https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-November/003467.html

many lessons to be learned there *

Reminds me of something.

This is utterly ridiculous. It’s a screenshot with a standard Firefox browser, in the standard screen resolution (1280×800), on a Ubuntu machine with only the OS top panel showing (the bottom is hidden, to reproduce more or less the screen estate you’d have on a Mac).

Hell, I’ve even hidden the bookmark bar and status bar and – STILL – the content area is tall not more than half my screen. A power-user may still press F11 and F to put the browser AND Google Groups into full screen mode, and – STILL – the fixed top bar would not move, even a bit.

Google, seriously, which kind of usability testing you perform on your products ?

Google, seriously, what are you feeding your designers and UX experts with ?

While the app was a paid one, the reception has been outstanding. I’ve gotten a fair amount of mails from the users, encouraging me and thanking me for improving their daily life.

This is something much different from what we experienced with Rapache. While there have been people speaking about it around, I dare to say it’s very little compared to Clip Ninja.

Rapache has been developed by two people and we experienced every kind of problem. The lack of documentation of Pygtk being the biggest one. At the time, StackOverflow didn’t exist yet, and dedicated IRC rooms were silent.

Packaging was an issue, even for a python application like Rapache, you had to learn how to do it, and that takes time. Packaging on Android is a breeze.

Then, after weeks of work, it finally comes the moment to submit to the Android Market and it immediately becomes available, and gets ranked within two days. Getting included in the Ubuntu (universe) repository, is a totally different beast. You need a MOTU for that, or open a bug and hope to get noticed.

You could, of course own your own repository, but – again – that placed the packaging burden on upstream’s shoulders (you). Right after that, you’d need to have your users add the PPA to their sources.list and was everything but intuitive. There was also a pretty big opposition against the proposal to let the user add PPAs with a click. That was for good reasons, but some of the reasons are symptoms of our OS weaknesses. Shared libraries aren’t good for everyone, aren’t always and guess what, most of the commercial packages for linux just bundle all the libs they need with their application to skip the issue completely.

And you get problems for that, as new versions of the OS may effectively crash your software (as it happened with Rapache).

Back to the Open Source, when you experience an issue, the code is open, and it’s easier for the people to have a look to that, and propose solutions, send patches, etcetera. I dare to say that doesn’t happen that often for most developers. That’s an important point: even if most people (let’s admit it) love open source because of its gratis, the main point of it should be the freedom, the ability to build upon the work of other people and adapt the work of others to your needs. But if that doesn’t happen often, is it really worth the effort ?

Is it worth the effort to develop for 10 million of people instead of 100 millions of people ? How many lives do we want to improve with our work ? With Android doomed to become the next Windows (both in the good and bad way) will you still develop for Ubuntu ?

How much do you think Ubuntu will still last ?

(so much for Gnome vs KDE)

]]> http://www.stefanoforenza.com/a-step-back-from-the-open-source/feed/ 3 http://www.stefanoforenza.com/a-step-back-from-the-open-source/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/stefanoforenza/~3/VWupqWqz1LA/ http://www.stefanoforenza.com/facebook-shuts-down-eventpress-development/#comments Sun, 25 Dec 2011 23:31:31 +0000 Stefano Forenza http://www.stefanoforenza.com/?p=2317

When you’re a big company, especially one that makes its money on free web services and advertising, it’s very easy to say you love open source.

Open Source will get you nice PR, and you may even release parts of your code to get even better PR. Sadly, things don’t always work as you expect them to.

The legal department of Facebook has recently forbidden EventPress developer, Kunal Bhalla, to continue his (brilliant) work on EventPress, as it’s similar to a Facebook product (Facebook events).

I’m afraid I currently have to stop working on EventPress — the open source/legal department at my new employer: FB informed me today that I’m not allowed to contribute to anything that is similar to a product offered by Facebook (events). Please feel free to fork and develop it further as you require.

Regards,
Kunal

[ here's the announcement: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/eventpress/olNCfNZfEP0 ]

EventPress is a well written open source plug-in that provides a non trivial feature such as event management to wordpress site owners. As event management is not easy stuff, there are not many contenders.

Apparently, Kunal got hired by Facebook, and subsequently had to stop his open source development right after.

It’s a real shame things have to go like that.

Some of the highlights include:

• Android project started before the release of the iPhone, and was designed to compete with Blackberry
• Android wasn’t originally designed primarily as a touch screen based operating system
• Iphone renders UI with higher priority than Android, at the expense of computation

Check it out:
https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJRGS

Well, I deleted mine some time ago, but while trying out the new Youtube homepage the first thing I saw was this:

My circles are still saved, my real name is showing and the same is probably true for the people in my circles.

Yet another reminder: don’t believe the big guys, data deletion doesn’t exists on the Internet, no matter what. There’s no escape, you access the internet, you get sold.

Not without a certain pleasure I announce that I got Rapache fixed and working again.

Rapache is a graphical user tool to help you configure Apache2. It allows easy creation of virtual name hosts and modules activation without prior knowledge of configuration files.

I still have to mess with the packaging thing, and there are certain trade-offs, but anybody interested can finally download a working version.

To install it run the following commands

sudo apt-get install python-crypto python-openssl python-lxml
sudo apt-get install python-glade2 python-gnome2-extras python-gksu2
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2 python-gtksourceview2 gksu bzr
bzr branch lp:rapache

Once you’re done, you can run it with the following commands:

cd rapache
sudo ./rapache

Note that Rapache now requires sudo, but it will nevertheless ask for your password the first time you try to do anything. It’s glitchy and patchy but at least it works.

Also there is no more tray icon (not a problem for Unity users I guess) and the status bar displays an ‘apache not reacheable’ message unregarding the real apache status.

Still you get the same easy virtualhost creation, syntax highlighted source editor, module activation/removal we all used to love.

A word of warning, as my computer is still running Ubuntu 10.10 Rapache is untested on 11.04 and 11.10. But it’s worth a try. Let me know how it runs

You can find more about Rapache in my previous posts.

Fabrice Bellard wrote a more or less full PC emulator in Javascript. And, unsurprisingly, Linux can run on it ! I’m not talking about ajax or some kind of client-server communication. Linux runs entirely in your browser, and uses the HTML 5 local storage as disk space.

I say WOW, check it for out yourself:

http://stud.hro.nl/0814604/jslinuxdemo/emulator.html

Steve Jobs passed away some hour ago.

Love or hate Apple products, you still have to admit he had a big impact on the world. He proved that passion for beauty and simplicity and nicely crafted objects pays off, no matter what engineers say.

RIP Steve Jobs.

(oh, by the way, this video pisses me off)