Coming back from FOSDEM
After having skipped FOSDEM in 2011, I wanted to go this year, especially because of the Golden Delicious stand where we had the OpenPhoenux GTA04 on show. A lot of people came around and were excited that someone picked up where Openmoko had left in 2009. The GTA04 is the true successor of the FreeRunner and I strongly invite all of you to support this movement by buying one. You will not get a more open mobile phone anywhere else.
I know that Brussels is always a bit colder than Frankfurt, so I tend to carry appropriate clothing... what I didn't expect though was that it was frickin' -20 on saturday. I have never been freezing more in my life. Lets cross fingers that I won't come back home with a cold. Especially due to the crazy public transportation situation. The Deutsche Bahn managed to accumulate a one hour delay on my way to Brussels – that's ok, however they managed to crash the engine in Aachen on my way back. So badly that we had to switch to a regional train and switch again in Cologne. Man... *sigh*
On to some good news... another thing I didn't expect was kind of an Openmoko family reunion. It was amazing to find Jan Lübbe, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Harald Welte, and even Rasterman hanging around at FOSDEM. That was just great. I also happened to share my hotelroom with Boudewijn which was unexpected but again very cool.
So despite the freezing, it was a great FOSDEM for me and I'm looking forward to go again next year, perhaps bringing Sabine and Lara Marie as well.
IT has seen a crazy year
Information Technology has seen a really crazy year. Among all the smaller incidents, the big bangs involved Nokia partnering with Microsoft, abandoning Maemo, HP driving with WebOS against the wall, patent lawsuits everywhere.
What that means for FOSS-lovers is clear... you can't trust any company to continue working on anything. Business demands are what counts in the world of mass markets. If you want longterm support for a platform, your best bet is to build a community around it. But you will also want to work on hardware support otherwise you'll run into the next dead end.
To be honest, right now I don't see much of a future for any mobile Linux-inspired platform other than the mutation called Android. But that's not much of a problem per se. The smartphone market is crazy. To compete in that world, you have to give up on freedom. But is the mass market really what we want? Is it what mobile Linux needs?
I don't think so. There are still huge opportunities for using Linux-based mobile software platforms in niches such as machine2machine communication, home automation, research, teaching, and more. That's where a service-based middleware like FSO comes into the game: for special interests. However, even niche-adoption is hindered without a minimal set of applications. And that is where we still lack: Even special interest people want to use their smartphones to manage contacts, browse the web, send mails, play media, etc. We don't have an integrated software stack with a complete set of UI applications that would cover these needs. Openmoko worked on one, but failed. Nokia worked on multiple ones, but gave up (multiple times). What else do we have?
With HP's recent announcement about releasing WebOS as open source, the game may have changed. If we could use the WebOS application stack on top of the FSO middleware, we may have a real chance to get something great and usable – and complete – soon. I have always liked the WebOS UI. If it's a bit slower than other UIs, who cares as long as it is free?
Towards the end of 2011
Tempus fugit. I can tell you. Even more so, if you have a baby. I must confess I somewhat underestimated the impact the baby would have on my spare time. In some weird mindset I really thought I could continue working as usual on my open source projects... as we know now I couldn't. I completely lost track and have to catch up with all changes that happened over the last 6 months.
The first bunch of weeks with the baby were really demanding. I mean, really. She screamed a lot and could only sleep in our arms. Boy, were we tired. We carried her around so much we have Schwarzenegger arms now. But it's great to see her developing, err... growing up, of course. With 6 months now she is a very interested baby, eager to learn new things and always trying to become more mobile.
Luckily both my wife and me are self-employed. It so much easier when you can skip some hours at the usual start of the workday and also at the usual end. Of course, the work needs to be done, so we have to compensate when she's in bed. But still, it's very satisfying being able to see her twice a day for a couple of hours -- not all families have this luxury. Plus the existence of our two invaluable grandmas... it's great.
Company-wise, the Lauer & Teuber GbR had an amazing year with many interesting iOS (and some Android) projects. We have reached the maximum we can do with the two guys we are, so we decided to grow and hire our first regular employee who's going to start in 2012. We also rented another office and are already moving.
I'm slowly getting back into some of my beloved open source projects... it's great that work on e.g. FSO did not stall at all, but continued while I was "away". Last week, I attended the 3rd installment of the Open Hard- and Software Workshop in munich, where the latest development of the very promising GTA04 mobile phone was presented. I had a talk about Vala which was well received. By the way, my Vala-book plans are not dead yet... just in parking position :)
Next week I'm attending the FSOSHRCON, a joined conference with the people working on the freesmartphone.org middleware and the SHR software. It's going to be great seeing all the folks again, concentrating a full weekend to agree on some important issues laying the path forward for the next year. Can't wait to be there.
What's left is the feeling that an extremely busy year has passed by, spiced with incredibly intense emotions. I'm a happy man and I love my life. I'm given exciting opportunities, but also challenges – and I plan to accept everything :)
All the best to you guys!
The Eagle Has Landed!
After letting us wait for a bit longer than scheduled (13 days), the hospital initiated the contractions. For the first couple of hours, everything went just perfect, but then the little one got stuck on the way and we had to resort to a cesarean section. Lara Marie Lauer was born 8th of June at 04:41 (AM) with 3460 gramms and 49 cm.
Mummy was still on intensive care and so they gave her to me. I can't express the feelings I had in this very moment. I'm still kind of overwhelmed every time I see her. Thanks for all of you who waited anxiously with me and those who prayed for us. The most important tasks for the near future is getting Mummy to recover and Lara Marie to become accustomed to us and the rest of the outside world.
Please bear with me if in the next time I'm not as responsive as usually :)
German Post on time!
And now for something completely different... while we are all waiting for my baby to arrive (who was scheduled for 25th of May), she just received her first greeting card – together with a personalized bib and a towel (with integrated hood – pretty fancy!) from my good friends at #openmoko-cdevel.
Guys, seeing this card was very heartwarming – it means a lot to me that you share my anticipation, thanks a lot! And I'm 100% sure she will appreciate her gifts... now let's cross fingers it won't take much longer... waiting is the hardest part of it :)
Yours,
Mickey.
Towards the end of 2010
Howdy, dear reader!
It's been a while on this blog, mainly due to the fact that many short status updates are better twittered than blogged. Then again, as promised / threatened in last year's installment of this column, I had to spend most of the time this year with iOS development, rather than with FOSS -- and it doesn't look like this will change much (you know, food and things...). Still I do care a lot about projects like OpenEmbedded, Vala, freesmartphone.org, and the like, so here's what has been going on this year:
OpenEmbedded (www.openembedded.org)
OE moved along quite well this year. I did not have much time for it -- other than taking care about a couple of Vala and FSO recipes -- but I'm especially pleased that the community finally embraced major clean up. Thanks to Frans, Richard, and all others involved, OE is improving heavily -- although it wasn't easy: Over the last couple of years, the OE core contributors developed a resistance against any changes affecting more than a handfull of recipes, however in order to make OE handle even more contributors and various use cases, we had to do some substantial cleanups. This will reduce maintenance and improve the overall quality of recipes in OE, which is the #1 complaint I hear.
Vala (www.vala-project.org)
During the first half of the year, Vala went through some extremely tiring phases of non-activity, which improved vastly when its main developers opened up a bit, i.e. giving more developers access to the tree, adding branches, etc. There have been many changes in the Dova profile, but also the GLib profile has seen an incredible amount of work, bugfixes, some new features, and more.
The pace of changes that affect basic things had also impact on my vala-book plans; apart from a severe lack of time on my side, I think it's better to wait until Vala is closer to 1.0. Otherwise I risk describing a moving target, which -- considering the time I have to work on that project -- would effectively kill it. That said, it's great to see that Vala is getting better every day and gains more and more popularity from all kinds of developers.
FSO (freesmartphone.org)
The progress on freesmartphone.org is two-fold; on one hand, we have seen quite a nice amount of work to support more devices. On the other hand though, in contrast to all the work I did in 2009, there has been a severe lack of development of the core in 2010. This I plan to change as soon as possible. For 2011, I see myself continuing to develop FSO in the following three dimensions; internal, external, and integration.
- Internal | FSO is a heavy DBus consumer. I think by now we are one of the largest projects using DBus, at least considering the amount of API and running processes that communicate with each other via DBus. We always had our share of problems with DBus, especially some concurrency problems and race conditions are still haunting us. Both libdbus and dbus-glib exhibit their own share of problems, obviously this is not much of an issue on the desktop, but it turns out to be a major PITA on embedded systems, such as a phone. That's why I have been excited since I heard that the glib team planned to write their own DBus backend and put it right into the glib. This work has now been released as of glib 2.26. Over the next weeks, I will port FSO to using gdbus in a branch.
- External | DBus-signals have some problems. That's why some big projects (BlueZ and ConnMan, to name two of them) adopted an agent-style of API, where the clients have to implement a server API which is being called by the actual servers. While this means some more work for client developers, it has major benefits. I'm going to change some of our APIs to adopt this style.
- Integration | To deliver an integrated solution for today's mobile phones, FSO needs to add more glue to work with existing services, such as BlueZ (bluetooth connectivity), Connman (ethernet and wifi connectivity), and some VoIP services. While these services work fine on their own, FSO lacks an API that uses these individual services in combination to achieve higher level tasks.
All this means that I will not be working much on the actual ports, but rather use my -- very limited, did I say that yet? -- time to drive the core forwards. I still believe that we will have full FOSS phones -- other than the Openmoko devices -- soon. Please help to make this dream a reality. (And no, please don't talk to me about Android...)
Cheers,
:M:
Feeling good
Since the last post about my growing feeling of uneasiness, I did a couple of things to improve my mood. First, I stopped spending every free second of my spare time at the computer, writing FOSS. Second, I reactivated some other recreational interests I also have, but which have been pushed back for long by freesmartphone.org, OpenEmbedded, Vala, EFL, and the like. I bought a new car and spend more time singing, playing guitar, doing sports, and acting. In short, I'm really enjoying my life these days. This doesn't mean I will stop working on the aforementioned projects -- however, it's very important for me to find a healthy balance between engagement on virtual things and on real things.
Volksradio: Just Radio!
Every now and then you come to the comfortable situation that a client requests you to develop a technology for a product of theirs, which you can then use in your own productions as well. This happened to us in the last couple of months, when we had to create an audio streaming engine for iOS for an internet radio app.
Now the internet radio app market on iOS is completely saturated. We browsed through the AppStore and found hundreds of radio station apps, half of them for free, half of them between 1 and 3 EUR. We downloaded quite a bunch and analyzed what we liked and what we didn't like. With regards to the latter, we have seen splash screens, click-through ads, complicated UIs, and -- most annoying of all -- broken stations. Only a few apps actually do well in what they advertise... streaming radio!
This is what lead us to the development of Volksradio: Just Radio! A no fuzz no buzz streaming radio app. This is what it looks like:
[Original App Store screenshots no longer available - Apple has changed their CDN structure since 2010]
A clean uncluttered UI that focuses on what the app does best... streaming radio. While we have refrained from feature overload, we put a couple of goodies into it, such as:
- HiFi streaming engine, even via EDGE
- Headphone remote control support
- iOS4 background streaming and multimedia dock support
- Automatically picks up playing the station you last heard
- Order channels alphabetically or by rating -- either just your own or total rating of all users.
We even did a small video to show the features, which you can see by clicking here. Note that right now we focused on german radio stations, so if you don't like german radio, don't buy! :-) If you are missing your favourite channel, please mail us to support
Sid Player Pro goes iOS4
Despite being incredibly busy due to some nightmare project I have been working on for the last couple of months, I have managed to sneak in some time to update Sid Player Pro to catch up with iOS4's idea of multitasking.
Sid Player Pro now can stream audio in the background, just as the iPod application can. Moreover, it also reacts to headphone remote control events and hooks itself with the lock and multimedia dock screen controls.
The update has been submitted to Apple for review and we expect it to be posted very soon. Once Sid Player Pro appears in the AppStore, Module Player and Pokey Player will also be updated.
Here's a video that demonstrates the new features in Sid Player Pro for iOS4.