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Enable open web technologies in Internet Explorer

Google Chrome Frame is an open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:

• Start using open web technologies - like the HTML5 canvas tag - right away, even technologies that aren't yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, or 9.
• Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.

One of the most exciting things about the Ubuntu 10.10 release has been the delivery of the Unity ‘shell’ in Ubuntu Netbook Edition. For the uninitiated,  this delivers a very different user experience to that in the main desktop edition. For a start the icons of the most popular applications are permanently featured on the left-hand side of the screen. This borrows more from the smartphone interfaces but is adapted for use on, in this case, netbooks. So there remains a workspace where users still have sufficient room to watch video, edit photos, create documents, play games, read the web, write emails – all of the usual tasks we use a computer for, day to day.

Everything is optimised however for the more limited screen space. It is sub-optimal for instance to simply port an interface from the full-screen world, shrink it and expect it to be a great experience. Unity does away with the bottom bar for example that Windows, Ubuntu and Mac users will be used to. This is actually a radical step, but in my experience at least, it takes no time at all to forget that there ever was a bottom bar. The result is considerably more ‘vertical space’ for to use  – again maximising the useful area on limited screen sizes.

One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them. But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s  multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.

Because there are a very limited number of touch-enabled devices out there at present, we thought we would create a video to show some of the features. You can see it below. It has turned out rather nicely even with the clumsy paws.

Gerry Carr, Platform Marketing, Canonical

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Alguien lo ha probado?

This is a project to port Android open source project to x86 platform, formerly known as "patch hosting for android x86 support". The original plan is to host different patches for android x86 support from open source community. A few months after we created the project, we found out that we could do much more than just hosting patches. So we decide to fork our code base that will provide android x86 support on different x86 platforms, and set up a git server to host it. To reflect this major change, we create this new project.

Canonical is pleased to announce the release of uTouch 1.0, Ubuntu’s multi-touch and gesture stack. With Ubuntu 10.10 (the Maverick Meerkat), users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications. Our multi-touch team has worked closely with the Linux kernel and X.org communities to improve drivers, add support for missing features, and participate in the touch advances being made in open source world. To complete the stack, we’ve created an open source gesture recognition engine and defined a gesture API that provides a means for applications to obtain and use gesture events from the uTouch gesture engine.

Our multi-touch work began in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, when we worked to get additional touch hardware supported in the Linux kernel, particularly the Dell XT2, HP tx2 tablets and the Lenovo T410s laptops. With that in place, and active development in X well under way, we reviewed our options for gesture recognition in Linux. The Maverick cycle has seen us produce several prototypes for gesture recognition software and the Ubuntu archives now include the results of that effort.

The world’s expectations of software experience are being raised by advances in mobile computing. We are bringing that revolution to the Linux desktop: for window management and applications. Though our work at the application level has only just started, we are certain that multi-touch and gestures will be central to the way we use Linux applications in future.

The success of touch in applications depends on several key factors:

• toolkit integration of gesture APIs
• touch support for legacy applications
• designing new applications for finger-based interactions

Work has begun on all three fronts in Ubuntu, and we expect it to remain an area of active interest over the next few releases up to 12.04 LTS.

Ubuntu is the fruit of collaboration across the huge Ubuntu community, and also the amazing work of many other communities that form around individual projects and initiatives like Debian. The uTouch framework enables work to begin across many of those communities to make touch a first-class interaction model in open source desktop and mobile software.

Existing contributions in other projects have provided fertile ground for uTouch. To name just a few:

• Stéphane Chatty at ENAC has lead much multi-touch hardware support in the kernel
• Peter Hutterer at Red Hat defined multi-pointer X and proposed a multi-touch protocol for a future version of X
• Carlos Garnacho of the GNOME community has done multi-touch work in X and GTK

We’re look forward to continued collaboration, ensuring that Linux remains the preferred platform for people building cutting-edge devices and software.

Canonical is working with manufacturers of touch-enabled products and those of their underlying technology in order to bring innovations in user experience to a broader audience. Our aim is to bring the natural, tactile experience of the world to the desktop, window manager, and applications you value — all the software that you depend upon to get things done and have fun. Touch will be part of the Ubuntu Netbook, Desktop and Light products from 10.10 and beyond.

[This post is by Dave Burke, who's an Engineering Manager 80% of the time. — Tim Bray]

Android Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM) was launched recently as part of Android 2.2. C2DM enables third-party developers to push lightweight data messages to the phone. C2DM created a nice opportunity for us to pull together different Google developer tools to create a simple but useful application to enable users to push links and other information from their desktop / laptop to their phone. The result was Chrome to Phone - a 20-percent time project at Google.

Chrome to Phone comprises a Chrome Extension, an Android Application, and a Google AppEngine server. All of the code is open sourced and serves as a nice example of how to use C2DM.

The message flow in Chrome to Phone is fairly typical of a push service:

1. The Android Application registers with the C2DM service and gets a device registration ID for the user. It sends this registration ID along with the user's account name to the AppEngine server.

2. The AppEngine server authenticates the user account and stores the mapping from account name to device registration ID.

3. The Chrome Extension accesses the URL and page title for the current tab, and POSTs it to the AppEngine server.

4. The AppEngine server authenticates the user and looks up the corresponding device registration ID for the user account name. It then HTTP POSTs the URL and title to Google's C2DM servers, which subsequently route the message to the device, resulting in an Intent broadcast.

5. The Android application is woken by its Intent receiver. The Android application then routes the URL to the appropriate application via a new Intent (e.g. browser, dialer, or Google Maps).

An interesting design choice in this application was to send the payload (URL and title) as part of the push message. A hash of the URL is used as a collapse_key to prevent multiple button presses resulting in duplicate intents. In principle the whole URL could have been used, but the hash is shorter and avoids unnecessarily exposing payload data. An alternative approach (and indeed the preferred one for larger payloads) is to use the push message service as a tickle to wake up the application, which would subsequently fetch the payload out-of-band, e.g. over HTTP.

The code for Chrome to Phone is online. Both the AppEngine and Android Application include a reusable package called com.google.android.c2dm that handles the lower-level C2DM interactions (e.g. configuration, task queues for resilience, etc).

Chrome to Phone is useful, but maybe it’s most interesting as an example of how to use Android C2DM.

Cuando en el título de este post me refiero a un estudio estoy hablando del Eclipse Community Survey 2010. En él, 1696 desarrolladores de la comunidad Eclipse, distribuidos a lo largo de más de 200 proyectos open source, contestaron una serie de preguntas durante el pasado mes de abril con el fin de crear un perfil de cómo interactúan los desarrolladores open source con la comunidad.

Por supuesto, el estudio no puede considerarse representativo de toda la comunidad de desarrollo de código abierto. No obstante, aunque esté centrado alrededor de la plataforma Eclipse, no creo que deba despreciarse por originarse en una de los ecosistemas de desarrollo abierto más diversos y exitosos.

Ahora mencionaré algunos de los interesantes tendencias que podemos hallar con respecto a Linux en el reporte de dicho estudio:

• Linux continúa ganando adeptos entre los desarrolladores. Cerca del 33% de los desarrolladores usan Linux como su primer sistema operativo para programar. Esto es casi 13% más desde 2007. Windows, en cambio, ha caído del 74% en 2007 al 58% en 2010. Esa caída de casi el 20% puede correlacionarse con lo ganado por Linux y Mac OS X. El sabor preferido de Linux es Ubuntu con el 18.3%, seguido por Fedora con el 4.7%.

• Linux es el sistema operativo preferido a la hora de poner el sistema en producción. Como muestra el siguiente gráfico, 46% de los sistemas desarrollados termina en Linux, mientras que muy cerca, el 41% lo hace en Windows. Los otros sistemas operativos tienen números marginales.

El estudio arroja otro resultados, como el sorpresivo crecimiento de Open JDK, así como el cada vez más preferido sistema de control de versiones distribuido (DVCS) con herramientas tales como Git. No menos interesante es el fragmentado uso de metodologías de desarrollo (¡25% no usa alguna!). El reporte ofrece todos los detalles con respecto a estos y otros resultados.

No sé si el crecimiento de las versiones de Linux fáciles de instalar y configurar como Ubuntu y Fedora (sobre todo la primera) sea la razón del creciente uso de Linux entre los desarrolladores. Tampoco sé con exactitud si son las empresas quienes están encontrando en Linux el sistema robusto, barato y eficiente para el desarrollo de sus aplicaciones. ¿Conocen un estudio que nos permita entender mejor por qué el aparente crecimiento de Linux entre los desarrolladores?

Imagen: ircnels0n

Estudio señala que cada vez más desarrolladores usan Linux (y menos Windows) escrita en Bitelia el 15 June, 2010 por alan.lazalde
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De GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) poco tengo que comentar: Un programa de retoque fotográfico muy potente, de código libre y accesible a todos. Yo lo llamo cariñosamente “el Photoshop de los no-profesionales” ya que para la mayoría de los usos que un usuario normal le da a Photoshop, GIMP los cubre a las mil maravillas… y es Open Source!

Pues bien, muchos vídeos, tutoriales, demostraciones se pueden ver por la red estos días de las maravillas que incorpora la nuevas suite de Adobe, CS5, y una de las más sorprendentes puede ser el eliminado y retoque de elementos en una fotografía con sólo seleccionar el elemento en cuestión. Resynthesizer viene siendo esto mismo, seleccionamos el elemento que queremos eliminar… y magia! Desaparece recomponiéndonos la foto sin problemas (aunque siempre se nota un poquito, siempre dependerá de la foto, tamaño del objeto a eliminar…)

El modo de aplicar lo que Resynthesizer nos ofrece es muy simple:

1. Lanzamos GIMP
2. Cargamos la imagen
3. Seleccionamos lo que deseemos eliminar
4. Accedemos al menú: Filtro > Realzar [Enhance] > Smart remove selection…

No puede ser más sencillito. El plugin, de código fuente libre y disponible para todos en su página web, es de muy fácil instalación sobre todo para los usuarios de Ubuntu ya que se encuentra disponible en los repositorios oficiales de la distribución de Canonical:

sudo apt-get install gimp-resynthesizer

Para los que usen el sistema de las ventanas, disponen de un paquete preparado para su instalación en su página web con lo que… más simple imposible.

Información básica

• Plataforma: Linux/Windows
• Licencia: Open Source
• Precio: Gratuito.
• Enlace de descarga: Resynthesizer o en los repositorios de Ubuntu.