Well, Neil recently got a Pre and decided that a good way to learn the WebOS API’s etc would be to contribute to Blunderground, and contribute he did - with an awesome patch to implement a “Jump to Nearest” button!

This adds a huge data file to Blunderground (> 1000 lines) that includes all the required data to find which tube station is nearest to the devices current GPS location and then zoom the map to that station.

I then decided to steal some glory from Neil by converting the main map to be a HTML canvas (rather than an img tag) and adding some slight bling for his feature:

The overlay will dissapear after 10 seconds, which could probably be handled in a nicer way…

As it’s at a stage where it works for the person I wrote it for (and a bonus user) it’s unlikely to be developed with any sort of pace, too many other fun things to hack on!

I’ve decided against trying to get it in to Palms app store as I’m fairly certain TFL won’t be too happy with me redistributing their map. There are ways around this but I don’t feel it’s worth it at this time, at the very least I’d need to support rotation and likely a couple of other features before submitting it to the app store otherwise Blunderground will just be a target for flames.

Writing apps for the Web OS is really easy, it’s just HTML and Javascript. I kept falling over the lack of static typing and my ability to create a large typo to LOC ratio but not everyone uses the compiler as a crutch like I do.

The develop/deploy/test cycle, even with the emulator, is a touch clunky. Seems to me a lot of the testing could have been done in a browser with a suitable harness but I didn’t have the inclination to develop that, I shall check out Ares if I write another WebOS application.

Finally interacting with web services wasn’t as rosy as the cloud pushers would have me believe, a significant bulk of the development time so far was spent on trying to figure out how to parse the JSON data TubeUpdates was returning. In the end I gave up and switched to using XML which I manipulated with JavaScript DOM methods and had the functionality running in minutes.

Hung out with a bunch of cool people, attended some great talks, absorbed the general atmosphere and got inspired to do some hacking.

Guadec hacks:

• Started working on a ConnMan plugin to implement the shared connectivity namespace I proposed in my talk. This needs some more work and may involve me getting more familiar with ConnMan internals so it’s not ready yet.
• GUPnP context manager for ConnMan. GUpNP has NetworkManager and Unix back-ends for creating context manager objects so I sat down and hammered a ConnMan implementation too.I didn’t have enough network to pull all of the dependencies to build it so I’m going to do that in the office this week and have Ross look over and hopefully merge it before next week end.
• Of course, I did some carrick and gconnman hacking and even more meta-hacking (discussing features and bugs with others and helping people get familiar with the code).

While I was away Thomas made the Moblin Gtk theme rock even harder and I merged some of Jussi’s awesome visual enhancements to Carrick such that when I updated my netbook I got this piece of prettiness:

The software I’ve been working on for the last few months is starting to look really quite nice and it’s even getting to a stage where it’s mostly usable. Great stuff!

Guadec has inspired me to work on a few more things which I hope to be blogging about soon. My current #1 home-time-hacking priority is gconnman; I want to add GObject introspection annotations and think I’ve worked out a way to make it slightly more efficient.

More on both these things soon as we all decided at Guadec that we need to blog more about the neat stuff we’re working on with Moblin. It truly is the nuts.

Of course there where various questions about NetworkManager; “Why aren’t you using it”, “Why don’t you switch to it now 0.7 is released”, etc. Questions I was entirely unable to answer, various hand waving, etc.

On the whole the talk was productive though, I proposed a shared D-Bus API for common connectivity queries and after the talk Darren Kenny of Sun Microsystems told me he was interested in implementing this for the OpenSolaris connectivity daemon NWAM. Win!
I’ll be working on a ConnMan plugin and getting in touch with Darren soon.

I’ve boldly thrown up a talks page where you can get at my slides.

GCDS is really great so far. Saw a good talk by Will Thomson on “Profiling and Optimising D-Bus APIs”. His D-Bus profiling tool, Bustle, looks great and I’m going to share it with the ConnMan team.

Back to the talks.

I’m in Gran Canaria for the next week to attend the Desktop Summit with a bunch of OTC folk.
Yummy Rob has already blogged about the talks our team are giving, so I’ll just mention my talk.

I was going to be sharing a slot with Marcel in his ConnMan talk and discussing my work writing Moblin’s connectivity UI. However, as Marcel couldn’t make the summit, I get the whole slot; so I’ll be focusing on Carrick, gconnman and generally writing UIs for ConnMan.

Tomorrow at 11:30 in room 3, “Palacio de la música”