tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36507801299415877572024-02-21T10:20:57.857+02:00Vesku's BlogThis blog is mostly about the stuff I do and about technology stuff that I find interesting.
This is a personal blog.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-68073939084780662872015-07-14T10:51:00.001+03:002015-07-14T10:51:51.432+03:00Linux for travel laptopLate last year I needed cheap and light laptop for travel use. I ended up buying Acer Aspire V3 11.6" -laptop and used it with kubuntu. The laptop was ok for my light needs during my long trip. Laptop's 4GB of RAM, slow CPU, and slow disk meant that occasionally swapping made the experience a bit annoying.
<p>My needs for personal travel laptop have not really changed, at home I'll continue doing majority of heavy lifting with iMac that is starting to be old, but still feels quite snappy (16GB of RAM helps). Mainly for fun and curiosity I decided to see how much better the laptop would feel with SSD. I bought 240GB SSD for it. Installing it was easy. I just opened bunch of screws from bottom, pulled the old drive out and replaced it with new one.
<p>I decided to start from scratch and install fresh OS to the upgraded laptop. Starting from scratch was a good opportunity to try out couple of different linux distros to see if any of them would work better for me than kubuntu has.
<p>At first I installed Ubuntu Mate. Install was trivial, this seems true for all Ubuntu variants I've tried so far. The desktop resembles traditional Gnome desktop. Bootup was fast. Menus and app launches seemed quite snappy. The desktop wastes a bit space as there is toolbars both on top and bottom, but otherwise UI seemed ok. Trackpad settings UI was minimal. It allowed me to enable two finger scrolling, but did not allow inversing directions, which is a must have for me. The sensitivity and sensitivity could also use some adjusting. For desktop use with mouse the distro could be good, but these few issues were enough for me to move to next candidate.
<p>Xubuntu was my next candidate. I've used xubuntu earlier in my work laptop for a while. I liked it, but ditched it when I realized that its multidisplay support was not good enough for my use. I often used different monitor setups and needed to quickly setup the laptop with new display when holding a presentantion. For personal use that is not an issue. Xubuntu feels quite fast in basic use, but the graphics are not entirely smooth. There is some tearing in cases like watching fullscreen video on youtube or scrolling graphics intensive website in Firefox. I got the touchpad set the way I like it, and I like the minimal desktop that xfce provides. I definitely prefer xfce desktop over Mate. The look is nicer and with one toolbar the screen usage is also more efficient.
<p>SSD doesn't make the laptop amazingly fast, but a lot of basic tasks like bootup, start of apps, and install of packages got a lot more pleasent. I've seen a lot less lag due to swapping so far. Xubuntu seems good enough for me. I think I'm going to keep using it in this laptop.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-48217501410550042862015-07-02T10:29:00.000+03:002015-07-02T12:28:28.141+03:00First day with Apple Music<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibcp9LmhG10piOieS8j1AXFHrWhEbzXTTWCR1NWg45jOp1xt27rfc-GmmA7Xiy-5VWWrXjY4gzDWaUUdYVdGCRKVplKNX3keIARTtI2GU4bai6o7zuvTCIGqc_YLch0HhcmptldBKlgtU/s1600/IMG_0275.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibcp9LmhG10piOieS8j1AXFHrWhEbzXTTWCR1NWg45jOp1xt27rfc-GmmA7Xiy-5VWWrXjY4gzDWaUUdYVdGCRKVplKNX3keIARTtI2GU4bai6o7zuvTCIGqc_YLch0HhcmptldBKlgtU/s320/IMG_0275.PNG" /></a></div>My first impression on Apple Music is good after one day of use. Apps are a bit complicated, but so are competitors. I don't think Apple Music is a game changer. Transition toward streaming services has been happening for long time already and Apple Music isn't bringing anything radically new to market. I'm not even sure if it is any better than competitors, but it is not bad either. Apple Music will accelerate the transition and a lot of Apple users that have so far been buying music from iTunes are now going to switch to Apple Music.
<p>I started my experience with upgrading my iPad Air and then starting using the service. Apple Music obviously had my iTunes purchases, playlists, and had subscribed the artists whose music I own in the Connect automatically for me. Discovering new music is quite easy. "For You" -tab provided good recommendations and playlists for me. Curated playlists seem like a good idea and I found quite many songs from them.
<p>I was surprised by the many crashes when browsing through artists and albums on my iPad. AirPlay playback via AppleTV to my amplifier was also very unreliable from iPad. Quite often the songs just went silent after few seconds of play, and only when I skipped to next song playback resumed. AirPlay from my iMac worked without any problems so could be an issue in my WiFi setup somehow.
<p>I've never been a big radio fan, and rarely listen to Internet radio so Apple's Beats 1 is not for me. I also don't see a lot of added value in the "Connect" social media. Hardcore music fans will anyway follow their favourite artists in other social medias, and artists simply have to put their stuff to FB, Twitter, Instagram, etc. anyway since majority of world will not be using "Connect". Apple Music team could just focus their efforts on making integration of Apple Music to existing SoMe services and Web (provide API!) as fluent as possible instead of trying again to reinvent SoMe.
<p>Personally, I have never spent a lot of money to music. I've been buying 3-4 albums of music from iTunes every year for about 10 years now and additionally I've got plenty of mp3 files from my student years. I've also been using free Spotify to listen to current hit singles. Streaming service like Apple Music or Spotify Premium would be a better user experience for me, but I'm not yet convinced that benefits are big enough for me to justify additional cost. I'm probably going to enjoy my three month free trial and after it is over go back to using combination of free Spotify and sometimes buying songs from iTunes.
<p><i>Edit: After upgrading my Mac to 10.10.4 AirPlay from iPad to AppleTV has worked without any issues. Perhaps discoveryd was messing up something in my network.</i>veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-75292946520167462472015-06-26T09:43:00.000+03:002015-06-26T09:43:06.488+03:00Google Photos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPjZLifQnznrt1wI9mcxjFxKZ7derXqZq2_a1n_DAkIg3RFyv5EJxEM4SBbRf_YjZdQCTsnGA8YBj4fpniLILh_CHeqcRRQncyiW9X9yHH8Tp8rEa2CLEddmrL27sPNhqbgtkb9j3es4/s1600/Screenshot_2015-06-26-09-23-17.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmPjZLifQnznrt1wI9mcxjFxKZ7derXqZq2_a1n_DAkIg3RFyv5EJxEM4SBbRf_YjZdQCTsnGA8YBj4fpniLILh_CHeqcRRQncyiW9X9yHH8Tp8rEa2CLEddmrL27sPNhqbgtkb9j3es4/s320/Screenshot_2015-06-26-09-23-17.png" /></a></div>Just two months ago I complained about problems in <a href="http://veskuh.blogspot.fi/2015/04/photo-management-with-android.html">Android's Photo management</a>. I've been using Google's new Photos app for few weeks now and I have to say that I'm impressed.
<p>Most of the things I complained about have been fixed. I've tried the app on my iPad and Nexus5 and it works nicely on both. Also the web app works well in browsers I use. The default quality is good enough for me, so I enjoy the unlimited capacity offered.
<p>Photo editing options are quite basic, but good enough for most of my uses. Synchronization has so far worked quite well. Sometimes there is a bit of delay even when devices are on same WiFi, but this has so far been so rare that it has not really bothered me. I've also seen couple of crashes on Nexus5.
<p>Search feature is quite cool. I haven't added any metadata (apart from location) to images and search is able to recognise if the picture is about a skyscraper, cityscape, a person, cat or something else.. I haven't tagged person's names to images since I'm still slightly privacy paranoid about letting google now who is who.
<p>I'm happy enough that Google Photos is my main image library from this point forward. I'm not going to migrate my old iPhoto library, but all new pics goes to Google by default and I will occasionally make local "backup" to iPhoto.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-91015740814296452362015-06-18T10:00:00.000+03:002015-06-18T10:00:17.605+03:00Elop is goneI can't say I'm sad about Elop finally leaving, but unfortunately this may just be one of the next steps toward new rounds of layoffs among the ex-Nokia people now working at Microsoft.
<p>I'm happy to see Jo Harlow gone. I haven't got any inside knowledge how the decision to go to all-in to Windows Phone -platform happened, but I've always suspected that there was a lot of company politics involved and that Harlow was one of the key proponents of the WP-strategy. After all, she was one of the few old Nokia executives that had better position after the strategy change. As Symbian boss she had most to lose if MeeGo would've succeeded.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-45501837488403857272015-05-15T16:28:00.000+03:002015-05-15T16:28:16.342+03:00Stage<p>About two years ago I did couple of public presentations and prepared the slides with LibreOffice. That was quite frustrating experience. LibreOffice is like MS Office in the way it offers huge amount of features which makes the UI a mess. My slides are always quite simple: texts, boxes, and images. Presentation programs' features are total overkill for my needs, but on the other hand I've been seriously frustrated by how difficult is to align the elements in the screen the way I want.
<p>Apple's Keynote has one feature I really like. Its use of anchor lines instead of grid for aligning elements is really nice. When you move an element and it comes near existing anchor line, the anchor line becomes visible meaning that element will snap to it. There are anchor lines, in middle and edges of elements, and screen making it easy to align elements. And anchor line stays visible only for certain time, so you can ignore it easily.
<p>From my frustration to Office suites and admiration of Keynote's anchoring mechanism I come to conclusion that I would really like to make my own simple presentation program that would support anchoring the way Keynote does, but other than that it would be minimal so that unnecessary complexity will not distract user from essentials.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbD7DP-B6kHRbOPG23EeSj39D726lm_trX54OtTVcX1cZS_jpSxkXtebEhu2z2QXPOi4WhIyPhrbr9XvL0xLj0q5MohkF-s5o4Qv7Tjbjx8T_FkRTAqNbaILaUPmnikmBzZnwAibR0fa4/s1600/stage.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbD7DP-B6kHRbOPG23EeSj39D726lm_trX54OtTVcX1cZS_jpSxkXtebEhu2z2QXPOi4WhIyPhrbr9XvL0xLj0q5MohkF-s5o4Qv7Tjbjx8T_FkRTAqNbaILaUPmnikmBzZnwAibR0fa4/s1600/stage.png" /></a></div>
<p>Around july 2013 I started working on the app I call <a href="https://github.com/veskuh/stage">Stage</a>. I haven't worked much on it and it is far from being useful yet, but I still like the idea and the anchoring code was interesting to write. I'm using Qt5 and QtQuick Controls since I want to make the app cross platform and QML is just so much fun. On the technical side I'm also playing with idea of doing as much as possible with QML and only using C++ when absolutely needed. In case anybody is curious, the project is at <a href="https://github.com/veskuh/stage">https://github.com/veskuh/stage</a>. The code is quite quick and dirty, and the architecture hasn't been thought about at all.
<p>I've been playing with Stage code again for few days. Doing desktop development this way is super nice and easy compared to the mobile development and the kind of projects I've been working. It's a fun little project, but it is likely that it will never be anything more than toy program. There is just too much work to be done, even for the simple set of features that I need in my presentations. It is good to have different kind of hobby projects, you always learn new things from them.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-73268062861627387272015-04-27T10:46:00.000+03:002015-04-27T10:46:05.082+03:00Developing competenceLong term survival in technology business requires companies to have top notch engineers. The companies in Silicon Walley benefit from the huge talent pool in the area. The best companies do think about developing their people, there even the bad ones benefit from the smart companies and are only willing to hire people they think are already good.
<p>European companies face a different challenge. There are not many R&D hubs with many big companies present. Typically the local talent pool is smaller and focused on narrower segment, like mobile game development in Helsinki, or car software in Germany. Finland used to have large amount of mobile software engineers, but due to platform change, the old Symbian skills are obsolete.
<p>Nokia managed to develop many great engineers that are now great specialists at other companies. To grow into a great engineer usually needs two things 1) right amount of time 2) suitable challenges. For example to become a great browser engineer, you would have to spent many years in doing fixes and new features for browser engine, even if you are talented. Nokia's best browser engineers have joined companies like Intel, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Huawei, and Nvidia and still work on browser technologies. To develop that kind of talent Nokia invested in Webkit development for many years and then on Linux side on Gecko development for several years.
<p>Sometimes companies forget that they have opportunity to grow the engineers from talents to great engineers and only setup new R&D in already hot areas like Silicon Walley, or even worse only hire top engineers (instead of top talent).
<p>There are challenging software areas where it can make a huge difference what kind of people you have and how long are you willing to stay in the area. All too easily I see companies moving responsibilities and restructuring their operations. These can be really bad for talent and demanding asset development. For example Google couldn't have made Chrome great by just developing one more UI on top of Webkit. Google needed to invest time and money on Webkit engine development, their own JavaScript virtual machine development, and forking Webkit to Blink. All of these required years of work, hiring great people, and growing talent into great engineers.
<p>While I applauded Nokia's browser team development as a good thing, sadly most of Nokia's development work seemed to be much more short sighted, and even in the browser area Google is much better than Nokia ever was as Chrome's success both on desktop and mobile proves.
<p>Way too often I still see companies only willing to hire ready people, instead of healthy mix of eager young engineers and experienced guys. Hiring is only small part of developing people. Keeping the right people and giving them right jobs is probably even more difficult.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-83629649261128749442015-04-23T09:56:00.000+03:002015-04-23T09:56:26.733+03:00Programmer stereotypesM.E. Driscoll wrote an interesting piece about the traits he sees in <a href="http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley">top engineers in Silicon Walley</a>:
<blockquote>A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer in San Francisco with friends when someone quipped:
<p>“You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++."
<p>It’s funny, but it got me thinking. Who are the "fat guys who know C++”, or as someone else put it, “the guys with neckbeards, who keep Google’s servers running”? And why is it that if you encounter one, it’s like pulling on a thread, and they all seem to know each other?</blockquote>
And continues to characterise them as:
<blockquote>
<bl>
<li>Their craft is creating software</li>
<li>Their tools of choice are C, C++, and Java – not Javascript or PHP</li>
<li>They wear ironic t-shirts, and that is the outer limit of their fashion sense</li>
<li>They’re not hipsters who live in the Mission or even in the city; they live near a CalTrain stop, somewhere on the Peninsula</li>
<li>They meet for Game Night on Thursdays to play Settlers of Catan</li>
<li>They are passive, logical, and Spock-like</li>
</bl>
</blockquote>
<p>So it's C++ fat guys with neckbeards vs. JavaScript hipsters. In my experience its quite different in Finland. <p>We do have JavaScript hipsters and some of them are really competent and obviously some not. Fat C++ guys that are great engineers are actually quite a rare.
<p>Majority of super competent C++ developers I know are regular boring engineer types (we used to use term "Nokia Engineer" to describe the type). These are people with 1,5 kids, golden retriever, wagon Volvo, and lives in a house in suburbs. They dress like normal engineers and most of their free time they use with their family. They really are passionate about their work and see it as craft, and do tend to use languages that are appropriate for the job, and definitely are logical. When they go shopping in saturday with their families they will not stick out in the crowd from the regular folk.
<p>I don't know if my experience is because of the companies I've been to, or if Finland's culture of not sticking out of the crowd has really limited the size of fat C++ coder community and forced the to fit society more than in Silicon Walley. veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-78552488140640885402015-04-10T15:19:00.002+03:002015-04-10T15:21:43.679+03:00Photo management with AndroidDuring my recent trip Nexus 5 was the only camera I used. I know its not the greatest, my Pureview 808 would have been a lot better, but I decided to only carry one phone daily. I'm usually quite happy with the quality of the pictures Nexus 5 is able to capture.
<p>The longer I've used Android I've discovered more and more little things I do not like in it. Photo management is something I've actually started to hate in Lollipop. Photos app UI is ok, its not great but does the job. I think most of the issues are because of cloud synchronization and grouping of local images.
<p>For example deleting image is a blocking operation and may take several seconds and I need to confirm dialog "Delete everywhere". The app does poor job in figuring out local vs. cloud and many times I had to wait loading of image for long time (loaded from cloud) even though the same image was available locally. Also, in "All images" list I see duplicates of images (cloud, local) and in some cases even a third one (local low resolution preview). <p>After trip I wanted to import images to iPhoto. For all images it imported both preview and the actual image. Perhaps that was an issue in iPhoto, but couldn't Android have stored previews to non-visible dir so that they would not be imported?
<p>There is also plenty of little annoyances in photos app and photo management like notification with led/sound about such a trivial thing as "n of your images was backed up" on succeeding automatic backup. I hate these issues because taking photos is one of the key features in a mobile phone for me. I like to take photos, share them, modify them, transfer them to computer for various uses and do all of this often.
<p>I may need to install Sailfish on my Nexus before I throw it to the wall. I'm also seriously considering iPhone 6. veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-38118664912270965532015-03-31T13:22:00.000+03:002015-03-31T13:22:28.995+03:00TravellingWhen I last year left my job I was generally unhappy. I did not love my job, I did not find my life exciting, and I did not know what do about it. Only thing I was sure was that I needed to change something. I decided to at least see some parts of the world I haven't seen, and do things I've always wanted to, but haven't had the courage.
<p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfz2grYgbNrnvlRA0YP0pnTjajoxhFg9O4J58X4FXtD9sScy5ehbXVcEnILcGF6jAvK_OfOgGRBDEp-CJtYBP_EQX1XH7ApHmqQWT2skEJFVIa58ntU3_cISc5kTm-lRaT0hjI9MdHLF4/s1600/IMG_20150321_235700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfz2grYgbNrnvlRA0YP0pnTjajoxhFg9O4J58X4FXtD9sScy5ehbXVcEnILcGF6jAvK_OfOgGRBDEp-CJtYBP_EQX1XH7ApHmqQWT2skEJFVIa58ntU3_cISc5kTm-lRaT0hjI9MdHLF4/s320/IMG_20150321_235700.jpg" /></a></div>
I just last week come back to Finland after almost three months of travel in South-East Asia and Australia. I had a great trip, probably best trip I've ever made and my biggest adventure so far. I spent a lot of money, but it was worth it. As a person, I'm still the same I've always been with the same problems and strengths, but I found courage to do things I never thought I could and found little moments of happiness. I hope I'm a bit braver and confident than before the trip. I will definitely pay more attention in living the life instead of just being.
<p>
Now, I'm actively looking for a job. After my break from work I've started to enjoy programming again so I'm also looking at developer positions. I'm mostly interested in Qt/QML and web technologies. I've always had a regular job, but this time I'm also thinking of getting into contracting. The idea of doing a 3-6 month contract and then having another contract or a small break could be just right for me.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-30955432421588896342014-11-12T16:55:00.002+02:002014-11-12T16:55:25.270+02:00Travel laptopI wanted to get a cheap and light laptop mostly for travel use. I did not need a lot of performance, but I wanted enough so that I could do a build of Tweetian using Sailfish SDK if I wanted to. This rules ARM based netbooks out and in practice means that device needs to have 4GB of RAM at minimum and reasonably modern CPU.
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5BthgOgO3c7hDH0Y8evKHmAJL9VjRUK7cdVUoO1HIC09xhOo6dtxbf25xXsxvKrtBAFJKSY0YL5IFaEe5uXzR_BkS7mP-FC7uNkHpf1GumKVuUJO5gkVWWjxvFTvi_l3SJOkbEjW1dqc/s1600/IMG_20141112_160815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5BthgOgO3c7hDH0Y8evKHmAJL9VjRUK7cdVUoO1HIC09xhOo6dtxbf25xXsxvKrtBAFJKSY0YL5IFaEe5uXzR_BkS7mP-FC7uNkHpf1GumKVuUJO5gkVWWjxvFTvi_l3SJOkbEjW1dqc/s320/IMG_20141112_160815.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>
I ended up buying <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-V3-111P-43BC-11-6-Inch-Touchscreen/dp/B00K2O4VLS">Acer Aspire V3-111P</a> The device was quite cheap at 399€. The performance seems to be good enough for the tasks I had in mind and even though the hardware has a bit cheap feel to it the device looks good. Trackpad and keyboard are OK and its surprisingly fun occasionally use the 11.6 inch touchscreen for pointing and scrolling.
<p>
I've never had Windows 8 or Windows Phone device before so I was curious about the Metro UI and for the first days I used the preinstalled Windows 8.1. The UI indeed was quite nice for touchscreen use. However, a lot of the time the things I needed were traditional mouse/keyboard driven things and the mixed traditional/touch environment become quickly painful. Originally I thought of making dual boot system with preinstalled Win8 and Kubuntu. The device had secure boot and UEFI enabled in BIOS and getting dual boot to work correctly did not work right and quick Googling did not help so instead I just changed to traditional boot and installed only Linux.
<p>
Display brightness adjustment has issues and Ethernet does not get IP, but everything else works with Kubuntu. Two finger scrolling is too fast with trackpad, other than that keyboard, trackpad, and touchscreen are working quite well. 4GB of memory means that sometimes the device lags a bit, but less than it did with Windows. Also, Sailfish SDK is clearly quicker under Linux. According to specs battery should last 7h of use. I haven't measured, but my feeling is that it is probably true, could be even a little better.
<p>I really wanted to buy a MacBook Air, but it would have been way too expensive just for travel use. I think I got good value for the money and if the laptop gets stolen or broken during a trip it will not be a huge loss like it would be with a premium laptop. I may still swap the 500GB harddrive to SSD to get a bit more speed some time later though.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-62703675137558774162014-10-17T14:00:00.000+03:002014-10-17T14:00:48.471+03:00Stella Launcher<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEing-Myu5dlpo8uUYvGyiR3ugQQBpCLJlX5H6tIwlhnT2CdUS6jMlJ4UcMHlUaZw3eGIMqL5IOc2-jl87zqRmLoanRBx6m9cU8wIfhzSvfzAVytcX5OiyGFj4Xaj-Vr-HkQoOEtA1f9s9A/s1600/Kuva.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEing-Myu5dlpo8uUYvGyiR3ugQQBpCLJlX5H6tIwlhnT2CdUS6jMlJ4UcMHlUaZw3eGIMqL5IOc2-jl87zqRmLoanRBx6m9cU8wIfhzSvfzAVytcX5OiyGFj4Xaj-Vr-HkQoOEtA1f9s9A/s320/Kuva.png" /></a></div>
<p>I've been using <a href="http://jolla.com/stella">Stella Launcher</a> on Nexus 5 for a while now. Originally I was skeptical about the whole concept. Jolla's UI is just so different than Android's so how could it be a good experience to have launcher from Jolla and then just normal Android UX in apps, system, and settings? Also because of Android API restrictions the launcher could not support all the things Jolla's homescreen has, so even the launcher is not 100% same as homescreen experience in Sailfish OS. There are some rough edges, but all in all I'm positively surprised on how it turned out. Personally, I prefer using Stella Launcher on my Nexus 5 over having standard Google launcher.
<p>I think I prefer Stella Launcher because it makes the homescreen simpler. There is just my apps and running apps. No widgets, no app shortcuts, nothing extra. All the apps I rarely use are in folders so my app grid is just one page and I get to apps I use often really quick. The one thing I'd like to see improved is the integration to Android notifications. It would be really nice if access to Android's pulldown notification menu could somehow be improved.
<p>It's great that with Stella Launcher wider audience gets to explore a bit about Sailfish experience.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-70191859221015050032014-10-15T18:03:00.000+03:002014-10-15T18:03:58.265+03:00ShuffleI pretty much always listen to music in random order and I have not moved on to Spotify and instead listen to tracks from files. It has annoyed me a bit that in Jolla's Media Player I had to first open it up, then go to "All Songs" and wait for 5 secs for all my tracks to load, and only after then I can choose "Shuffle all". I thought that I could do something simpler for myself and thus started a little hobby project I call Shuffle.
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<p>Shuffle is now ready for its first release. The UI is as simple as possible. When you start the app it starts playing immediately and only options for user are next and pause. I'm not going to add much more, the idea really is to keep the app simple and optimized for random playback.
<p>Shuffle is now available from <a href="https://openrepos.net/content/veskuh/shuffle">OpenRepos</a> and sources are at <a href="https://github.com/veskuh/shuffle">github</a>.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-9449486954593872922014-10-08T11:00:00.000+03:002014-10-08T11:00:38.052+03:00Pragmatic programmer<a href="http://adamsilver.github.io/articles/the-boring-front-end-developer/">"The boring front-end developer"</a> by Adam Silver:
<blockquote>Cool front-end developers are always pushing the envelope, jumping out of their seat to use the latest and greatest and shiniest of UI frameworks and libraries. They are often found bridging the gap between native apps and web and so will strive to make the UI look and behave like an app. Which app? you may ask. iPhone? Android? What version? All good questions, alas another topic all together. However, there is another kind of front-end developer, the boring front-end developer. Here is an ode to the boring front-end developer, BFED if you will.
<p>
...
<p>
When given the choice to add a preprocessor (e.g. LESS, SASS, CoffeeScript etc) to the technology stack, the BFED realises there is a deeper impact beyond just "writing less code". Will developers need to learn a new language beyond the language of the web (i.e. HTML, CSS, JS)? Will debugging code be harder? If the answer to any of these questions is yes then the BFED will say no to preprocessors.
<p>
..
<p>
The BFED realises that users have different abilities and preferred ways of using a computer, whether its a mouse, finger, thumb, screen reader, keyboard or a combination of all, websites should be consumable no matter the audience, screen size or capability of the browser.
<p>
</blockquote>
<p>This great post got me thinking about my own attitude towards code. I've always thought that I'm pretty good programmer but not a great one. I lack the ambition to know everything there is to know about certain specific area. I prefer just to solve the problem at hand and move on to solve the next challenge. I always try to solve the problem well, but I rarely go the extra mile to create awesome solutions.
<p>Sometimes I get annoyed when rockstar programmers create really ambitious and risky solutions (or use tools unfamiliar with the team) to problems that are in my eyes just regular problems where regular solutions work quite well. Of course sometimes radical approaches are needed, otherwise we wouldn't have really great improvements like QML. I guess having the taste to understand when its appropriate to take risk and go with radical solution is what separates wannabe rockstars from truly great programmers.
<p>I just try to be practical and get things done.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-16926211563568443312014-10-06T13:43:00.000+03:002014-10-06T13:43:28.038+03:00Taking a breakAfter two awesome years, I left Jolla last week. I felt a strong need to do something else since coding hasn't felt as fun as it has been earlier. I still have huge respect for Jolla and for the people in it. The company is still a young and evolving. If someday Jolla has the kind of position I want, I'd love to go back.
<p>Next I'm planning to chill, travel, and do some hobby projects, like continue to maintain Tweetian for Sailfish. I'm of course keeping an eye out for great opportunities and I'll surely apply if I see something close to my dream job, but I'm not stressing at all about getting a day job quickly and instead I just want to be sure that whatever I do next is just right for me.
<p>My dream job? I don't know, who really does? I'm nowadays more interested in what software does than actually creating the code so I think I would like working as a product owner for an app or service. I've also enjoyed a lot doing the Sailfish app development presentations at conferences and would definitely be interested in a job where I could do more that kind of tasks. Startups are interesting and I think I would be ready for taking a big role in a startup and help it make the product and grow bigger. I've also done project management and team leading. Perhaps being a technical program manager or a team lead in some interesting project would be a nice challenge.
<p>The farewell wishes from the whole Jolla crew was heart warming. I really appreciate their kindness and understanding. They gave me this awesome lifebuoy as farewell gift and it will surely keep me afloat while I try to find dry land. <p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ltvZY8x0I7jQsP0NQjghyphenhyphenfIDtQ8M5LHMOnPLh3ghlF2l5gjATy2xEtCKWJQHqxmjBMiGHuStGOPV8tgIbtXGS7TpHoDXDUOBLY8_z9JOrdMNHK8TB7Ia2kTcsd8rUdhrijzkh0vyxm8/s1600/IMG_20140930_180815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_ltvZY8x0I7jQsP0NQjghyphenhyphenfIDtQ8M5LHMOnPLh3ghlF2l5gjATy2xEtCKWJQHqxmjBMiGHuStGOPV8tgIbtXGS7TpHoDXDUOBLY8_z9JOrdMNHK8TB7Ia2kTcsd8rUdhrijzkh0vyxm8/s320/IMG_20140930_180815.jpg" /></a></div>veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-87247278014545389692014-02-08T15:15:00.000+02:002014-02-08T15:15:37.306+02:00Tweetian for Sailfish OSAs a hobby project I've been porting Tweetian to Sailfish OS. Last week I finally thought it was good enough and submitted it to Jolla Store, and it's now downloadable from Jolla Store and for early adapters there is a bit more advanced version available at <a href="https://openrepos.net/content/veskuh/tweetian-sailfish-os">OpenRepos.net</a>
<p>Here is how latest version runs on Jolla:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/fz-hDtO9wQw?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>Big thanks goes to Dickson Leong for creating original Tweetian.
<p>All the features in our sailfish port come from the original. Main part of porting has been adjusting the UI to suit Sailfish OS. For the features we have done some small changes since Sailfish uses Qt5 and the original was done with Qt4. <p>Big help in getting Tweetian running nicely on Sailfish has been Siteshwar Vashisht, he did the initial Qt5 port and has done many pull requests to get UI working nicely. Stephan Beyerle has helped in creating more Sailfish like icons. Thanks to other contributors too. Many of my colleagues at Jolla have provided feedback and tips, thanks for those and for making our beloved device real.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-62071554724514905532013-08-31T11:49:00.000+03:002013-08-31T11:49:15.375+03:00AkademyHolding a keynote presentation at this years Akademy was the highlight of my summer.
<iframe width="480" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QCylvUiXmrg?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>I really enjoyed keeping the presentation. Usually my presentations have been almost purely technical, but since this was keynote I told a bit more about what kind of company Jolla is and where we come from. It was nice to have the opportunity to tell my view on the Jolla story so far.
<p>I enjoyed the conference and the co-located Qt Contributor's summit. There was a lot of interest toward Jolla, and I talked with many interesting people. Some people were curious about the device, some about the OS, and many had interesting ideas about what kind "Other Halfs" for the Jolla device would be nice. Everybody were really positive and supportive toward us, and there were a lot of people that had used and liked N9, or N900 and really wanted us to produce worthy successor to those devices.
<p>I still like R&D work, but I have to admit that nowadays I enjoy more going to events like this to give talks and I'd probably want to do that even more often then I'm doing now. Next one that I will attend is <a href="http://smartdevcon.eu">SmartDevCon</a> at Poland in two weeks.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-35374726360873050432013-06-20T15:52:00.000+03:002013-06-20T15:52:59.679+03:00Qt Developer Day Beijing and a mini tour in China
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About a month I was asked to attend Qt Developer Day at Beijing and Jolla developer events at Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzen at the beginning of June. I had never visited China before and so I agreed to go.
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<p>Our hosts arranged a fancy meal for the first evening in a gourmet restaurant. The food was delicious. I tasted the famous Beijing duck and many other great dishes.
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<p>The conference was at the second day. Marc held a keynote, and Joona had presentation about the user interface. The guys did a great job in their presentations. I had a smaller demo session about "Getting started in Sailfish SDK" in a smaller room. To my surprise the room was packed full. My colleagues didn't even fit the room. It was nice. There were many questions and people seemed really interested. Our booth was also quite popular.
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<p>Before my talk I went to my room to concentrate and I discovered this wonder:
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Apparently you can have instant coffee that is also good.
<p>
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<p>In the evening we had dinner at a restaurant with a traditional upper class (royal?) style. The atmosphere of the place was amazing. There was traditional Chinese decorations everywhere and the staff were in fancy costumes. They also presented couple of dances and old music for us.
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<p>During our last day in Beijing we had some time to see the sights. We woke up really early to visit the Great Wall. Unfortunately, it was raining heavily and there was also fog, so the views weren't great. It was still nice to see it though. After coming back to the city, we wen't to the Forbidden City since we had some time. It was one of those places that are much bigger than you think. Buildings were pretty, and there were a lot of tourists. Everybody were taking pictures, all the time.
<p>Developer meetup was at a coffee shop that was decorated in a true hacker spirit. For example the walls of men's room were filled with old keyboards. The event was nice, and people seemed genuinely interested in what we are doing. I loved the experiences we had in Beijing, but I did not like smog, traffic, and hugeness of the city. During the time we spent in Beijing I did not see the sun, the pollution was that bad. Our hosts took good care of us and I'm more than happy to revisit, but it is not place I'd recommend for ordinary tourists.
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<p>In the next morning we woke up really early again and took a bullet train to Shanghai. Shanghai felt completely different than Beijing. The skyscrapers were taller and prettier, there was a breeze of fresh air from the sea, and the old colonial style building by the river, opposite of the famous Pudong area, were really looking nice.
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<p>After the meetup in Shanghai we went to 30th floor sky bar which had amazing view towards Pudong. After one drink we head back to hotel, since the wake up was even earlier in the following day.
<p>The last day of the trip was the longest one. We flew from Shanghai to Shenzen and went straight to the meetup. Again we met nice and enthustiastic people and they gave a really nice calligraphy as a gift to Jolla. After the meetup we drove by taxi to Jolla office in Cyberport, Hong Kong for quick visit. The office was quite small, but the place was really nice with a really cool views.
<p>It really was a super busy week and I was totally exhausted after getting home, but it was an amazing trip and I'm so happy that I had opportunity to do it. All in all, I'm quite positive about Jolla's chances of making it in China.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-69284192478626265082013-05-20T17:55:00.000+03:002013-05-20T17:55:43.532+03:00An engineer's view on product launchToday we launched the Jolla-phone:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/K4lWTsqFe6I?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>We have worked hard to get to this point and there is still a lot of work ahead before this beauty is in the shops. Launch is one of the major milestones in any product's lifecycle, and many potentially good products do not even see that day. I'm so happy that we have gotten this far and the general public starts to see what we have been cooking.
<p>For an engineer last weeks before product launch are typically quite intense. There are a lot things to do.
<p>This time around I was pretty much doing my normal development work until almost last week before the launch. I was initially not too involved in the launch preparations since I was thinking that the app I've been lately working on would not be demoed, since it was not quite yet good enough. However, last week there was demand to get that also in a bit more polished state so that it also could be demoed if needed. I got some additional help working on it, and we got the biggest issues solved.
<p>At the end of last week I was also asked to help with a demo content a bit so I did couple of longer days helping to get that done. Friday was the longest day for me. In the morning I quickly updated one of our older apps since somebody from management thought that we need to be able to quickly show it if needed. After finishing updating the app, it was time to prepare the devices for the hands-on sessions. We had few of the devices at the office and we were going to put the final software and setup on them, and then test that it all works perfectly. This took a bit longer than we thought and it was about 10 at the evening when we were ready.
<p>I'm actually quite happy about how the last minute crunch went. Some people did work on last weekend, but most of the stuff was ready early enough. In some launches it has been much worse, I remember times when practically whole teams have lost their final weekends for last minute preparations.
<p>Today and the next few days are one of the most interesting days for me. This is because now the feedback starts to come in. I love reading feedback on the device and on the software. The thing is that when we plan and design the features, the look, and in general how it all will works we do a lot of thinking and speculation on how people will use the device and what to they need. There are sometimes quite strong debates around these areas ("It needs to have this", "it can't behave like that", "That color is not pink enough"). Now we start to really see if we have been right or wrong in our thinking, and I find it very fascinating to know how well we have understood people's needs and answer them with a product.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-13972162383258124012013-05-14T10:00:00.000+03:002013-05-14T10:00:59.321+03:00Replacement for Google Reader?Does complete replacement for Google Reader exist?
<p>Threre is just couple of weeks of time to find a replacement and so far I haven't found what I need. To me most important part is to have 3rd party API available so I can write a client for my favourite mobile platforms, which obviously are MeeGo Harmattan for my N9 and Sailfish OS for Jolla. I'd also like to have good Android tablet app for my Nexus7 and decent website when I'm at work.
<p>Best part of Google Reader was that it offered all of these for free. The replacements I've seen so far are either paid solutions or are not offering an API. I'd really love to find a free solution (free with ads is fine). <p><a href="http://feedwrangler.net/welcome.html">FeedWrangler</a> is the paid solution I'm currently considering if I can't find a decent free one. It's 19$/year and looks like it offers the things I want.
<p>I haven't looked into the alternatives in that much detail so I'd really appreciate any recommendations.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-6716099932803261822013-05-09T16:42:00.000+03:002013-05-09T16:42:07.533+03:00Swipe on!Nokia's new Asha 501 is quite an interesting device.
<p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_3d8xzeNoJY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>I like the user interface, which is quite close to the Swipe UI on the N9. On demo videos UI is running quite nicely, even though the device is cheap and probably quite low-end specs. My understanding is that making modern UI running nicely Nokia ditched S40 platform and developed a new one based on the SmartedPhone OS. To me this makes the Asha 501 one of the most ambitious devices Nokia has developed recently.
<p>I'm happy to see Nokia innovate again and that they had the guts to actually ship. Battle agains cheap droid manufacturers will be hard. For true innovators sake I really hope Asha platform will succeed.
<p>Nokia's challenge is to make consumers understand the benefits of having platform optimized for low-end devices. The problem is that on paper these cheap Android devices look good, too good to be true if fact. And in real life most of the time they aren't good at all. Their battery life sucks, they are buggy, despite seemingly nice specs the UI can be laggy, and they are quite complex to operate. Some devices are obviously better than others, but in general at least usability, durability, and battery life should be clearly better in Asha 501. I'd also expect basic phone functions (calling, texting, etc.) to be way better in Asha given Nokia's years of experience in building mobile phones.
<p>I think there are two markets for these new Ashas. Developing world is the obvious one. The second one is people in western world that want some smartphone features, but do not want complex device. I think iPhone has a lot of users that prefer it over Android just because its simpler to operate. Now, with modern UI Asha is way cheaper alternative and should be just as usable. For example I think I could recommend Asha 501 for my retired parents, or I might buy one for myself as backup phone for travel, etc.
<p>As an application developer, I'm not that interested in the platform. I'm generally ok with Java as language, but I do not like traditional UI Frameworks and as long as there is no proper declarative way (like QML) of building the UI, I'm not going to bother. Good interface building tool might help here, for example Apple's interface builder is quite nice. I haven't actually checked if there exists one nowadays for J2ME, but I doubt it. As an alternative to J2ME it is possible to write Web Apps for Asha platform. These devices are having quite limited performance and with web technologies its even more difficult to write well performing apps so I'm not really interested in trying that route either.
<p>It has been a while from the last time I was as exited about Nokia product as I am now. Glad to see old colleagues still delivering cool stuff.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-48441168678344107312013-03-10T20:02:00.000+02:002013-03-10T20:02:28.988+02:00TweetianOne of my hobby projects for Sailfish OS has been porting <a href="https://github.com/dicksonleong/Tweetian">Tweetian</a> on it. This is not a complete port yet. There is plenty of stuff that does not yet work, but basic stuff is already working as you can see from the video below.
<p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Il3n_AUEbZE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>My code is still hackish and incomplete. I'm hoping to get it soon to good enough shape so that I can contribute it to upstream project. In the meanwhile sources of my port are available be found from my <a href="https://github.com/veskuh/Tweetian">github fork</a> under branch sailfish-port.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-6264298538422810712013-03-02T15:52:00.000+02:002013-03-02T15:52:36.339+02:00Sailfish SDK AlphaAfter a lot of hard work, we finally got the <a href="https://sailfishos.org/">Sailfish SDK alpha</a> version out. I've been involved in the SDK work for some time now, and I'm extremely happy to see the community to start to port their apps to Sailfish OS.
<p>After the launch I've seen some really cool screen shots of apps being developed or ported to our platform. Now, I'd like to show something I've been doing. I've got a few of my own hobby projects brewing, and I've done couple of initial ports of nice open source apps to Sailfish as part of testing and presenting the initial SDK. So for benefit of the community, I'm now publishing the sources of my first porting project, Grrok. Grrok is a great little Google Reader client by Jon Levell. Its open source and I like it, so I did a quick port of it to Sailfish and used it to demo developing for Sailfish at <a href="http://www.meetup.com/Helsinki-MeeGo-Network/events/92291392/">Jolla Hackday</a> and at <a href="http://www.qtdeveloperdays.com/northamerica/jolla-developer-story#.UTIDCaXDNIY">Qt Developer Days 2012</a> at Santa Clara, California.
<p> Here is couple of screenshots:<br><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1xx2WzyM4CPJ4pdQID6dYPJBw8cOadqouTJ0-TozXzyT_INlkhMqXVA551gtXBtXI2T3AFeI7dJhHESHSPP9Psblil03guyXKW1K0aUMaYlNlH_X5c0ENx4Z0ZzY0GZ7Te4oHumGcc1U/s1600/grok-2.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1xx2WzyM4CPJ4pdQID6dYPJBw8cOadqouTJ0-TozXzyT_INlkhMqXVA551gtXBtXI2T3AFeI7dJhHESHSPP9Psblil03guyXKW1K0aUMaYlNlH_X5c0ENx4Z0ZzY0GZ7Te4oHumGcc1U/s320/grok-2.png" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl13Wr77C5dVvoNHKqGm-FdvrllcE9VIMkWpL0tu1rEAWR1iR44MgjPwC-fHk240f3NU23-3zrCqidwBiqSkT-nny0uYxP6VOYEtRUxZf8VvPOMYXLD2DMZfqiaj9w2o_ZItSe1tTv_vw/s1600/grok-1.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl13Wr77C5dVvoNHKqGm-FdvrllcE9VIMkWpL0tu1rEAWR1iR44MgjPwC-fHk240f3NU23-3zrCqidwBiqSkT-nny0uYxP6VOYEtRUxZf8VvPOMYXLD2DMZfqiaj9w2o_ZItSe1tTv_vw/s320/grok-1.png" /></a>
<p>The sources of my port are available at: <a href=" https://github.com/veskuh/grrok">https://github.com/veskuh/grrok</a>veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-11208202172122823472012-12-30T13:40:00.000+02:002012-12-30T13:40:23.365+02:00Qt Developer Days 2012, Santa Clara<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJjn9YqggTxlz4kCWXMQ5gMPj2erYgw4AV8vg9yKEh04xpLcPEBRxbhUln3ZGQ0MqGYiNaux2LFEMgk1_T8TDJHunjzo-quPQ5BO6upWrw6pmOsgDq_ULCvTfBocV3dgltoHzQcmdqihU/s1600/12120010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="180" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJjn9YqggTxlz4kCWXMQ5gMPj2erYgw4AV8vg9yKEh04xpLcPEBRxbhUln3ZGQ0MqGYiNaux2LFEMgk1_T8TDJHunjzo-quPQ5BO6upWrw6pmOsgDq_ULCvTfBocV3dgltoHzQcmdqihU/s320/12120010.jpg" /></a></div>It was -17°C and snowing when I left from snowy Tampere. About 24h later I was at San Francisco Airport. I did not sleep too much and I was dead tired the whole next day. Unfortunately I still needed to stay sharp for the whole day since there was important stuff to be done. In the official program it was a training day. I had registered to Effective QML -training, but after sitting there for couple of hours I realized it was not really targeted for me since pretty much all the stuff trainer covered I knew already.
<p>We had agreed to give a hands-on demo and interview of Sailfish OS to Engadget in the afternoon so I decided to skip the training and prepare for Engadget and for the Jolla BoF -session in the evening. I think it was the right choice, since the interview and the hands-on went pretty well even though I was dead tired due to jet lag. The article is now available at <a href="http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/29/hands-on-with-jollas-sailfish-os-video/">Engadget</a>.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEOyBo0Irp1LxqdjKRL2WTjohYtQypBRVWWZQMaFTtfASmuAPsxyDeJwwS_eQ8jBwfymghKlidQHMLsPCc2TPd0FoWhXdDRRawgu0y7W2_sVH2ukXnm79h9uYcwObSa1j9v5-SxZfg1dg/s1600/12120020.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="180" width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEOyBo0Irp1LxqdjKRL2WTjohYtQypBRVWWZQMaFTtfASmuAPsxyDeJwwS_eQ8jBwfymghKlidQHMLsPCc2TPd0FoWhXdDRRawgu0y7W2_sVH2ukXnm79h9uYcwObSa1j9v5-SxZfg1dg/s320/12120020.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>In the evening we had a Jolla BoF session that we had agreed just couple of days before the conference. I gave demo of the UI and David talked about SDK, Mer, Nemo Mobile, and Sailfish. It was quite nice to give the UI demo, but the best part of the session was the chats with Qt people after the "official" part. People seemed genuinely curious and sympathetic towards what we do at Jolla.
<p>The next day the conference really started.
<p>Qt5 release candidate was obviously the big news from Qt-project and Digia. Qt5 is definitely interesting technology. Since Nokia doesn't anymore control Qt, the cross platform aspect of it is gaining more support again, even on mobile. In Digia's booth they had demos of Qt5 running on iOS, WP, Androrid, and other platforms. Official support for Android and iOS will be coming later in 5.x releases.
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<p>RIM had a strong push to motivate developers to code for BlackBerry 10. The platform is interesting and their UI seems quite nice. I think they do have same kind of thinking behind their UI choices as we do, but that is just inevitable when you try to optimize for single handed use or optimal screen estate use.
<p>In the afternoon I attended Open Source Tablets -panel as one of the panelist and had my own presentation in the last patch of sessions. I talked about Jolla Developer Story and gave a short overview of Sailfish architecture. My slides are available <a href="http://www.qtdeveloperdays.com/northamerica/jolla-developer-story#.UOAkn6XDNIY">here.</a>
<p>One great thing about Qt Developer Days presentations were that almost all had live-coding part that showed what the subject is really about. In my presentation I took an open source Google Reader -client called Grrok and ported it from N9 to Jolla Sailfish OS. Since the original app is QML/JS and utilizes MeeGo QML Components, porting it to use Jolla Components really was quite quick and easy. I haven't yet published sources of my port, but will do as soon as Jolla Components will be publicly available.
<p>Conference diner was fun. I was still a bit jet lagged so I didn't even drink more than two beers, but I sat down with interesting people from various backgrounds and we had really good discussions. I enjoyed the food too.
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<p>In the last day I listened to David's presentation about Mer-project and couple of other interesting sessions. From the technical sessions, I found desktop Qt Components session quite impressive. I was also curious about the QtWebkit in Qt5 and it seems so promising. Can't wait for that to get it in Mer.
<p>In the evening I ended up having diner with couple of Digia's Qt guys. Again, nice people and we ended up agreeing that we would go together to drop our luggage to airport in the following day and then go sightseeing in SF.
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Sightseeing in San Francisco was great. It's a nice city and it was especially cool to take a cruise at the bay. It was 20°C and sun was shining. Perfect ending for a great trip.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-59690228107309557872012-11-23T17:50:00.000+02:002012-11-23T17:50:05.825+02:00SlushJolla's Sailfish OS has now made first public appearance at Slush conference. I think this video shows quite nicely what the UI is all about:
<p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_c_BqnR_vAM?list=PLQgR2jhO_J0y6zifH8KkevJoEYM9LOtkM&hl=en_US" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>
It took a lot of hard work and determination to get here. At the moment, I'm tired after working long days and then partying hard at Slush. I'm happy and so darn proud of what we have achieved. I know that there is still a long road ahead and a lot to do, but in a very short time we have already achieved a lot. We were able to show pretty impressive UI.
<p>
It's amazing what a small, talented, and motivated team can do with right technologies and tools.veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3650780129941587757.post-11496771157944958752012-10-11T09:08:00.000+03:002012-10-11T09:08:01.505+03:00MeeGo TaleTaskumuro did a pretty cool job in collecting the <a href="http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/nokia-meegon-tarina,10">story of MeeGo</a>. Despite all the chaos, annoyances, and all, I loved working there. I'm happy that I stayed until the end and I'm extremely proud of the N9 product.
<p>After the WP announcement in Feb11, when I still was at Nokia, I felt a bit like I had a deckchair on Titanic and most of the stuff we had been doing was just rearranging the seats while the boat hit iceberg. All that was left to do was to see the boat sinking and save whatever we could. If you read the article, I think you will understand my feelings at the time.
<p>Luckily, a lot of the stuff we did is out there as contributions to various open source projects, and there is Jolla to continue coming out with cool Linux-based devices.
veskuhhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04260419672207954580noreply@blogger.com0