Make Your Contribution to F14 Artwork

Yes, now is the right time to make a contribution to F14 Artwork even if you don't have much confidence in your own artistic skills. We're in a concepts submission state for the main artwork and it's the idea that counts there. The deadline for submissions is July 7th, which is a month from now, so you still have some time. We keep track of the submissions on a wiki page created for this very purpose and it's considered good manners to also make note of it on the design-team mailing list.

If you don't want to aim for the main theme, you can alternatively submit a wallpaper for inclusion in additional set (You can even submit other's people work. The details how to do that will be on the following wiki page when everything is ready ;-)). We're aiming at selecting about 6 to 8 wallpapers we consider good and we'll be selecting from what will be submitted on another wiki page. Deadline for this one is further away because it's not for concepts but for already finished works—it's August 19th.

So, don't be shy and help making the F14 Artwork even more awesome!

Midori—Now Almost Feature Complete for Me

Starting today, it looks like Midori is going to be my only webbrowser (previously I've also kept Chromium for pages with that send themselves compressed which wasn't supported by older webkitgtk/libsoup combinations and firefox because the open java didn't work in webkit) because the only feature that's missing now is password saving and that's not a showstopper for me. So here're some highlights of what you can get with the latest and greatest stuff that's in Fedora 12 (and a bit of customizing):

Simple, highly usable and effective UI

Do I need status bar? No. Do I need menu bar? No. Do I need the browser controls+bookmark bar to take up lots of horizontal space? No. Do I need a home page? No. Do I need to have both reload and stop buttons displayed at the same time? No. Do I keep many tabs open? Yes. And here's precisely the type of UI that aligns with these answers:

AdBlock

These days, browser without AdBlock just gets in the way. I don't want to be distracted by ads I'm not going to click at anyway. With a sensible set of filters, Midori's advertisement blocker works very well and is shipped with the browser itself.

FlashBlock

See one of my older posts on this. This one drastically reduced CPU usage when using midori, as many pages are using flash now and flash is known to be hungry for CPU cycles :D

Netscape Plugins

Browser without support for netscape plugins is predestined to fail. That's why firefox supports them, that's why chromium supports them that's why midori supports them. But among these is also the java plugin and especially the open one was in past years not exactly just working everywhere. But with the (rather biggish) update I did yesterday, java plugin is working for me in midori as well. The miracle combination is:
midori-0.2.6-1.fc12.i686
java-1.6.0-openjdk-plugin-1.6.0.0-38.b18.fc12.i686
webkitgtk-1.2.0-1.fc12.i686

Session Saving

One of the biggest showstoppers for me using epiphany is this feature. Any browser that does not have an option to save session on exit is practically dead for me ;-) Midori fares well in this area, maybe even better thing would be to load the saved pages on demand to speed up the start. Especially with 30+ tabs open, starting even the fastest of webbrowsers is taking a loooooong time. I heard that firefox has an extension for that so lets hope midori will gain this functionality in the future as well.

Another related feature is trash bin. I can reopen closed tabs. Nice to have in case you close some tab accidentally.

Speed

All I want to say here is that midori is one of the fastest browsers I've ever use especially in comparison to firefox…

HTML5 Media

I've been always critical of the path firefox has chosen with support for the audio and video html5 tags. They just bundle some codec libraries with firefox. While this might be a good solution for windows platform (you know, they don't have package managers to download the deps for them) it's IMHO essentially wrong.

When you implement a media player you do not bundle every possible codec with it but use an already working media framework like gstreamer, directshow or phonon. And that's the way webkit people are going—webkitgtk makes use of gstreamer, qt-webkit makes use of phonon, chromium port makes use of ffmpeg,… One of the pros of this approach is that you don't need to install new version of webbrowser to support new codec, so when google released WebM, all that was needed was building the needed libraries in fedora, write a gstreamer plugin, release, package, update and you are done for everything that uses gstreamer, midori included. So we now have WebM support in midori, while firefox users still need to wait :-p And as a bonus, we don't have to care about the result of theora vs. vp8 vs. h264 browser war—webkitgtk supports all (if you have the needed codecs installed which probably anyone who watches video on fedora have).



From what I've seen on youtube, the VP8 codec can provide high quality but it seems even more CPU intensive than h264—I can barely watch videos on youtube in h264 in 720p, but I cannot watch those that are in VP8 and 720p.

Manageable Search Engines

included in address bar. I don't need a separate search bar. But I do need more searches than just google and I want to use keywords so that I just write say 'j 先生', hit enter and it does a jisho search for word '先生' (sensei, teacher, master, doctor).

What's missing?

Good question. For me it's password saving, ssh certificates handling (I probably cannot log in to koji) and ftp protocol support—I don't mind that ftp browsing is not implemented in web browser, but opening nautilus (or another file/ftp manager) with the specified location would make things much more convenient.

Some Impressions on LGM

Ok, first let me same I'm totally awful with writing kind of what-did-I-do blogpost and at the same time both Nicu and Pierros are making a really good posts about what we do here (with some of the best photos Nicu and Pierros took included)…

My first first impression of Belgium was not that great — I'm pretty used from Czech Republic to get easy everwhere, there're "online" infotables about trains departures/arrivals on train stations, the subway in Prague is really easy to follow (I'd say it follows the KISS principle, like gnome does), and to add to that everything here in Belgium is in French (which I know nothing about) so I was a bit at loss when trying to travel from Charleroi to Brussels and then to our hotel. But at last I was successful.

It really is a bless to have Pierros with us — if it were not for him, I would be constantly lost in the city (somehow my sense of direction in big cities is terrible) ;-) Both Nicu and Pierros are really awesome companions and they're showing me lots of new stuff I have no idea about (like the Belgium beers). Btw. speaking about the beers, I'm totally "insesitive" in this area and most beers I've tried taste very similar to me :-D

But back to the conference itself. Yesterday's morning lectures were the more technical ones which is probably not a best way to start a graphics meeting, but they were pretty interesting. Lots of python, some C and even Scheme based scripting language (the Script-fu and Tiny-fu from gimp). The most interesting talk for me for that part of day was A first outline for a UI for a fully GEGLed GIMP. As I understand it it's a new type of workflow and format that is kind of chain based — you take the initial image and apply various edits, effects and other operations like the old way, but the difference is that it does not change the image itself. Those of you familiar with quantum physics or generally a [noncomutative] operator algebra over some space could see it as taking an image (member of the space in question) and applying various operators on it. And the point is, you apply it only on screen, in memory it's still being interpreted as a sequence of operators applied on the image. So you can insert another operators in the middle, delete some of them, without breaking the rest of the chain. Lots of possibilities. I really look forward the time when this will be included in gimp releases ;-)

The lunch was fairly good, and we've met some interesting people there. It's a really great oportunity to talk with various people during the lunch break. In the afternoon there were some interesting presentations like How to get contributors to your Free/Libre/Open Source project from Vietnam and Asia or How to Run an Art School on Free and Open Source Software. Btw. Hong Phuc Dang who was doing the presentation about Open Source in Vietnam is really enthuiastic about the FLOSS software as you can see in the video she put up (sadly it's in flash, but it should be acessible form lgm site some time in the future hopefully in more open format). And of course, we've had our presentation with Nicu, seems the audience liked it, but we're regretting that we forgot to say some of the things we wanted to say…

Today, I'm a little sad that we overslept and missed a good part of the Diffusion Curves in Inkscape vector drawings, there was an interesing presentation about LibreDWG and I'm looking forward some presentation later today about fonts and typography.

Flash Block in Midori

So, I've been reading a bit on epiphany on live.gnome.org and noticed, that you can block flash via user scripts. And since midori also support user scripts I loaded userscripts.org tried a few a lo!, one of them works exactly as I expect. Just go to Flash Block for Chrome, click install and save the opened .js file to ~/.local/share/midori/scripts/. It should enable automatically, if not, go to the Userscripts panel and tick it on. For it to start work, page reload is enough — there's no need to restart browser ;-) To whitelist youtube, just add 'youtube.com' to var exclude array at the beginning of the script. Supposedly it also works for silverlight, but as mono is banned on my laptop (no sound reason, I just don't want to use apps that they're in some weird language combo of java and c++ which furthermore need virtual machine running), I cannot verify whether this is true or not.

And on a completely unrelated note: I successfully managed to arrive at the hotel in Brussels I stay during LGM, and had a nice walk around the city with nicu ;-)

Why I'm Still On F12?

First, let me warn you that this is not an objective and exhaustive review of Fedora 13 but just a (hopefully) short list of things (both bad and good) I noticed while trying to use it and to add that most of the issues I'll talk about are bugs/odd features in upstream, so not Fedora's fault.

Evolution

I think it's fair to start with an app that I use most and that is most likely Evolution (especially its e-mail component). The UI is reworked and I'd say it both looks better and is more usable, it's almost pain to return to F12 Evolution's interface. On the flip side, IMAP backend has also been rewritten (or so I've heard) and it hits a dead end here and there and because of that, using Evolution isn't very smooth and joyful. So in short, with future releases there is high probability Evolution will be significantly better that what's in F12, but currently it's one of the pieces that blocks me from advancing to F13. Plus, I forgot to mention, Evolution lost the option to keep gpg passphrase stored during session.

Intel Video Driver

Well, this one's a little bit of pain. I've grown quite used to F12 which has been damn stable so fast, so X or even the whole notebook frozen was a big surprise. Seems the frozenness of whole system have been already fixed, but last time I were in updated F13 (about a week ago), I still managed somehow to endup with half-frozen X — I move with mouse, switch to tty, kill apps (without any graphical response though) or kill X completely. But only full reboot fixed it for good.

Nautilus

Another UI change. Generally it seems cleaner, but what irritates me is that I cannot keep the entry-like input for paths — I seem to be able to access it only via ctrl-l and after entering the path, it reverts back to the button mode. No good, no good.

Webkitgtk

This where the most goodness (from my point of view) went, albeit not exactly as I'd prefer it. Thanks to hard work the guys over at webkit and epiphany, epiphany now can store passwords, but as epiphany does not have sensible session saving (why the hell do I need to kill it to save session?) [and for some other reasons] I use midori, which however it does not seem to know how to save passwords (in web forms, not in web auth pop-ups). The rest of the goodness (I know about) is same for both browsers — html5 youtube flawless support (only fullscreen seems to be missing), html5 video tag finally has handler, sites (like anidb) which serve pages in compressed format are now supported and java applet (I've tried only the openjdk one) is almost working.

Gnome-keyring

In one word it behaves strange. Sometimes the keyring that should get unlocked at startups refuses to unlock, sometimes I get asked for new password for 'default' keyring, which however never gets created… This is incidentally also the last thing that shows when trying to start up gajim. The good thing is that thanks to this I started using emapthy with a chat theme from one of my favourite anime durarara >_<

Conclusion

Well, there are still some hick-ups that keep me from transferring from the probably best fedora release so far (F12) to F13 to feel the new awesomeness, and one thing to keep in my mind is: don't be lazy and finally fill the bugs you've encountered!