the beauty of open source...

...is that it just doesn't die because somebody says so.

A lot of noise has been made about Intel closing up the MeeGo shop and heading for new waters, but predictably, a lot of people aren't very happy with this move, both individuals and companies who have products based around MeeGo.

I won't rehash the story any more than that, except to say this: MeeGo, or the ideals of it - an open mobile-oriented platform featuring Qt is still very much valid and needed, and it's not going away. There's some discussion already going on on the MeeGo lists about how best to continue, already.

Watch this space. MeeGo (in some form or other) is not dead, and neither is Qt.

MeeGo CE work

With the governance for MeeGo CE now being turned over to the community, and increasingly, the work on MeeGo also being done by the community, I thought that perhaps now was a good time to look at where we are, and where I think our priorities should be. I've already started working on these myself, and will continue to do so.

Present:

• CE Fall Release is a good start, a lot faster than 1.2
• We still use too much memory running daemons for things we (mostly) don't use, like Tracker. We should look at ways to minimise this penalty, or remove the offenders.
• We are lacking in applications in a number of areas
• Our (MTF-provided) theming is really ugly IMHO

Future:

• It was looking like we were more or less going to get a new UI'for free' from Intel with their tablet work, but signs show that they seem to have abandoned this work, so I don't think we should rely on it, and given that it isn't at all optimised for our screen sizes and resource constraints, we can't really reuse it wholesale, either. That thankfully doesn't mean we can't reuse pieces (lipstick uses parts of meego-ux-launcher. :)
• We should investigate applauncherd to (further) speed up application load times. This will have a memory hit, so we should be careful, and measure to make sure it is really worth it, but this could also be minimised by only running the QML booster plugin.
• Qt needs investigation to make sure graphicssystem switching is actually working; I don't think it is at present, and this may mean a lot of wasted RAM with GL contexts being held by backgrounded applications.
• Software tuning is required on all areas of the stack, one simple example found in a few minutes of investigation is messageserver, which links to QtGui unnecessarily.
• It would be nice to revisit theming, and make things prettier. This is possible on an application-by-application process (e.g. I personally think things like lipstick and qmlcalc are the start of some good directions), but we need to make sure we have an up-to-date, OSS licensed Qt Components theme available which *looks good*, and also *really* nice looking icons for our applications.
• More applications! I've started work on a clock / alarm application, we'll see where it goes in the next week or two. I'm waiting for Tom Swindell (alterego) of MeeGo fame to help me with a nice QML theme for lipstick, and there's a few other projects I have on the boil too - watch this space...

Sorry for the brain-dump. I hope someone has found it helpful/useful, it's at least helped me prioritise things a bit for myself, maybe for you too? :)

It should go without saying, but should anyone want to help out on CE at getting an open source mobile OS into top gear, please, by all means get in contact with us on #meego-arm on freenode, and we'll find you something to do.

relocation...

It's been a few years since I last moved house, although that was a small hop. Just across the hallway from my previous flat. I figured it was about time to move countries again, so I said goodbye to folks, closed all my accounts, and have finally made the move I've been planning for a long time now: to Norway.

I'm just about starting to get settled in here, I have my fødelsnummer and other paperwork mostly sorted out and am generally loving things. I guess I might have to start writing in Norwegian sometime in the future for practice, but perhaps that's something for another blog.

As a result of all this, my work situation is changing a bit, but not too much, thankfully. I've been forced to start my own company (my second in my lifetime, actually), but thankfully I'll keep working along with the great folks at Collabora - just with a little more freedom for adventure, should I so wish it.

Oh, and I nearly got married while my parents were visiting. But the paperwork didn't quite arrive in time.

That's about all the life updates for now... ;)