Seif Speaks: Interviewing Mr. Gwibber (Ryan Paul)

I met Ryan Paul at UDS last may and I must say I was star struck (I am star struck most of the time at UDS anyhow). As a badass editor at arstechnica and the man who started gwibber I thought it would be nice to interview for OMG! Ubuntu!

So hey dude, introduce yourself to our readers please and tell us about your story with Open Source? 

I'm the Linux and open source editor at Ars Technica and the lead developer of the Gwibber project. I had my earliest experience with open source software when I developed a MUD (multiuser text-based roleplaying game, based loosely on Dungeons and Dragons) in high school. I used the open source SMAUG code base and published several of my patches. SMAUG is the name of a popular MUD code base, derived from Merc. http://www.smaug.org 

So by day you're a journalist and by night you are a hacker? How do you find time for both? 

Yes, it's difficult to find time. I have to rely on other contributors to do a lot of the basic upkeep like bug triaging. Members of the Ubuntu community have been very helpful with those kinds of tasks, which means that I can devote what little hacking time I have to making major changes and improvements to the code.

Can you tell me how your Gwibber story started? What was your inspiration? 

It started like every other small tool that I develop for my own personal use. As it evolved, I started using it as a testbed for experimenting with new frameworks and development tools that I wanted to write about in articles. When Jorge Castro talked me into trying out Launchpad, I decided to migrate the Gwibber code to the site. That was the point at which Gwibber really took off and became popular. The number of users grew considerably and I started getting patches from contributors. I realized that managing a real-world open source project could be a useful way to gain insight into the development process, so I decided to continue moving forward with the project. I think that a lot of Gwibber's early success is attributable to Jorge. He got people excited about the project and helped me get past my initial anxiety about being the maintainer of a serious public open source project.

Talking of Ubuntu it must be pretty awesome to see the app at the "crux" of Ubuntu's 'Social from the start' initiative. How has this impacted on the direction of Gwibber?

Ubuntu's Social from the Start initiative has driven a lot of the decisions that have been made over the past year about Gwibber's architecture. In particular, our decision to separate the underlying service from the frontend was driven entirely by Ubuntu's requirements.

There's no doubt that Gwibber set the pace and the standard for social clients on the Linux desktop but, of late, the app has a bit of a reputation as a slow, resource-chomping beast that many users - despite the Ubuntu integration - don't use. Do you think that image is fair? Is making a leaner Gwibber something that is a priority?

The perception that Gwibber is slow and excessively resource-intensive is absolutely fair, but it's something that I've been working to improve. I don't think that it has cost us many users, however. The statistics that we get from some of the social networking services show that our audience has grown steadily. Although some of the alternatives to Gwibber are much lighter, none offer equivalent functionality yet. My goal with Gwibber has always been to test new technologies and new components of the desktop stack, but sometimes I adopt new technologies prematurely.

 

Gwibber's reliance on DesktopCouch has had a deeply negative impact on performance, reliability, and portability across distros. We have switched to SQLite in Gwibber 3, which significantly improves the program's performance and responsiveness. In the future, we are going to be more cautious about adopting unproven technologies. I think that our new version will help improve Gwibber's reputation, but there is still more work to do. I think that the WebKit renderer is still too memory-intensive and the use of Python for the frontend makes the program slow to start. We hope to fix those issues in the future, with a major redesign of the Gwibber frontend.  I'm sure some OMG! readers have already seen the excellent mock-ups by Neil Patel (http://njpatel.blogspot.com/2010/07/gwibber-concept-part-1.html) of his proposal for a next-generation Gwibber interface. When we implement those mockups, we are going to be using native widgets, which will hopefully help improve our performance considerably.

Additionally to Neil's mock-ups we have seen lots of super-slick mock-ups and interface designs for Gwibber recently. Are any of these going to be adopted or used as a basis for the next 'phase' of Gwibber? 

We welcome design feedback from the community, but we are going to be relying mostly on the work of experts like Neil and other members of Canonical's design team. It's not easy to create a good design that can be implemented within the constraints of the Gtk+ toolkit. Neil has a tremendous amount of expertise in creating exceptional user experiences with Gtk+, which means that he is uniquely qualified to help us formulate a vision that is both compelling and achievable.

As far as I can tell, Gwibber is 100% Python, what challenges has this led to with distributing packages for the various distros? 

Python hasn't posed any deployment challenges on Linux. In fact, Python is extremely well-supported by all of the major distributions. The biggest problem we have with Python is that some bindings (like WebKitGtk, for example) aren't maintained as well as we would like. There are some WebKitGtk APIs that we simply can't use yet because they aren't exposed through the unmaintained Python bindings. PyGI (the new Python binding system based on GObject introspection) is fantastic and will help to solve a lot of problems like that in the near future. We are hoping to use PyGI in the next version.

With the talks at GUADEC about integrating web services into GNOME, and KDE 4.4 introducing the "social desktop" functionality, where does Gwibber fit? 

There isn't anything upstream yet that does what Gwibber can do. One project that has some interesting potential is libsocialweb, but it currently only supports about 5 percent of Gwibber's total functionality and has some serious architectural limitations that are untenable for us, like only allowing one account per service. The libsocialweb developer has expressed some interest in accommodating Gwibber's requirements, but it's still a long way from being able to do what we need. If some framework materializes in upstream GNOME that is on a trajectory to be suitable for Gwibber, I'll be very happy to contribute to it and rearchitect Gwibber to make use of it rather than Gwibber's own backend daemon.

 

Because Gwibber's frontend and backend are independent, it would not be difficult for me to totally replace the backend with an alternative if something substantially better comes along. Maintaining the backend and keeping up with changes to the APIs requires a huge amount of effort, so I think it's good to move that kind of work upstream to the greatest extent possible so that the burden is shared between client implementors. KDE's Social Desktop initiative has no overlap at all with Gwibber. It's designed to enable desktop integration of open source community Web sites, not mainstream services like Facebook and Twitter. I have experimentally added support for the KDE Social Desktop protocol (which is called Open Collaboration Services) in Gwibber, which made it possible to do interesting things like search GNOME-Look.org directly from the Gwibber client:

As a developer of desktop applications, how do you feel about the spread of services like OAuth and openID which require you to integrate to some extent with the browser to properly authenticate

(ed. note: Twitter is supposedly going full OAUth this week) 

OAuth is absolutely vile. It is a very poorly-designed standard that has a number of serious technical limitations. It is fundamentally impractical for use in desktop and mobile applications. Some social networks like Facebook and Google Buzz have extended OAuth with non-standard extensions in order to make it usable on the desktop, but some social networks are doing it very wrong. Twitter, for example, requires applications to embed an OAuth secret key. This is problematic, because there is no way to guarantee the secrecy of a key once it is included in software that is distributed to end users. When the key is compromised, Twitter will invalidate it and lock out the application.

 

This is going to pose very serious challenges for open source Twitter clients, because we have no way to even obscure our keys. Twitter promised to deliver a special authentication mechanism for open source client applications, but was not able to get it ready for widespread use in time for their transition away from basic authentication. Twitter's decision to turn off basic authentication without first addressing this issue is very bad for Linux users. There is an extremely serious risk that open source Twitter clients will be remotely disabled by Twitter. All we can do is embed the keys in our applications and hope that Twitter doesn't notice.

OK that is depressing! Do you mind some fun hot or not questions? 

You can try asking, but I can't promise that I'll answer all of them. :-)

Fair enough, so hot or not?

Windows XP

Ryan: Not!

Windows 7

Ryan: Warm

Steve Ballmer

Ryan: Totally Insane

Me: I like his haircut

Seif Lotfy

Me: (SOME THREATS)

Ryan: The genius Zeitgeist developer? Totally hot!

Me: More like sexy fluffy

Steve Jobs
Ryan: Obnoxious.

Me: How do you like the fact that I placed myself between Steve and Steve?

Ryan: LOL!

Me: Its because we share the same haircut ;)

Mark Shuttleworth

Ryan: I think that Mark means well and is genuinely interested in elevating the Linux user experience.

Me: So hot or not?

Ryan: Hot!

Me: Bathing suit hot?

Ryan: not answering that.

Ubuntu

Ryan: Hot!

GNOME Shell

Ryan: I'm going to withhold judgment of GNOME Shell until it's more mature.

Seif: Good idea. I can't get in trouble for talking smack. You can =P

Unity

Ryan: Hot!

Seif: I took off my shirt just thinking of it.

Zeitgeist

Ryan: Hot!

Seif: You bet your ass it is... see and this time i did not have to threaten you!

Telepathy

Ryan: Hot!

Seif: My personal favorite desktop service.

OMG! Ubuntu!

Ryan: Hot!

And last but not least I think you are hot.

Ryan: LOL What?

Seif: Nothing...

So anything else you would like to users to know about?

We have some great features coming in Gwibber 3, including support for Google Buzz, Twitter lists, Ping.fm, inline images, and direct messages. It will be out with Ubuntu 10.10.

Follow Ryan's writing for arstechnica here. And of course follow him on twitter here!

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Call for Mock-ups: OMG! User Awarding System needs a Trophy Viewer

OMG! OMG! OMG! We are close to releasing.... a beta.

After porting the daemon to Mono with Chris Szikszoy (Docky fame) and with the support of David Siegel and Alex Launi (both from Do Fame and more) the daemon is almost stable.

You can check out the code by running the following in a terminal: -

• bzr branch lp:omg

The OMG! team has been working on a trophy set to release within the next 2 weeks.

WE ARE MISSING AN ACHIEVEMENT VIEWER !!!

So guys please if you feel like mocking up something throw designs at us here. Even better would be if you want to hack it with us. Since the OMG! daemon uses DBus you can hack the UI in any language you feel like. (Python, Mono, Vala, whatever...)

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Seif Speaks: My Sexy Desktop

Well I received a lot of comments and mails about my overall *sexy* desktop layout and look. So to get everyone down a bit here is what you need to use and set up to have your desktop look like mine...

• Get the Elementary wallpaper right here

• Get Docky
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:docky-core/ppa
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install docky
• Once done set your Docky settings window to look like this:

• Ok now for the fonts:

• Then for the theme I use FineryDark
• My panel background:

• And last but not least the Icon Set, I use Faenza:
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tiheum/equinox
• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install faenza-icon-theme

• I modified the theme by changing the controls to Dust

I hope you enjoy the experience like I do.

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Bringing fun back to the desktop with... OMG! (the app)

Ohso wants to create fun, unique apps. Jorge linked me up with this idea. I quote from the blog post:

I think it would be fun to add an achievement system to the Ubuntu Desktop, like is done on Steam and XBox. The tricky part is tracking various events and finding amusing correlations. For example, if your screen-saver kicks in 40 times in a single 24 hour period, you could earn the “Alternating Current” achievement, indicating that you’re being repeatedly interrupted all day long

I decided to give it a go and I already have a very early prototype of what I call "OMG!" since it will be co-maintained by "OMG! Ubuntu!" (trophy ideas) and "some Zeitgeist devs" (Core Application). The core product will be backed by Joey and Benjamin's company, Ohso.

Here are our two first trophies that already work...

If you have ideas for cool achievements or any other functionality you think this app should have, let us know in the comments!

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Integrating Zeitgeist into GNOME: You decide which apps get patched (poll)

GNOME 3.0 is delayed and the Zeitgeist team has more time to integrate with the GNOME desktop.

Daniel Siegel (the Cheese dude) had an idea during GUADEC that is worth giving a try... for Zeitgeist to integrate with the desktop, applications need to be patched or extended to do the following:

• Send their Activity to Zeitgeist
• Make use of the Information gathered by Zeitgeist (getting most used or other files related to the one in focus, etc...)

The Zeitgeist and GNOME Activity Journal teams have been very busy doing their own thing. The engine matured and the team has a very healthy momentum. Thus, starting October, Michal Hruby (from AWN and Sezen) and me (Seif Lotfy) will be focusing on deployment into existing applications.

For that we created a poll where everybody gets to vote for one app he/she would like to see make use of Zeitgeist. That's right folks, YOU, the lucky readers of OMG! Ubuntu!, exclusively get to decide which applications make use of Zeitgeist.

The voting closes on the 15th of September, giving us 2 weeks to evaluate and discuss. Starting October 2010 we will integrate with an application every week, for four weeks in a row. The patches, plug-ins or extension will then be proposed for upstream inclusion - and our progress will be reported here on OMG! Ubuntu!

Thus the Zeitgeist team can live without a guilty conscious!

Applications that are not listed on purpose are:

• Shell: we are working on this already (Siegfried Gevatter).
• Tracker: Experimental integration is already on the way plus we have an existing extension for Zeitgeist to push its stuff into Tracker.
• Nautilus: Currently they are busy with redesigning so any integration must be postponed.

So here is the poll, go crazy...

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Seif Speaks: Interviewing the OMG! Ubuntu! guys

This is a guest post by Seif Lotfy well known for his work on Zeitgeist, Sezen and the Elementary project. If you treat him nice, you might see more posts by him in the future.

About a week ago I was approached by Benjamin to do some guest writing for OMG! Ubuntu!

As an avid OMG! Ubuntu! reader and supporter I was psyched about taking the initiative to write for one of my favorite websites. I decided to start by interviewing Benjamin and Joey.

Benjamin and I had already met at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit and we had some nice discussions and laughs. But the two guys together are very entertaining... Just read the interview...

Guys, you are behind OMG! Ubuntu! - Can you introduce yourselves?

humphreybc: d0od: After you (Joey always sucks at talking about himself)

d0od: I'm Joey-Elijah, better known as ‘d0od’. I’m a 22 year old self-confessed Ubuntu-ite from the UK. I studied Broadcast journalism at University - which is, fact fans, where I discovered Ubuntu…

humphreybc: Well my name is Benjamin Humphrey, I'm a 20 year old design student from New Zealand. In Ubuntu I'm probably most known for founding and running the Ubuntu Manual Project, and of course working on OMG! stuff with d0od.

How did you discover Ubuntu?

d0od: I read about the EeePC in a tech magazine and saw it came with something called 'Linux'. I hopped from my bed to my desk (was a very small room) and went on YouTube, typed in Linux and... saw the wondrous 3D cube...

humphreybc: Ah, sucked in by compiz.

d0od: Indeed! Hence my slight affection for the powers of the promotional YouTube video…

humphreybc: I was sick of Windows Vista. Hackintosh didn't like my Toshiba laptop. Then my friend at school told me about this wondrous thing called Ubuntu which at the time was 8.04. I downloaded it, burnt it to a CD and installed it using Wubi. I absolutely hated it.

seif__: (sarcasm?)

humphreybc: No, not sarcasm! Truly, Ubuntu sucked two years ago. It's come a huge way.

d0od: Hardy was awesome you fool!

humphreybc: I think it was the brown that put me off. So I removed it, went back to Vista, then realised how terrible Windows really was, thought I'd give Ubuntu another go about a week later and the rest is history. I got hooked after I successfully fixed my ATI driver on my own and had this amazing feeling of accomplishment.

So now the two of you are bad-ass ubuntu-ites, how did "OMG! Ubuntu!" start?

humphreybc: You'll have to ask d0od that one, I only joined a bit later.

d0od: I used to run a blog about applications that ran on 4 OSes - Open Solaris, Windows Vista, OS X 10.4 and Ubuntu but the novelty of this got real old, real quick.  Due, in large part, to the fact I only really ended up mentioning Ubuntu the blog became "Ubuntu only” over a year ago or so - but it needed a name.

I was in bed when the name "OMG! Ubuntu" came into my head and I liked it  instantly. It was so darn stupid sounding and summed up exactly the way I wanted to present Ubuntu to people ‘like me’ (end users): fun, familiar, un-intimidating.

humphreybc: The end user thing is quite interesting actually, on the whole, Joey and I are just end users. We're not programmers (I tried, failed), and we both came into Ubuntu because we thought it was cool - we don't have a history with Linux. Which is what separates OMG! blogs from other Linux blogs. That and the family-friendly atmosphere.

d0od: My sister bought a netbook that had Vista on (!) but after her complaints I installed Ubuntu on it. She's even more of an "end user" than either us (doesn’t know what a ‘web browser’ is) so I tend to get her opinions on things Ubuntu-related often - she’s become my barometer of what's relevant, irritating and/or interesting to those out of the ‘buntusphere’.

humphreybc: And likewise, I have a Mum who has Ubuntu on her new laptop.

So how did you guys start writing together?

humphreybc: How did we meet... hmm. I had a blog in 2009 called "Interesting" that tried to cover too many subjects at once. I found I was posting lots of Ubuntu things and not much other stuff. I used to read OMG! Ubuntu! quite a bit and somehow Joey and I got talking. Knowing that "Interesting" could never compete with OMG! Ubuntu! and d0od's addiction to posting at least three times a day, I decided to join them. Whether Joey asked me to be a writer first or if I asked him, I can't remember…

As far as I know you are not the only people writing for OMG! Ubuntu!?

d0od: We have two other part-time writers. Nixie was plucked off YouTube, but recently she's been caught up with family stuff and Tyler came to blog simply by commenting a hell of a lot on posts often. He was always super-insightful in doing so, so I think I ended up bullying him in to posting.

After 15 minutes of joking around about how OMG! guys are rich, befriended Steve Jobs and like Windows 8 (and GNOME-related trolling) we decided to continue...

I have been hearing about the new OMG! website design for a long time! What can you tell us about it?

d0od: Benjamin designed it, so shoot, dude!

humphreybc: New websites, new websites, let's see, ah right. Well, there are many new things happening. OMG! Ubuntu! is getting a re-launch on wordpress with a fantastic new design by yours truly.

d0od: For background info OMG! is currently shoe-horned into the rigid confines of ‘Blogger’. By sojourning over to Wordpress we're hoping to shave.. oh.. 3 minutes off the loading time!

humphreybc: The new design will fix everything from loading times to tacky logos and colour schemes, lack of a decent search and a heap of other stuff like easily accessible categories to find all the older posts that get buried easily. (Not to mention the favicon).

Dammit, now I have to show you the new site Seif!

I got to see a preview and WOW it is HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOT. But meanwhile the two kids were acting silly and I had to set them straight...

seif__: Ok guys shut it! I have another question!

d0od: There are questions?! :P

humphreybc: I was under the impression this was #irc-standup

d0od: Ba dum tssh!

What else do you guys do outside the ‘Ubuntu universe’?

d0od: By the time I'm finished for the day with OMG! I've about enough time left for one episode of Batman Beyond and a few hours sleep!

Seriously though, I was doing some freelance work for a vegetarian magazine a while back but Ubuntu has sort of enveloped me since then. I do get up to other things aside from Ubuntu; I skate (board, not in lycra or on ice) and go to gigs... but I'm really focused on honing OMG! and what it can do for the users and the Ubuntu project as a whole. We have a fast-growing readership and trying to keep up with projects can render you octopus-like, which is why any project willing to have a clear channel/keep OMG in the loop is very nice, wink wink.

humphreybc: Yeah, Joey works really hard on OMG! - something that most people don't realise!

A fair amount of my time is spent working on university projects where I get to design T Shirts and play guitar. When I'm not doing that, I play guitar and drums, listen to and create music, I do a bit of photography and I also have my pilots licence - so I fly when I can and when I have enough money. But I design things for fun, and recently I have been doing a tonne of design work for the new Ohso sites, which has been really fun. (And the merchandise we recently started selling)

seif__: Well maybe having guest writers that cover some areas is a good idea.

humphreybc: Yeah we're working on having "celebrity guest writers."

humphreybc: I just found out that Taylor Swift is the same age as me. I always had a crush on Amanda Bynes when I was growing up, but she's a bit older than me. Everyone already thinks i'm an egotistical **** anyway.

Please tell us what you're planning for next year?

humphreybc: Oo, big question. More like what AREN'T we planning for next year!

We can't give away too much information, we like surprises. But basically, new sites, new designs, new company, new software, new writers, more readers and an ever increasing presence in the world of Ubuntu. (And open source in general)

d0od: Benjamin pretty much covered it: We aim to continue being a voice for end users, keeping people up-to-date with the latest and greatest in ‘buntu land. We also have some apps in planning/design - one of which is the Indicator-Weather. Nothing outrageously complex, just simple "single purpose" type apps that look good and work with no-fuss. We're not out to duplicate effort either; so think of it as us filling in the gaps.

We carry on discussing, ranting and chatting for a while but soon reach the end of the interview because humphreybc needed to retire for the evening!

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