Wednesday, December 17, 2008

WebKit EFL receives its first patch

So first I would like to thanks everyone for their interest and support for the EFL-port of WebKit. People have been asking me for some screenshots, so I made one.

It doesn't look like much as our test browser doesn't even have an address field yet, but at least it shows that I have logged into my google account and that it is possible to use Google Reader :-)



Later I hope to do a nice browser demo using Edje, if someone else doesn't step up and does it.

Anyway, we also got our first patch today from Cedric Bail that fixes some crashes he had running on his system. Really nice knowing that people are already playing around with the code!

EDIT: People asked me how to get and compile the code, well it is easy:

  • git clone git://code.staikos.net/webkit webkit
  • cd webkit
  • git checkout origin/kenneth/efl-port
  • ./autogen.sh –with-port=efl --enable-web-workers=no
  • make
In order to test, you can run the test launcher:
  • Programs/EWebLauncher http://www.enlightenment.org

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

WebKit ported to the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries

So, the last month and a half I have been porting WebKit to the EFL libraries. It has been something that I wanted to do for a long time, but due to other projects I never got around to it. It has been a very interesting last month and a half and it is very gratifying having something that is already usable :-) I hope that now vtorri (from #edevelop on freenode) will be very happy as he have encouraged me to do the port for I think about half a year.

Some of our Manaus-based guys were already looking at doing the port so I went one month to the tropical rain forest to get the port really going. A lot of things are already working, some things ain't, like keyboard input, but we're looking into that. Just be patient :-)

If people are interested the code lived in the kenneth/efl-port branch of git://code.staikos.net/webkit - and thus shares place with the Qt port.

Now begins the work on improving the code, getting it reviewed and sometime in the future getting it all upstream!

EDIT: Keyboard input now works thanks to Diego Gonzalez!

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Presenting QEdje

So Nokia bought Trolltech and brought Qt into the fold. Really surprising to most of us, but also very exciting. I had never used Qt before, though heard lots of nice things about it from my team at the German Aerospace Center. Actually, I have never been much fond of KDE, and 4.0 also didn't make me that excited, though I must say that the same counts for GNOME these days.

Anyway, Qt seems to be gaining ground so I installed Qt, and me and my team started researching this nice new technology. I have never been fond of programming in C++, maybe I have changed, but programming in Qt/C++ have been a breeze so far. Qt is a high quality piece of software and something not to be ignored.


Working on Canola and other internal projects during the last year have brought a lot of experience to the team. We have learned that our investment in MVC, our plugin system and the Edje [1] canvas interface description language have born fruits, and is something that we cannot do without; I'm still amazed how much we completed in basically a years time.

So Qt seems to be an important player in Nokia's future, atleast for the Internet Tablet, so to be better aligned with that, we researched the viability of porting Edje to Qt, and are very proud of making the announcement that the most important parts are already there and released under the same license model as Qt.


Three guys from the team are present at the aKademy conference and have been giving a lecture on Edje and our QEdje project. The presentation went very well, and the audience seemed interested. Aaron Seigo went so far to look at implementing Plasma [2] objects (so-called plasmoids) using QEdje. How that went I don't know, but I guess we will see shortly.



The presentation was written using python together with QEdje and pretty fancy in my opinion, but we have put a PDF version online for those of you who are interested and didn't go to the lecture.




It can be found here: "QEdje Presentation" (7z compressed) at the project site. A high quality version of the video is also available.

QEdje is still running a bit slow on the Internet Tablet and we have been writing various profiles which we have shared with the Qt developers, showing that we will need some heavy optimizations before we can write applications like Canola and Carman using Qt + QEdje. The Qt developers have been really friendly and paid attention to our requirements, and to make my day, Andreas Aardal Hanssen announced [3] at the conference that they are working hard on improving the raster graphics path in Qt and that it is already 40 times faster in some situations. Now that is what I needed to hear! Tusind Takk!

[1]: Building Interfaces with Edje: The Edje Developers Guide
[2]: Plasma, http://plasma.kde.org
[3]: Qt 4.5 to dramatically improve QtWebKit and QGraphicsView..., dot.kde.org

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Get your cars ready!

It has been some time since my employer INdT has released a new version of our car application, Carman. Carman is a OBD-II analyzer for the Nokia Internet Tablet, that presents various car information (via the onboard debug II interface) to the user, such as engine rounds per minute, calculated load value, vehicle speed, cooland temperature etc.



Carman isn't dead though, and a new, much-improved, version is about to be unleashed :-) still fully opensourced! The new version is similar in architecture to Canola and provides a whole new user experience. As Canola, Carman is now based on the EFL framework and spots an integrated touch-based interface, full with animation, maps integration as well as trip reporting!

Marcelo Oliveira has a post, explaining the details and showing off some of the cool new artwork! Though, not yet integrated with Canola, we are definately toying around with the idea, as well as hoping to be able to release Canola as opensource.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Canola2 vertical mode

Marcelo did a nice post on running Canola in vertical mode and has a video demonstrating the result:



The vertical mode is possible by using Xrandr, which has been ported to Mamona and the Chinook version of Maemo (os2008) by our [INdT] Mamona team. Really cool stuff. Great work guys :-)

Now let's hope someone has the time to adapt the interface for vertical usage.

PS: Leo reminded me to tell that not one line of code was made to the Canola2 before filming this video :-)

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Bossa Conference '08

If you didn't have the privilege of joining our Bossa Conference last year, now is your chance. It was the first INdT sponsored conference on Mobile / Open Source Software and it was a huge success.



To quote some of our attendances:

"The best Open Source conference I had the pleasure of attending."
Zack Rusin
KDE/MESA/Gollium3D


"The Bossa Conference was an awesome event. For me it was the best open source conference in 2007. Don't miss the next one..."
Marcel Holtmann
Bluez Maintainer


"Sand, sun and small devices. BOSSA was the perfect conference to discuss the future of Linux on embedded platforms."
John 'J5' Palmieri
Red Hat/OLPC/DBus


"Best conference I've ever been to. DON'T miss this one."
Carsten 'Rasterman' Haltzler
OpenMoko/Enlightenment




To sum up: Bossa Conference '08

Come and enjoy a innovative conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms. Located in Porto de Galinhas, one of the tropical paradises of Brazil, the Bossa Conference will happen during 16th to 19th of March at Summerville Beach Resort (www.summervilleresort.com.br). The perfect combination of developers, pleasant environment and good ideas.

Let's go! We're waiting for you.


Information and registration: www.bossaconference.org.