Online Desktop and other things GUADEC

GUADEC seems to be very interesting this year from the maemo / Internet Tablet perspective… The Nokia releases (SIP support and a Gecko based browser) were a positive surprise of course but there are also other keynotes that make me wish I could have been there. I recommend reading Planet Gnome this time of year — it’s quite lively during and after Guadec.

One thing that really hit a nerve: Online Desktop is about deep integration between web and the desktop (see also Big Board). I’m not entirely sure I like this progress but I have to agree with Havoc Pennington and Luis Villa: It is the future. Maybe not this implementation, but the idea… It will be very interesting from a mobile device POV — syncing data becomes a lot easier if the data is on the internet to begin with.

Questions to GUADEC attendees:

• I understood there was a GMAE meeting this week. Any news?
• How was the Geoclue workshop?

Geoclue release

Long time, no reporting on Summer of Code progress…

Here goes:

• lots of small improvements to geoclue (see
  http://freedesktop.org/Software/GeoClue
  )
• gpsd provider now works and uses libgpsbt on maemo
• updated the project plan
• First public release (see release news)
• Release of a demo/test UI

The geoclue service/library is still a work-in-progress and the UI is a genuine 0.1-release (and neither are in a repository yet), but they’re there and they’re testable.

Screenshots

For those not interested in installing things by hand, here are some screenshots: First I clicked “Refresh” on demo home applet: position from default provider (Hostip.info web service) is shown. The position provider menu is also open.

Then I selected GPS in the menu and clicked “Refresh” again — now the position comes from a GPS device:

This is not very interesting in itself, but what is interesting is the code needed to write a client like the demo home applet there… Here is the position related code in the applet (error checking not included for clarity):

gdouble lat, lon;
geoclue_position_init ();
geoclue_position_current_position (&lat, &lon);

…and that is it.