah.sima ???)

any thinkg else ? just mail me.

I wish to have any fund on this :p, after all funding means time !

-- Antonio Gomes

minimo 016.3 (maemo port) available

2006-07-18T21:02:00.000-07:00

New minimo 0.16.3-1 available featuring:

$ cat debian/changelog
minimo (0.16.3-1) unstable; urgency=low

* fixed problem with security websites: loggins are possible now.
* added hidden 'ftp and ssl proxy preferences' set on the same values of
http_proxy prefs.

(...)

NOTE: My way of packing minimo up is wrong: it fails in the case libXt, libICE or/and libSM have been already installed in the system (built-in or not). (bug planned to be solve for 0.16.4 release).

NOTE: Virtual keyboard is still an issue. See the last OLD NOTE bellow. (bug planned to be solve for 0.16.4 release).

NOTE: CHARSET can be set manually via 'about:config' -> charset.

NOTE: Autocompletete forces the users to type twice for text input (bug planned to be solve for 0.16.5 release)

OLD NOTE: Launch-in-fullscreen-mode (one of the most desired features) is already implemented by the minimo team and it's and available from this build.

Go to LEFT-BOTTOM-PREFERENCE-BUTTON->PREFERENCES->(1st TAB) ->SYSTEM_INTEGRATION->FULL_SCREEN_ENABLED

OLD NOTE: To toggle off fullscreen :

Go to LEFT-BOTTOM-PREFERENCE-BUTTON->FULL_SCREEN_MODE

OLD NOTE: Pressing "ENTER" on the rocker pop up/hide the vkb.

OLD NOTE: ZoomIn Hardwarekey crashes it.

Feel free to mail me.

--Antonio Gomes

minimo 016.2 (maemo port) available

2006-07-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

New minimo 0.16.2-1 available featuring:

$ cat debian/changelog
minimo (0.16.2-1) unstable; urgency=low

* Workarounded the lack of way to back from fullscreen mode: now the homebar is still shown even when on fullscreen mode ...

NOTE: Launch-in-fullscreen-mode (one of the most desired features) is already implemented by the minimo team and it's and available from this build.

Go to LEFT-BOTTOM-PREFERENCE-BUTTON->PREFERENCES->(1st TAB) ->SYSTEM_INTEGRATION->FULL_SCREEN_ENABLED ... give it a try . it rocks !

ps: thanks to anonymous for point me out on this solution !!

NOTE: To toggle off fullscreen :

Go to LEFT-BOTTOM-PREFERENCE-BUTTON->FULL_SCREEN_MODE

NOTE: Pressing "ENTER" on the rocker pop up/hide the vkb.

NOTE: Log-ins on security sites is broken.

NOTE: ZoomIn Hardwarekey crashes it.

Feel free to mail me.

ps: nice guys having good talks about it

--Antonio Gomes

minimo 016.1 (maemo port) available - update

2006-07-06T15:48:00.000-07:00

New minimo 016.1 .deb available. It's getting better ;)

$ more mozilla/debian/changelog

minimo (0.16.1-1) unstable; urgency=low

* Trunk updated (July 04)
* Automated build/packing initial version (build_minimo.sh , tarball ,
patches) working
* Fixed lack of entry on task navigator by adding StartupWMClass=minimo into
.desktop file. Minimizing it possible now :) - thanks henry.
* made default webpages font bigger
* made preferences/menus font bigger
* ssr (minimo/components/ssr) component temporarily disabled.

minimo (0.16.1-0) unstable; urgency=low

* added initial dbus-glib implementation, fixing the "system is killing me
after few seconds" problem.
* packed libXt, libSM and libICE together into .deb

shots

Please, any suggestion, bug report or whatever is welcome via comment, email or bugzilla .

ps: check menus at window right and left bottom corner for functionalities.

-- Antonio Gomes

minimo 016 .deb (beta/hack version)

2006-07-03T15:53:00.000-07:00

I got minimo 016 packed into a preliminary-stage-.deb for maemo 2.0/armel. It's AI-able (installable via Application Installer or dpkg) and launchable via 'menu->extra->minimo'.

Main issues I am working on now for the next .deb:

Currently, minimo does not add an entry into Task Navigator after launched, so MINIMIZING IT MIGHT GET YOU INTO PROBLEMS :)
Security sites sometimes work sometime don't (on sbox/i386 it works all the time though).
Typing from the vkb is possible: you can pop it up or hide it by keystroking "ENTER" (button in the middle of arrows).

minimo's port for nokia 770 is not close to be complete (lots to do yet) .

NOTE: This .deb is built over armel architecture, so it will not working on non-armel ones.

NOTE: In this current stage, reproduce by your own the steps I did to build this .deb might be a bit painful (manual process). But, I've been working on a script for automate all these hackings. The script will:

applying all required patches
build and pack it all.

NOTE: some missing libraries on Maemo 2.0 image were a problem.

Please, any suggestion, bug report or whatever is welcome via comment or email.

-- Antonio Gomes

Some progresses on ARM

2006-06-29T13:00:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu (dapper) is great for home using, but there is nothing better then our good and old friend Debian for devel :). While using Ubuntu as development platform, I was able to build minimo for i386 and arm, but always when I tried run it on n770/maemo2.0 it failed. Since then, I've been spending part of my rare free time producing debug builds, strace'ing it, blablabla and nothing 'till today.

So unintentionally I did it all again using a fresh debian sarge machine (set up with same toolchain, rootstraps, compilers). Follows the results:

cnn

brazilian soccer idols

minimo in fullscreen mode

minimo in fullscreen mode (and vkb popped up)

I am cleaning patches up just now and .deb is about to upload.

--Antonio Gomes

arm'ing Minimo 016 ! What am I missing ?

2006-06-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

My odyssey of make minimo 016 work on the n770 has began. After got it built on sbox/maemo2.0 for both i386 and arm, but running it on arm is being painful. That's where I am:

arm build - DONE
AI-installable .deb - DONE
source packing - DONE

menu item added on extra menu (am able to launch minimo from it on sbox/i386 only)
icon on task manager is not added after launch it, even on i386 !!!

initial dbus support - DONE

it is not killed by system when launched from menu on sbox/i386.

vkb synchronization - MISSING
CORE: minimo does not show up when on n770

maybe a libstdc++6 incompatibility ????

I've posted about it on maemo-dev mailing list, but nothing yet ? Btw, after a hand of some nice guys (jay and guilt from ITT) I got it working on IT 2005. Any hint ?

--Antonio Gomes

minimo 016 on maemo2.0/sbox

2006-06-15T12:03:00.000-07:00

good news: I got lots of my old stuff recovered after my laptop damaging 2 weeks later. This holiday, and during world cup matches :), I got back hacking minimo for maemo-2.0. Follows the situation currently:

dougt has launched minimo 0.16. WOW.
I applied some patches (psm + testgtkembed + packaging) into it and built/ran on sbox2.0b-i386.
odd build failing on arm. working on it.

Some nice screenshots:

--Antonio Gomes
http:// tonikitoo dot blogspot dot com

Losing stuff

2006-05-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

My ubuntu got a crash ! Lots of precious data gone away, include some 770 specific minimo patches and unfortunately I haven't done any backup recently so ... :(

Minimo 0.16 Nokia 770 Special Efforts (update)

2006-05-20T15:11:00.000-07:00

Follows are some topics we think are suitable to make minimo Mozilla suitable for the Nokia 770:

Provide an AI-able .deb (DONE)
Adding an icon on 'Extras' menu.
Command line parser (ongoing)

--fullscreen '-f'
--url '-u'
--file '-p'
see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336136 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=334019

Add DBUS support.
Customize the minimo's default SSR CSS file for the huge 77' display.
Static linkage of libstdc++ (avoid external stdc++6 installation).
Adding -Lpath at build time (avoid need of setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH).

see http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/06/static-libstdc/

Synchronizing maemo's virtual keyboard show up/hide events to html forms' focus in/out events.
770 Hardware keys support

Any suggestion ?

I am not sure if all of them will be available for the 0.16 already, but I'll do my best ;)

Minimo 0.15 + PSM support (update)

2006-04-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

I got both minimo and TestGtkEmbed browsering through some "security" sites. That's more than great. So, I'll clean up the code and submit a patch into the mozilla/minimo bugzilla asap ...

I've also debianized such build (Minimo 0.15) for the 770, but unfortunately couldn't test it out on my own 770 so far. Reason: I am not able to update my maemo image: "an invalid ID error" sucks. On my *old* image I got a libstdc++ incompatibility. (minimo requires libstdc++6 to run but it has .5 instead).

So, I'd be much appreciated if someone who I have already flashed the newest maemo image into your 770, could check if libstdc++6 is available,

$ ls -lah /usr/lib/libstdc++*

and if you succeed you can install minimo 0.15 as follows:

_Installing it:

Via AI

_Running it:

Nokia770-05: cd /var/lib/install/usr/lib/minimo/
Nokia770-05: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=.
Nokia770-05:/var/lib/install/usr/lib/minimo# export DISPLAY=:0
Nokia770-05:/var/lib/install/usr/lib/minimo# ./minimo

I've sent a question to dev-maemo asking about it my but nothing yet. Your feedback will be amazing ;)

--Antonio Gomes

Embedding a static build of mozilla ??? Probably no ...

2006-04-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

A learn-by-doing time has just arrived at INdT this "year". So, just answering to some who have written to me, "yes, my lack of posts about manaos is mainly because of the bunch of work out here ... noone's fault.

- so, is manaos apart *again* ?
- not at all. I've been planning crucial changes at the engine layer: instead of running over a minimo build, manaos will probably run over a xulrunner-minimal-gecko-profile build, just following on the tendency of embedding mozilla for the future. This was a suggestion from dougt, and seems to work.

--Antonio Gomes

MiniMo 0.14 running on 770

2006-04-03T19:17:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I spent some time making a .deb of the newest MiniMo (Mini Mozilla - 0.14) and that's what I can tell about it:

As faster as an end user can expect
11 Mbs of footprint (GREAT !)

Nokia770-05:/var/lib/install/usr/lib/minimo# du -sh

10.7M

Has SSR and Pan !!!!

What makes me impressed was the fact of with any modification on the minimo source code, it runs on 770 very well (it's a XUL app not GTK) !

Congrats to Minimo Team. For more about it check dougt's post

Looking Forward to put MANaOS running over such a build. I hope doug can help here :)

_Installing it:

Via AI

Change of plans - Manaos-Mozilla 0.1.4

2006-03-21T05:03:00.000-08:00

From now on, MANaOS (Mozilla Browser) will be running over the maemo-mozilla-engine available at Nokia's official repository, which is btw much more frequently updated. So, all engine level efforts will be coming from there, at least until we get the whole engine sourcebase updated and synchronized to the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH (Firefox 1.5.0.x - 2.x trees).

Of course, all credits will be given to who has provided such package(s): Nokia and INdT.

ps: This is not a functionality release, instead we just aim to straighten the situation out. So, those who have installed 0.1.3 be warned that there is nothing new in terms of functionalities, and furthermore, it could bring back to some old bugs for a while (e.g. spatial navigation breakage - crashes on arrow keystroke). Of course 0.1.5 release will fix them up.

Steps to get 0.1.4 installed:

Users

Download maemo-browser-mozilla-engine and manaos-maemo-minimo.
Install both packages using AI.

for Development:

Put these lines to the /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://repository.maemo.org maemo1.1 free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org maemo1.1 free non-free

deb http://repository.maemo.org maemo1.1-extras free non-free
deb-src http://repository.maemo.org maemo1.1-extras free non-free

fakeroot apt-get update

fakeroot apt-get install cpp-3.3
fakeroot apt-get install cpp
fakeroot apt-get install libidl0
fakeroot apt-get install maemo-browser-mozilla-engine

fakeroot apt-get install maemo-browser-mozilla-engine-dev

Compile or install BIA (bia-minimo-dev)
Compile Manaos

PS: Thanks "gotcha" at http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18370581&postID=113306925921974055 . You have opened my mind :)

MANaOS (Mozilla-based Web Browser) 0.1.3 out

2006-03-17T13:59:00.000-08:00

Using MANaOS Web Browser to blog this.

0.1.3 version of MANaOS is out, comprising some really useful features:

concrete installation improvements: AI-able.
spatial navigation: jump between focusable elements though hardware arrows.

no crashes anymore.

draft zooming algorithm (not as faster speed-wise opera's).
small redrawing improvements.
minor bug fixes like:

Find - search for a text in webpage.
Block pop-up window - It's better block them to avoid crashes ... It sucks, I know.

Set default "home" page (no more www.uol.com.br at all)
SSL(2) and JS support via MENU->SETTINGS
hiding Vkb after pressing 'GO' and so on ...

Instructions about uninstalling previous versions (if you have gave them a try) can be found here or in the case you have installed them via x-term
$ sudo gainroot
$ dpkg -r manaos-maemo-minimo
$ dpkg -r manaos-mozilla-engine
ps: ignoring warnings you get.
ps2: if none of them work, drop me an e-mail or post a comment.

Known bugs:

Open new window, including pop-up window.
Context sensitive menus are not working properly some times.
preferences stuff: writing them down in the "wrong" setting file.
Image zoom fails sometimes

improvements were already implemented but not packaged.

Coming:

Themes look-like improvements (eliminate wasted space in toolbar)
zooming improvements
new window stuff working

Afonso Costa has been working on MANaOS recently. He's doing it GREATLY.

--Antonio Gomes

Web surfing with an extensioned Firefox

2006-03-16T18:59:00.000-08:00

Back posting about desktop stuff, this time I'd like to express my pleasure about my recent web surfing experience with a fully customized Firefox.

From a high level (user) point of view, some obviously reasons makes it the best: security, rendering quality and velocity, simplicity of use, changeable look and feel, community support, and of course the ability of making it the web browser I want to just with some clicks and extension. Following are some of ones that are making it really usefull: grab-and-drag, small screen rendering, session saver, image zoom, link preview, reveal, gmail notifier, greasemonkey and ajax yahoo mail, just to list a few.

From a embedder, I'd say their embedding APIs rock ! Btw, grab-and-drag, image zoom and small screen rendering will be ported to MANaOS.

Regardless some warnings about the bad extension usage, I love mine ones !!!

ps: MANaOS releasing by tommorrow !

--Antonio Gomes

MANaOS 0.1.2 is out - update

2006-03-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

This unstable development release is a bit more end-user-friendly and features:

some installation improvements

"dpkg -i" not required anymore.

targeting /var/lib/install/usr/... instead of straight on "/"

Launching from "Extra Menuicon"

no root required to launching it any more
history segfault fixed

Source code partially redesigned.
Virtual Keyboard improvements (still have problems as reported here - jay's comment)

synchronization between it and HTML forms.
it stopped popping-up everytime.

Cool chinese rendering screenshot from pawa"

_getting 0.1.2 installed

gettting new AI-installable MANaOS .debs (gnuite-ITT rocks ! many thanks) - old ones are here.
installing them via AI.
running it from "Extras" menuicon

_stable version (0.2)

We've decided do not publishing MANaOS' source code until we have a stable version (0.2) of it running well, as well as:

minor bug fixes (multi appviews support and main entry expansion |minimizing)
draft zooming capabilities
installation via A.I.

(more about the coming releases here and an enjoyable discussion about 0.1.2 ITT).

ps : A "great job congrat" Afonso Rabelo and Tomaz Noleto for their efforts on .deb templates and code redesign.

ps2 : keep dropping me mails with suggestions, doubts, whatever.

ps3: thanks to gnuite's debs and effots

tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Getting MANaOS Browser 0.1.1 RC installed on arm

2006-02-21T21:26:00.000-08:00

First of all, getting MANaOS installed on the 77 device at this stage is a little bit a hacking/boring job :p

ARM:

1) Getting a xterm emulator - It can be installed via AI :)
2) Getting .debs (only manaos-mozilla-engine and manaos itself are required)

manaos-maemo-minimo_0.1.0-1_arm.deb  18-Feb-2006 10:41   77K
manaos-mozilla-engine_0.2.0-1_arm.deb 18-Feb-2006 11:00  5.7M

3) gain root access
$ sudo gainroot

4) ln -s /var/lib/install/var/lib/dpkg /var/lib/dpkg
(by max)

5) install them
$ dpkg -i manaos-maemo-minimo_0.1.0-1_arm.deb
$ dpkg -i manaos-mozilla-engine_0.2.0-1_arm.deb

6) run it
$ cd /usr/lib/minimo
$ run-standalone.sh ./run-mozilla.sh /usr/bin/manaos

ps: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH should not be required, but if it is let me know, please

TBD: Installing all the files into /var/lib/install/ instead of directly to /

Antonio Gomes

MANaOS 0.1.1 RC1 is out

2006-02-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

I'm finally launching MANaOS Web Browser 0.1.1 RC for both ARM and i386 as well as making its sourcebase also available at here.

But what is MANaOS ?

The project itself is an open source initiative aiming to provide a mozilla-based and "full" web compliant Browser for the maEmo platform. (see here for more about it). It was in standby since of June 2005, because of no time in this meanwhile. But, we hope to get you monthly releases, at least.

About 0.1.1 RC version and what's coming ...

This is the RC which will lead up to 0.2. So, please drop me emails with bugs, suggestions, whatever ;) Thus, as all development releases it has a _long_ list of TODO tasks (see bellow) as well as a _not-as-long_ list of bugs to be fixed. But it works for most of the web sites we tested (check cool screenshots out). Now, regarding the coming_soon releases, I can tell you it will features spatial navigation and an 10-times optimized version of the zooming algorithm, and virtual keyboard/HTML forms synchronization.

TODO list

TASKS	STATUS
solving the multi-appviews problem	TODO - EASY
make it installable from AI	TODO - Coming to 0.2
main entry expanding	TODO - EASY
fixing up the set_profile method	DONE - Coming to 0.2
ssl/nss log-in.	TODO - specially webmail.ufam.edu.br fails
speeding up the zooming algorithm	TODO - Coming 0.2
panning	TODO - have a look at grab-n-drag
Encoding support	TODO - Coming to 0.3
plug-ins	TODO - missing flash-arm-plug-in
download manager	TODO - not that hard
better history - using mozilla's history.dat	TODO - not that hard
Entire code redesign	TODO - Coming to 0.2/0.3
footprint reduction	TODO - hacking chrome/
updating the engine source base	TODO - (see bug) Coming to 0.3
better matching theme	TODO - Coming to 0.3

in bold - coming with 0.2

red - coming with 0.3

Thanks to Andre Pedralho, Tomaz Noleto, Afonso Rabelo (great .debs template !!!), Diego Gonzalez and Elmano Carvalho, (coders of MANaOS so far) and also who was waiting for it.

(sorry for the long awaited time and send me back bugs you found ;)).

Antonio Gomes
http:// tonikitoo (dot) blogspot (dot) com

openGL and Mozilla (posting using 770)

2006-02-09T19:54:00.000-08:00

uBrowser (mozilla-based browser) screenshot

an image like as above can say more than words, but here we go anyways (this time, from my Nokia 770)

It seems like there are some softwares/corporations getting them activities somehow involved with the OpenGL 3D rendering multiplatform library (among them, I can tell Adobe and Mozilla, for instance).

It's really impressing what such a library makes possible you to do in a easy way. Well, to a _programmer_, OpenGL is a set of commands that allow the specification of geometric objects in two or three dimensions, together with commands that control how these objects are rendered into the framebuffer. For the most part, OpenGL provides an immediate-mode interface, meaning that specifying an object causes it to be drawn.

But what made me pay it a special attention was the launching of ubrowser.

"It is a simple Web Browser that illustrates one way of embedding the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine into a standalone application using LibXUL. In this case, the contents of the page is grabbed as it's being rendered and displayed as a texture on some geometry using OpenGL. You are able to interact with the page (mostly) normally and visit (almost) any site that works correctly with Firefox1.5.", says its author.

MiniMo (Mozilla for small devices) half-2006 roadmap is out

2006-01-27T11:06:00.000-08:00

DougT, leadership of MiniMo Project, has published the roadmap for the first 6 months of 2006. It includes some outstanding features:

__the following ones will sure rock the boat (if you will):

Footprint and performance
Content rendering and small screen rendering
Customization and extension system enabling
Improvements in the build, development, testing, release, and project management infrastructure
Review of Mobile devices and competitive analysis in the mobile space

__hardcore:

Migration to Cairo -> this one specially makes me scratch my hair ...

Badly, there is no mention neither of Linux nor GTK stuff at all(only WinCE and XUL), but I'm sure it'll work for us though, "linuxans" :)

--from Doug's blog at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/dougt/archives/009634.html
see for more detailed/technical description

for more about it: read out MINIMO ON 770 ;)

--Antonio Gomes

just a little taste :) of MANaOS - update

2006-01-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

Check out some full-screen-mode screenshots taken from running MANaOS (on i386/scratchbox) during a debuggin section this afternoon ... just browsering around :)

updating feeds on ueba.net/ (good-for-nothing)

wasting time on OKUT.COM

updating myself on maEmo stuff

blogging

Some hacks are required before releasing its 002 version, though ! Anyway, even for a while I CAN'T tell much, probably something better than MANaOS is coming :p ... keep on

--Antonio Gomes
http:// tonikitoo (dot) blogspot (dot) com (slash)

"coming soon ..." soon ? how soon ?

2006-01-07T14:30:00.000-08:00

It's just to apologize for new MANaOS 002 packages delay. Actually, this project was begun as a "intentless and innocent" private initiative, aiming to get the 77'device free of all proprietary solutions, like the "good" Opera Browser shipped into it so far. And it was in standby for a while because of my heavy demand of work on the second-half of 2005.

I am pleased that some of the posts have requested debian packages from me, so there is someone waiting for that :) (specially the anonymous guy, neil grogan, gultig, esteban and others). So here are my reasons:

(non-technical ones) I've took holidays since Christmas time, and right now I'm enjoying my last free weekend :p ...

(technical one) I've gotten some weird compile errors while building cvs "checkouted" sourcebasas inside scratchbox (not outside at all).

Happily, on my last chat with Doug Turner, he mentioned the following: "I need to get a Linux build going. I know what the problem is. Feel free to post this as my comment." So here it is :)

So now, there is no time for further blablablas anymore ... It's just to do it !!!

Antonio Gomes
http:// tonikitoo (dot) blogspot (dot) com (slash)

footprint reduction trigger :)

2005-12-14T08:18:00.000-08:00

These days I've played a bit with pretty interesting application called UPX (Ultimate Packer for eXecutables) and I'd tell you that I got quite impressed on how it can reduce the footprint of some BIG apps. Well, in short terms, it's an open source (over the GNU licenses/rights) that supports packing of a variety of binary formats (executables and/or static libraries), and according to its official website it performs that better than the traditional (g)zip.

So I went to test it out its compression ratio with MiniMo and Firefox 1.5 and I got something like 60% of footprint saving for them and no memory overhead for your compressed executables because of in-place decompression (at least on desktop, but it is not a good benchmark at all, I know). In pratical terms, following are some numbers over MiniMo:

I applied UPX only on the it 'minimo' executable and:

it comes from 6,6 to 3,0 Mbs

agomes@tonix:~/mozilla/make_install/lib/minimo-0.009$ du -sh minimo
6.6M minimo

agomes@tonix:~/mozilla/make_install/lib/minimo-0.009$ upx -9 minimo
Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
Copyright (C) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004
UPX 1.25 Markus F.X.J. Oberhumer & Laszlo Molnar Jun 29th 2004

File size Ratio Format Name
-------------------- ------ ----------- -----------
6905384 -> 3086148 44.69% linux/386 minimo

Packed 1 file.
agomes@tonix:~/mozilla/make_install/lib/minimo-0.009$ du -sh minimo
3.0M minimo

thus, the entire MiniMo app comes from '14' to '9.6' Mbs easily ...

ps: I "regardlessed" the other shared ones libs ".so" on there, once UPX does not support packing such a format so far, although is does for Windows' .dll)

Again, I've tested it on i386 machines so far, but the good results led me to add a checking of how suitable UPX is in the 770 world on the top of my TODO task for coming days ... Actually, the author mentions no support for embedded so far, but as Nokia 770 is not a embedded device (but a "Desktop Linux running over an arm processor" I'll be testing it soon. As soon as I manage to port it for maEmo (if I do) I'll be testing it with MANaOS as well ;) and publishing the results here ...

obs: my guess is that it works by removing the table of symbols from binaries (so it is not for debug phase), but I am not sure ... hacks jobs are coming !

--Antonio Gomes
http:// tonikitoo (dot) blogspot (dot) com/

ps: thanks to my friend Allan Bezerra (from Unicamp/SP/Br - Code optimization expertise) for introduciming this tool. looking forward to make it real ...

XUL-based applications/environment on the Nokia 770 device

2005-11-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

If you are one of those guys that enjoy a good discussion, probably mailing lists are good places for you waste some words, and point out your opinions. These days a thread was rounding the maemo-developers list. Again, it was discussing about 'why has Nokia chosen building maEmo as GTK-based instead of a QT*-based environment'. Of course, some flames and aggressiveness posts, but it was a good talking after all. So, let me I reopen up this talking (between me and myself, I know), but this time, I wanna go deeper, revolutionizing and flaming :p

LET'S RAMBLE ABOUT GUI toolkits ...

Graphical applications, in general, are built of "small" components like dialog buttons and mail inbox folders, which we collectively term "widgets." Within a widget, drawing and user interactions are completely under control of the individual widget, and set when the widget was built. Relative placement of widgets, their interactions with each other, and optionally some of their configuration, will be controlled by a UI layout specified in a script whose structure is defined in this and related documents.

That's what GTK (QT and whatever toolkit) provides to, and even in the case of maEmo that is it. Having more the one toolkits supported on the device is I'd say unfeasible (for performance and storage points). However, I was thinking: are GTK and QT* the only ones available ?

HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT XUL ???

XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a user interface markup language developed to support Mozilla applications like Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. The point is: it's becoming bigger than what they had in mind. I'd say that it is one of the most powered languages for UI programming available so far. I mean its main benefit is that it provides a simple and portable definition of common widgets. This reduces the software development effort in a way analogous to the savings offered by 4GL tools.

XUL defines a wide range of elements, which roughly belong to the following types:

Top-level elements

e.g. window, page, dialog, wizard, etc.

Widgets

e.g. label, button, text box, list box, combo box, radio button, check box, tree, menu, toolbar, group box, tab box, color picker, spacer, splitter, etc.

Box model

e.g. box, grid, stack, deck, etc.

Events and Scripts

e.g. script, command, key, broadcaster, observer, etc.

Data source

e.g. template, rule, etc.

Others

e.g. overlay (analogous to SSI, but client side and more powerful), iframe, browser, editor, etc.

It is possible to use elements from other applications of XML within XUL documents, such as XHTML, SVG and MathML.

ps: Some common widgets - such as spinbox, slider, and canvas - are not available in the current XUL widget set, but are planned for XUL 2.0

AND SO ??? ...

Well, regarding embedded environments, I'm not sure about its usage on projects like maemo-xul (notice it does not exist at al). IMHO, XUL is not as mature as it should be for so, but the ideia exists

... hey ... pymaemo's been ported before ! What about xulmaemo !?!?. Programming using XML and has a build for GTk would be amazing, wouldn't it ?!

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

MANaOS Embedded Browser (for Nokia 770)

2005-11-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

(selling a browser)

"MANaOS is an open source alternative Web Browser for some proprietary ones still shipped with the Nokia 770 device". It embeds mozilla and khtml (partially).

I'd say that a differencial feature between it and other similar Mozilla-based (or not) embedded open source web browsers is that MANaOS implements BIA (Browser Interface Agent). What a f... is that ?! Shortly, BIA is a not too complicated abstraction (software layer) for Rendering Engine independence at compile time. In other words, it enables you just adding a --with-engine=mozilla/khtml and it's done !

the MANaOS guys keep their focus on testing the Mozilla Embedded Project libs and the GtkMozEmbed set of widgets, measuring footprint and paying special attention on the performance of Minimo/Mozilla build on Nokia' 77'device, everything as an open source initiative. It uses a almost default Minimo build, except for the disabling XUL (--disable-xul specified on the mozconfig file (mozilla/minimo/config/mozconfig/linux_x86) and a simple extension for zoomming based on the colorzilla algorithm (this component is built in JS and suchs on a real device).

With regardings to the KHTML Engine' support, just some basic functionalities are provided so far, like go-stop-back-forward.

Some propaganda can be found here (from dougt's blog) ;)

GOOD-FOR-NOTHING -> repercussion of MANaOS after the annoucement of its first release is here on the maemo-developers mailing list.

ps1: I'll be releasing MANaOS 0.2 soon with some bugfixes and interesting improvements, like spatial-naviation and zooming support.
ps2: how to get it installed on the Nokia 770

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com

Minimo (XUL) on the Nokia 770

2005-11-27T10:23:00.000-08:00

These days I managed to run Minimo, that uses XUL get its UI built, on the Nokia 770. Although some hacking jobs are still needed, it is a great achievement regardless of these details :)

So, it's just a summarized howto of what I had to do to get it working on the 77'device.

RESOUCES USED:

** 1 Nokia 770 (hardware B4)
** 1 reduced size (rs) mmc
** 1 usb hub
** 1 usb cable (linking the device's usb port to another usb) - it comes with the device
** 1 usb-usb adapter (female-female)
** 1 usb cable (linking the adapter to the usb hub)
** 1 usb fast internet adapter (linked into the usb-hub)
** 1 usb-serial cable (link the device to the pc's serial port) - get root access.

Pull your rootstrap.

Flash the device (this step is not mandatory) - I flashed the newest rootstrap on 77'device actually a nokia's internal rootstrap instead of the public one available on the maEmo repository. If you're curious enough though,see here for more details.

Set up your scratchbox

Create an 'arm target', select it, unpack our rootstrap there (just a a set of scratchbox commands)

pulling and build mozilla/minimo.

copy the binaries to the device (humm, for this, I acessed the device via ethernet-serial port using an application called Minicom (I lot of cable involved:), but it can be done using a mmc card). btw, i've blogged it here before.

run minimoXUL from the x-terminal app inside the device.

$ cd path_to_your_dist/bin
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:.
$ run-standalone ./minimo

Minimo hasn't its inputs recognized by the environment (it's absolutily acceptable once it isn't a Hildon/GTK app), and I'm only able to browser on local files (I am not able to set up the proxies) ...

Antonio Gomes
tonikitoo at gmail dot com