Inqlude progress

My Hack Week project is progressing. Qt Dev Days have finished. I presented Inqlude there and got lots of good feedback. I even won a prize for my lightning talk. Thanks a lot for that.

Best Lightning Talk by overall value: Andras Mantia, SQLate; by presentation Cornelius Schumacher, inqlude. Congrats! #qtdd13
— Kalle Dalheimer (@kalledalheimer) October 9, 2013

I got a lot of input on which libraries were still missing and have a pretty long list to process now. The patches I got on GitHub I have already merged. Tomorrow I intend to go through the rest of the list and add the missing data. This should get us a lot closer to the goal of having all Qt-based libraries listed in one place.

One question came up a few times. Do we also want to list proprietary libraries, which are not available under a free software license? The answer is: Yes, we do want to also list proprietary libraries. We already are collecting the license information for all libraries, so this would be just another entry in the license field.

Inqlude is meant to be an open system. The goal is to have all libraries listed in one place, which are part of the Qt ecosystem and can be useful for application developers. So it's consequent to list all libraries there, independent of if their source code is available, or if there is a commercial model behind them. We will show the license data and add a separate section on the web site, so that people can easily find what they are looking for according to their preferences in terms of licenses.

I'm looking forward to the next two days of Hack Week. This is a fun project, and it looks like we can reach a state where it actually will be useful for quite a number of people.

An audacious goal for SUSE Hack Week 10

I have set myself an audacious goal for the tenth SUSE Hack Week: Create a complete collection of all Qt-based libraries which exist.

There are many places where you can find Qt-based libraries. Qt itself already comes with a number of modules. KDE has created a rich set of libraries with additional functionality on top of that, and you can find a lot of other third party libraries on sites like Gitorious, GitHub, Google Code, and more.

Now getting an overview and access to all the Qt library goodness, which is out there, is not particularly easy. To solve that we started Inqlude as a project to create an archive of all available Qt libraries back then at one of the Randa meetings. I worked on it some more at Hack Week 7, and continued to spend a little bit of time here and there. We have reached a state now, where it starts to become useful, and so I thought Hack Week 10 is a great opportunity to fill in the missing bits and pieces, and make it ready for prime time.

We have the web site and a documented format for library meta data. We also have tooling to process the meta data, e.g. for updating the data on new releases or to retrieve packages of libraries for installation. The web site also gets generated with these tools.

One thing which is lacking a bit, is the packaging of libraries, and the integration of the tools with the native package management systems on various platforms. With the help of the Open Build Service the packaging part should be solvable. For the integration on different platforms help of users of these platforms would be greatly appreciated. There is some support for openSUSE, but for other Linux flavors, or non-Linux systems, there is still some work to do.

The other thing is the coverage of the archive. It already has quite a list of libraries, but there are more out there, and I really would like to see it to be as complete as possible. All libraries, which reasonably can be considered useful to developers using Qt, should be on Inqlude. So I'm looking for third party Qt libraries now.

I'll be on the Qt Dev Days in Berlin the next two days, and hope that I can use this opportunity to get some more input and pointers to libraries, we haven't covered yet. If you are there as well and have hints, please talk to me. I'll also give a lightning talk about the current state of Inqlude, so you can learn about where we are first hand.

So this is my project for Hack Week 10. You'll find some more details and updates on the progress on the Hack Week project page. If you want to join the project, don't hesitate to add yourself there and contact me]. We'll use the inqlude mailing list to coordinate work as needed.

Looking for third party Qt libraries

We all know that Qt is great, but we also know that it can't possibly cover all use cases. Fortunately there are plenty of third party libraries based on Qt, which fill a lot of gaps, so you don't have to develop everything yourself.

Finding these third party Qt libraries can be a challenge, though. To address this we started a project to create a curated archive of all relevant Qt-based libraries some time ago (you may want to think of that as CPAN for Qt).

We have reached a state now, where the necessary infrastructure is there, and it's starting to become useful for production use. You can find the web site at inqlude.org.

To make this information more complete, I would like to give this a focused push now. My goal is to get all relevant Qt-based libraries listed by end of the week.

So I'm looking for 3rd party Qt libraries.

Are you releasing a Qt-based library? Do you know of libraries, which aren't listed yet?

If you do, please get in contact with me and let me know what's still missing. You can also create patches for the meta data, which the web site is based on. You'll find instructions on the web site.

If you want to get involved with the project you can also subscribe to our mailing list inqlude@kde.org.

Inqlude is meant to be open to allow everybody to participate on the same level. The infrastructure is free software. It's run by the KDE community, but we intend to cover the full Qt spectrum.

Let's make this a place, where Qt developers can easily find and get access to the full power of the Qt ecosystem.

If you have any comments or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact me.

SUSE Hack Week 9

The results are in. The winners of the awards for SUSE Hack Week 9 have been announced.

The award for the best overall project goes to the heroic effort to kill YCP. The team has made great progress and the plan is to see the results in milestone 4 of openSUSE 13.1. It will be the first SUSE distribution since ages, which will install without requiring YCP, the SUSE in-house developed programming language. This is quite an achievement. It ends an era and starts a new one.

Other awards went to the widely discussed team effort to create a light-weight deskop using KDE technology, to Tim's great performance as individual developer to get support for encrypted web sockets into QEMU's VNC implementation, or to the glorious openSUSE ARM team. There are more awards, and you can find the full goodness of all Hack Week projects on the Hack Week Wiki.

My own project was somewhat meta. Together with Henne I worked on a web app for managing the Hack Week projects. We weren't happy with the current set of tools, because they didn't provide enough support for discovering projects and fostering collaboration. So we set out to change that, took a deep grab into the magic chest of web technology, and wrote a new app. There is a demo and source code.

You can enter and maintain your projects, join and comment on projects of others, and browse projects to see what's going on. We also started to implement a recommendation engine, which hints you at projects, which match your interests. This gives a more structured environment than before, which hopefully makes it easier and more fun to collaborate on common interests. Some more details about what we did you can find on my Hack Week blog.

Our intention is to have this app ready for next Hack Week, so that we can use it for managing the projects then. If you want to help you can find the source code on GitHub.

Another fun project right before Hack Week was to set up the Hack Week web site. Cassio, André, Tom, Ken and me threw together some time and effort and came up with a shiny scrolling front page, complete with magic project lock, and a terminal mode.

And of course we had T-Shirts.

I'm looking forward to next Hack Week.

Konqi

I posted this on the kde-promo mailing list. But it's more fun with proper links, so I'm reposting it here.

Konqi is a part of the KDE family for a long time now. He has not only been part of our software and promotion activities, he has also made several real-life appearances on his own, or with his girlfriend Katie, and as a movie star. He has looked over the shoulders of many KDE developers and the plush version has been part of quite some kid's lifes, including mine.

Konqi has inspired artists, pastry cooks, and needlework. He also has been an excellent member of the family of free software mascots. And of course what would David be without his famous Konqi T-Shirt?

Konqi is part of our home as community, and while not everybody likes him the same, for many of us he is part of the identity of KDE. But he wasn't our first mascot, and he won't be our last one. The new rendition is cute, but still professional, and opening up a number of new interesting ways how to work with our mascot.

It will have to prove itself. I don't think it would be right to do a huge change to our mascot by a vote or a committee. But if there are people behind it, who give it a life, use it to give KDE promotion a fresh touch, make use of the opportunities it provides, it will grow and can become a worthy successor of our current Konqi. Then it will be part of the KDE family as well.

Experimenting with user interfaces for todo lists

When I presented Polka, my experiment to reframe the user interface for address books, some people suggested that it would be interesting to try something similar for todo lists. So I did try. The result is a small app called Bliss, because it makes you happy and gives you peace of mind.

I started with taking the concept from Polka to have freely arrangeable items on a canvas organized in groups. That works, but it had a flaw, because the basic element of todos is not the individual item, but a list.

Todos are much more dynamic than information about people. You create, remove, and rearrange them all the time. Context matters. One powerful effect of writing todos down is that you relieve your brain from having to constantly make sure you don't forget about them. This only works, if it's easy and quick enough to structure and arrange the todos according to your mental model. Lists are the natural structure here to keep priorities and order.

So basically a group became a list, where you can reorder items by dragging them around, either within the list or to other groups.

But in addition to this it's also quite useful to have multiple lists in one view. You can for example model a flow between things to do today, this week, and this month, where items in one list are replenished from the next one. Or you can have something like a personal Kanban with lists for things to do, being done, and done. Or you can use a scheme like in the Getting Things Done method. The combination of groups and lists is pretty powerful here.

Bliss keeps the complete history of what you did, so you can always look or go back without cluttering your views with done items. It animates all the transitions when moving items or navigating groups, so you don't lose context when items are rearranged or you change the view. Especially when dealing with such dynamic objects like todo items, animations really make sense, not as eye-candy, but as a way to support you in keeping track of what's happening. That said, they also make the app more fun to use.

The menus are done in the same way as in Polka, as semicircular context menus, which works nicely not only with the mouse, but also on a touch screen.

The code is in the KDE git as well as on GitHub. If you want to give it a try and play around with the UI you can get it from there. I'm happy about feedback.

The technology behind this experiment doesn't matter much. It's mostly reusing Polka code, a QGraphicsView based Qt GUI with an Kode-generated XML backend, which stores data in a git repository. To move forward it would be nice to redo the UI in QML and connect it to Akonadi. But the more interesting part it experimenting with the user interface right now.

Looking ahead it would also be interesting to rethink the UI of mails and calendars by moving beyond the limitations of the traditional widget based approach. This could make it possible to come up with user interfaces which are much more tailored to the natural mental model of people, and make full use of the opportunities you have by not being constrained to paper. There are tons of unexplored areas here.

I'm looking forward to more experimentation.

Don't sell free software cheap

How can I get paid for free software development? That's a question many developers ask. And it's a good question, because software development is expensive, no matter what the license is. Money is one way to pay for this, but fortunately there are many other ways to get paid for free software. The one thing you should never do, though, is to sell free software cheap.

It's tempting. Put some ads on your blog, a donation button on the project page, get a low paid student job, etc. It's fine, if you can work on free software, right? Some money is better than nothing, isn't it?

No, it isn't. Because it interferes with other ways of being compensated for free software development, such as reputation, control, freedom, learning, or just satisfying your curiosity. Money adds dynamics which can go against these. It changes to whom you are accountable, it alters expectations, and it can actually harm your motivation, because money is a bad motivator. So you need to be very careful when putting money into the equation.

That doesn't mean that there are no good ways to get paid money for free software development. In fact an increasing number of companies have realized that they are better off developing a good part of their software as free software, and they don't compromise on quality or payment. So there are well-paid jobs for free software developers. Guess who gets these jobs. Not those who do it for cheap, but those who have built up a good reputation as a free software developer.

Contributing to free software actually is a great way to build up a career. You are in control. You don't need a university or company program, you can start any time. You can build a reputation doing something you want, something that matters. You can learn and grow following your passion. This is a great foundation for a professional career, and studies show that committers to free software actually get higher salaries than those who don't do this.

Your work on free software is an investment in your happiness, your career, and a better world. Don't sell it cheap.