I’m absolutely relying on working with issue trackers for managing features, bugs, and releases. Although it’s always a bit cumbersome to teach (new) clients how to properly use it (it takes quite some hand holding and improving their tickets), sooner or later they all realize that it’s way better than the chaos we get by tossing Excel sheets back and forwards.
Although we shut our company LaTe App-Developers down last year, my colleague and me are still using our old redmine 2.x installation to support existing clients. For new projects, I recently started to look into the current state of issue tracker offerings. My needs are:
As I’ve mentioned, we previously used redmine and this is what I’m familiar with and what I love to work with. In the past (when my requirements were not developed yet), I also used trac, mantis, and bugzilla – but neither of those got me hooked.
Despite being somewhat satisfied with redmine, the last time I researched the market was five years ago, so I set out to do another survey – to see whether there is anything better than redmine meeting my requirements. I spare you the itchy details, but after looking and trying for some weeks, there were only three contenders left:
OpenProject looked interesting to me since it basically is still redmine, but with a focus on a more streamline UI and better usability (and more frequent releases). Installation was pretty good, since finnlabs (the company that is steering its development and offering professional services around the product) provides packages. Everything worked pretty well, but at the end of the day though, it wasn’t that much of a step-up from redmine.
Phabricator is pretty impressive. Installation is painless (On most systems, PHP still has the better out-of-the-box experience than Ruby and Rails) and the web GUI looks amazing. Although the individual parts are very strong and it has a lot of features that redmine lacks, the configuration UI is pretty barebones (for custom ticket states, you have to edit JSON files) and it doesn’t felt as integrated as redmine. It has great potential though, perhaps I just need to play with it for a longer time. I left my installation intact and will use it for an internal project for a while.
For all other projects though, I have decided to come back to redmine. To spice up the look and feel, I’m using the Circle theme from RedmineCRM (who are making some great plugins for redmine) and some of their plugins.
One thing that’s always a bit of a nuisance is the git repository integration without pulling or stalling when it reads the changesets while you are, say, querying the tickets. Phabricator comes with a dedicated daemon that eases this part, I think that’s a way redmine et. al. should look into, as well. For redmine 3.1, I got it working with their new (to me) repository web service. If you don’t have the repository on the same machine as your tracker installation, the ideal system has the following parts:
I push a new changeset to my repository. A simple post-receive hook on my gitolite installation then calls the redmine web service to trigger the next step, e.g.
curl "https://<redmine url>/sys/fetch_changesets?key=$apikey&id=$projectid" &The redmine webservice updates its local mirror of the repository by calling git fetch. This can easily be done with the redmine plugin gitremote.
The redmine installation processes the new changesets, checks for special commit texts, and updates its internal databases accordingly.
The hardest part of that is debugging, when something does not work (as always…). In my case it was a custom SSH port on my machine, which made it silently fail fetching new changesets until I realized that :)
I still recommend redmine, if you have similar needs as me. Yes, it may not integrate the latest web technologies and look a bit rusty (which you can improve by using a theme), but it’s solid and does not get in your way.
Cheers,
:M:
Hi fellow readers, this time we’re talking music. For quite some time, I’ve been wondering about the sound of a certain area which seems to be abandoned by pretty much all bands. It was the area when sampling technology became affordable and where a bunch of musicians adopted this (back then very limited) technology in creative ways to use any kind of noise in a musical context.
In this period (say, 1984-1990), bands like „The Art Of Noise“, „Jean-Michel Jarre“, „Depeche Mode“, „Moskwa TV“, and many more, emerged, who thrilled their audience with sounds that had been previously unheard. Obviously we lost this form of art somewhere along the way – I can’t think of any currently active band embracing these kind of instruments. Even the aforementioned pioneers have “developed” (why must every successful band „develop“ and lose the distinct quality that made them big? but that’s a topic for another blogpost) and turned their back on this.
Is it because listeners became tired or did the massive improvements in sampling quality and length (due to the vast price decline in computer memory we now have hours of sampling time where back in the 80s we only had seconds) thus the limitless possibilities strangled the creativity (again!)?
I still love to hear (and produce) those kinds of sound. So let me ask: Is anyone still sampling? (except sample library vendors, that is)
Cheerio – Gone fishing, err… field recording!
After the outage of the VM where freesmartphone.org has been hosted on, we are now almost fully back. I have integrated the DBus API documentation (that has been hosted on the doc subdomain) into the top level documentation which now lives at https://www.freesmartphone.org. The source code has already been moved to https://github.com/freesmartphone and the new mailing list has been alive for a few months on the Goldelico FSO mailing list.
Now that the documentation is live again, I have plans for short, mid, and long term:
1. Short-term I’m working on completing the merge to libgee-0.8 and then cut the next point release.
2. Mid-term I want to discuss integrating the unmerged branches to the individual subprojects and continue cleaning up.
3. Long-term I’m looking for a new reference hardware platform, funding, contributors, and decide whether to move the existing reference platform to kdbus (or another IPC.)
If you have any plans or questions with regards to the freesmartphone.org initiative and its subprojects, please contact me via the FSO mailing list (preferred) or personally.
This is a post about the state of Sid-, Mod, or PokeyPlayer on iOS.
Coming from the background of the C64 and AMIGA demo scenes, I always thought that every platform needs a way to play back the musical artwork created by those great musicians in the 80s and 90s on machines like the Commodore C64, the AMIGA, and the ATARI XL.
Fast forward to the iPhone: Being excited about the new platform, me and another guy from the good ole’ AMIGA days started working on SidPlayer in 2008, shortly after Apple opened the developer program for european developers. After some months of work, we had the first version ready for the Apple review, standing on the shoulder of the great libsidplay and the HVSC. Due to libsidplay being GPL, we had to open source the whole iOS app. To our surprise, _this_ hasn’t been a problem with the Apple review.
SidPlayer for iOS was available for some months, then we developed adaptations for AMIGA .mod files (ModPlayer) and Atari XL pokey sound files (PokeyPlayer). In the meantime, iOS development went from being a hobby to our profession (we formed the LaTe App-Developers GbR), which unfortunately had great impact on our pet projects. Being busy with paid projects, we could not find enough time to do serious updates to the players.
The original plan in 2008 was to create an app that has additional value around the core asset of a high quality retro computing player, such as a retro-museum-in-a-box (giving background information about those classic computing machines) and a community that shares playlists (important given the amount of songs), comments, statistics, and ratings. Alas, due to our time constraints during the lifetime of the apps, we could only do small updates in order to fix bugs with newer operating system versions. There was not enough time to add features, do an iPad adaptation, nor to unify the three distinct player apps. In the meantime, other apps came along that also could play some of those tunes, although we weren’t (and still aren’t) very excited about their user interfaces and sound quality.
The final nail for the coffin came in 2013, when – much to our surprise – out of the blue (not even due to reviewing an update), we received a letter from Apple where they claimed that our player apps would violate the review guidelines, in particular the dreaded sections 2.7 / 2.8, which read “2.7: Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected.” and “2.8: Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected”. Although we went past this guideline for several years, this turned into a showstopper – some weeks later, Apple removed our apps from the store.
Unfortunately, those sections really apply – at least for the Sid- and PokeyPlayer. Both players rely on emulating parts of the CPU and custom chip infrastructure of the C64 / Atari XL (hence run “executable” code, albeit for a foreign processor architecture) and said code gets downloaded from the internet (we didn’t want to ship the actual music files with the app for licensing reasons). ModPlayer actually was an exception, since the .mod format does not contain code, but is a descriptive format, however back then I did not have the energy to argue with Apple on that, hence ModPlayer has been removed without a valid reason.
In the meantime, my priorities have shifted a bit and we had to shutdown our iOS company LaTe AppDevelopers for a number of reasons. Still I have great motivation to work on the original goal for those players. Due to the improved hard- and software of the iOS platform, these days we could add some major improvements to the playing routines, such as using recent filter distortion improvements in libsidplay2, audio post-processing with reverb and chorus, etc.
The chance of the existing apps coming back into the store is – thanks to Apple – zero. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience anyways, since the code base is very old and rather unmaintainable (remember, it was our first app for a new platform, and neither one of us had any Mac OS X experience to rely on).
Basically, three question come to my mind now:
1. Would there be enough interest in a player that fulfills the original goal or is the competition on the store “good enough”? 2. Will it be possible to get past Apple’s review, if we ship the App with all the sound (code) files, thus not downloading any code? 3. How can I fund working on this app? To honor all the countless hours the original authors put into creating the music and the big community working on preserving the files, I want this app to be free for everyone.
As you may have guessed, I do not have any concrete answers (let alone a timeframe), but just some ideas and the track record of having created one of the most popular set of C64/AMIGA/Atari XL music player apps. So I wanted to use this opportunity to gather some feedback. If you have any comments, feel free to send them to me. If you even want to collaborate on such a project, I’m all ears. If there’s sufficient interest, we can create some project infrastructure, i.e. mailing list.
Thanks to the fabulous wayback machine, I have imported my blog from between 1999 and 2006. It’s not properly formatted and most of the images are missing, but it’s somewhat interesting to read the things my younger self wrote about 15 years ago.
I have pondered a long time whether to learn web programming for my customers’ services app, so that they can access their user & device statistics, crash logs, manage service messages, push messages, etc.
I now have decided not to pursue this path. Web technology is a mess, even more than mobile technology. It’s lacking a clear separation of layers and although many frameworks nowadays are using MVC or similar patterns, I feel I have to do too many things at once (web service, html templating, css design, java script for interactive stuff, etc.) to really make a professional web app.
I’m going to make a mobile client instead, using the technologies I already have mastered and in which I’m productive. Yes, I still want to learn something new, that’s why I’m working with a NoSQL database now for the first time.
Of course the downside is my customers can no longer use their web browsers to manage all that, but since they have their iPhones and iPads always around anyways, I’m sure they can cope with that.
After 6 years being co-director and CTO of LaTe App-Developers, I feel it is time to make some changes.
It’s not that mobile development is no longer interesting to me, however after doing (too) many small (5-20 person days) iOS projects, I need some new challenges. Project work has been limiting my creativity and enforcing too much regularity in my daily routine. Besides, there’s hardly any room to do compelling software architecture work in projects of said size. You’re rather constantly working against the time in order to make some profit with those fixed-price projects.
This year I took three months off in order to decide on what to do next and finally, I have made up my mind. As per the end of this year, I’m resigning as co-director and CTO of LaTe. I will still be involved as freelance collaborator though in order to continue supporting our biggest client.
With the regained freedom, I plan to explore some new directions with regards to own apps and services. I need to catch up with what happened in (Embedded)-Linux and I also want to polish my almost rusty Python and Vala skills.
Last but not least, I’m not going to do 40 hours per week any more – instead I want to spend more time with my family.
Every 6 years or so I’m revamping my website. This is the 3rd incarnation now (yes, I started early) featuring a new wordpress theme, a clean layout, and – most important – serious content improvements.
So 2013 is finally over and it’s been an energy-sapping year, business-, baby-, and building wise.
Business. The stagnation that was present for pretty much the first half of the year and which forced us to downsize a bit, had been replaced by too many projects all at once in the 2nd half of the year. And while it was welcome since it saved us from closing doors, it prevented working on our private projects, i.e. our apps in the store, but also personal pet projects – let alone anything open source.
Baby. After 7 horrible months between Lara Marie’s 5th and 13th month, she finally began sleeping great, often 12 hours without waking up. She’s now 2.5 years and everything is good. Still, she’s a demanding little one, enjoying being offered a selection of everything instead of deciding on her behalf. I love her.
Building. With a bit of (natural) delay, our new house was finished by November and we did move on 9th of December. We’re now 2 months in here and it’s feeling mostly great. We had to monitor and decide on a LOT of things during the construction phase, but apart from the usual minor issues, the building quality is good and we enjoy the comfort of having a dedicated room for Lara Marie. Being able to use the living room again after 20:00 is nice :)
I took the liberty to install a dedicated server for the house which is living in a 19“ rack in the utility room. I’m going to post about the networking infrastructure soon.
Referring to my last post, I’m still planning on doing the sabbatical, but due to some unforeseeable circumstances with my wife’s health, it had to be postponed for a bit. It’s going to happen in 2014 though, which is why I’m sure, 2014 is going to be better than 2013.
Salut!
I didn’t blog for quite a while, since – as I’ve mentioned before – these days, Facebook seems to me the more appropriate forum for shorter status messages.
That aside, let me recap how things are these days. Since the birth of Lara Marie, quite a lot in my life has changed. I haven’t been contributing to any open source projects nor did I have time to continue my writing of articles and books. This leaves me being quite unsatisfied.
Business-wise, my iOS/Android-company had to struggle a bit in late 2012, since a lot of clients cancelled or postponed their app projects due to the unstable economy in europe. Thankfully we’re now being more busy again, however I find myself being pretty annoyed with how our projects are being performed these days. Dealing with customers who try to squeeze more and more features into an app and loading you with change requests while at the same time insisting on the fixed price offer is extremly annoying. Plus the pure nature of many mini-projects we get (typically one or two person weeks) where the communication overhead results in us working twice the amount of time we actually get paid for.
Perhaps we need to be more strict and organize the workflow better. On the other hand, it rather looks like the mobile app market is dominated by so-called “full service design agencies” which then outsource the actual implementation to us, keeping us out of the actual decisions, but paying us only a minimal share of what they get.
In a world of HTML5 and cross-platform-tools ruining the prices, it also seems increasingly difficult to convey the benefits of a highly device-optimized native app.
With 30 years of experience in information technology (heck, I even received a Ph.D ;) – do I really still need to discuss about button placements and whether billing a bunch of additional hours is justified, when all I did was implementing “that trivial feature”?
After five years of iOS development, it might be the time for me to move to something new – or come back to old things. That’s why I’m pondering about a combination of a sabbatical and a parental leave in 2014.