I’ve read every tweet and nearly every comment on Reddit, Lifehacker, and other blogs, and the message is clear: the world is ready for better Linux software, and a better instant messenger. People are encouraged by Synapse and looking forward to it’s future. No pressure, right?

Huge HUGE thanks to everyone who has reported bugs, helped with troubleshooting/triaging, and shared their feedback in the conference room and on the forums. Synapse is still an alpha product so there have been plenty of problems, and quite frankly I’ve been a bit overwhelmed :). All the help has been great.

Lots of bugs have already been fixed including better icon support when running under KDE, support for proxy servers, and eliminating many many crashes.

The first user-contributed plugin was just merged in, adding preview for wikipedia urls (Thanks goto!):

You can also now add multiple accounts, just note support for this is still a bit rough around the edges.

So what’s next? First I’d like to make absolute sure that nobody will find Synapse less useful than other open-source products. In addition to fixing all the open bugs in the tracker, the plan for this week is to focus on implementing two major features:

1. Logging and a conversation history browser.
2. Linked Accounts aka transports/gateways. This will make it possible to communicate with friends on other networks, so if you’ve been holding off on switching to Synapse because most of your friends haven’t switched to XMPP yet, hang tight!

I’d also like to add official packages for other distributions very soon, starting with openSUSE and Foresight. If you can help with either of these, please let me know! Big thanks to trontonic for working on ArchLinux support.

There’s been great international interest in Synapse as well. So far members of the community have offered to translate Synapse into Russian, French, Italian, Ukrainian, and German… so making Synapse translatable will be a major short-term goal as well.

Once all this low hanging fruit is taken care of, we’ll be switching gears back to new innovative features. We’ve got a few things in mind, and would love to hear your ideas on the forums.

Challenging the status-quo is never easy. If you’re looking for a fun and exciting project with tremendous potential to get involved with, I hope you’ll consider joining us and help make the vision reality.

Today I’m extremely happy to officially announce the project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s called Synapse, and while it may look like just yet another instant messaging client, it’s actually much more than that.

The web has changed a lot over the past few years. Web applications now offer rich user experiences and beautiful interfaces, video has has become ubiquitous, the ability to mix and match content from different sources is now not only easy, but widely accepted by companies that would have once sued you for doing so. Most importantly, more and more of our daily lives continues to move into the “cloud”.

With all the focus on the web, a lot of people have been dismissing desktop operating systems as nothing more than something required to run a web browser. Unfortunately, Linux, which has suffered from unpolished UI applications for a while, has been hit especially hard by this trend.

Even though there have been lots of exciting advances to the platform (Mono, DBus, Cairo, Gstreamer, KDE4, etc.), few developers focus on supporting Linux, and Linux applications rarely receive the same polish and attention to detail as web applications.

Although it makes me unpopular, I’m not ready to give up on Linux software development. I feel strongly that there’s a place for both web and desktop applications, and exciting opportunities for integration between them.

The state of instant communication and collaboration, especially on Linux, has been stagnant for many years. In fact, there have been few advances since IRC, which was invented in 1988 – nearly 20 years ago.

For the most part, we’re still limited to expressing ourselves using only plain text. Image sharing and file transfer rarely work, we can’t make voice/video calls, there’s been little to no integration with the Web, and a lack of innovation all around.

Sci-Fi movies have been envisioning amazing communication tools for years – tools that appear infinately flexible and act like magic.

The goal of Synapse was to see if it was possible to bring this magic to reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

History has a tendency to repeat its self, so my first step was to determine why other similar projects have failed to foster innovation. One of the failures, in my opinion, is the desire to be multi-protocol. If any new feature needs to work everywhere, the result is often that it works poorly everywhere, or not at all. What we’ve seen with many projects is that they implement only the lowest common denominator across everything, and then stop there.

Just as Apple understood when they decided to throw away OS9 and switch to something new that was designed from the ground up to do exactly what they needed, having a solid base is extremely important. Fortunately, there’s already a mature, open, and all-around wonderful chat protocol out there: XMPP.

Although I suspect this will be one of the most controversial features, Synapse is designed to only support XMPP. If this upsets you, relax and hear me out.

Unlike any of the legacy proprietary networks, XMPP is an open and distributed system. Anyone can run their own server and communicate with people on any other server. In addition, the “X” in “XMPP” stands for “Extensible”. Any piece of the protocol can be extended without breaking compatibility with software that doesn’t understand the extension. This is a perfect fit for Synapse because it means there’s never anything stopping you from implementing your great idea.

Many people will say that this all sounds great, but that it doesn’t matter if nobody else is using it. Standard chicken-and-egg problem? I think there’s already proof that it is possible to overcome this. Skype appeared out of nowhere and now has millions of users. XMPP can do the same, it just needs an awesome client that offers features nobody else has, just as Skype offered working voice chat when nobody else did. And of course, XMPP already has a huge head-start thanks to Google. Remember, Synapse can talk to any other XMPP server/client, including Google Talk.

All that said, legacy networks will likely be supported through server-side transports that translate other protocols into XMPP, but if Synapse is truly successful, I’m confident it just wont matter.

Synapse is a very new project. I’m confident that it already offers a few compelling features, but overall isn’t groundbreaking in its current state (and is certainly not bug-free). My hope is that Ive succeeded in expressing my long-term vision, and can interest other people to join the project.

Pre-built packages are available for Ubuntu, with support for additional distros on the way. If you want to get involved, or just want to share your ideas, you can join the conference room or post on the forums.

I look forward to your feedback!

Download Synapse »

First of all, what is SVG?

From Wikipedia:

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated, and either declarative or scripted. It is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Modern browsers such as Firefox and Opera have built-in support for rendering SVG images. If you’re using one of these browsers, you should see a pretty butterfly on this page, and if you look at the source code, see the raw SVG document.

What will SavageSVG do?

The goal of the SavageSVG project is to create a fully managed (C#) SVG library that will make it easy to for developers to add beautiful and interactive SVG graphics into their applications. In addition to basic rendering, the goal is to fully support a DOM, CSS, scripting, and animations.

SavageSVG didn’t start from scratch, it’s a fork of the abandoned windows-only SharpVectorGraphics library, so many things already work.

What’s been done so far?

I’ve taken the SharpVectorGraphics code and done a fairly major cleanup. Here’s a fairly vague overview of what’s been done:

• Autotoolized the entire thing so it’s easy to build on linux
• Removed various un-needed code that was causing issues with mono
• Removed all references to System.Windows.Forms, so everything but the winforms svg viewer (and the related components assembly) will build without it
• Moved the unit tests into their own assembly
• Wrote a very simple GTK# SVG viewer

What needs to be done?

A lot. Many things that the SharpVectorGraphics website boasts don’t work, even on windows using their binaries.

I’ve started a list of tasks that anyone interested in the project could work on. Please see that page for more information. There’s also a bug tracker, which would be another good place to start.

The Savage project needs YOU!

If you’re interested in joining the project, please contact me. We can use help from anyone – at any skill level.

The best way to reach me is using jabber, my ID is eric@extremeboredom.net. The same address works for email, too.

…almost forgot….screenshots!

Here’s how things are looking right now on my linux box.

Coming to Seattle in May for that other hardware conference? On your way out, stay for the hardware unconference where you’ll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more.

Get answers on everything from kernel data structures to the fine points of licensing. Discover how participating in the Linux process is fast and simple, how the development process works, and where to get started.

Also, a few days ago there was an anti-DRM rally outside of the Washington State Convention Center (where WinHEC is taking place) that a few friends participated in.

It is important to note that Xgl provides more than just wobbly windows and a cube reperesenting your virtual desktops, but it also gives you an additional color channel that you can use when drawing to the screen – the alpha channel. This makes it possible to create (semi-)transparent windows as well as arbitrarily-shaped windows that have a smooth border just like on OSX and Windows.

Here is a C# example of how to create an ARGB drawing using Cairo:

Hopefully I’ll have time this week to put a sexier example together.

$ svn co https://svn.extremeboredom.net/Monique/trunk ./Monique
cd Monique
./autogen.sh
make
make run

(WARNING! I have NOT tested “make install” so I don’t recomend trying it. I have no idea what will happen.)

Once Monique starts, add some documentation sources from the Preferences window. You’ll probably want to use the Compiled Monodoc provider.

Once you have the documentation you want to export loaded, press the “Export to Web” button on the toolbar.

Set the options and press OK. After a few seconds, assuming all goes well, it will say that it’s done exporting and ask you if you would like to test the site. You’ll need XSP installed for this to work, and assuming you’ve got it, you will end up with this:

Monique was a fork of monodoc I used as a playground. It never went anywhere, and the GTK documentation viewer is compltely worthless. Hopefully I will have to time to merge all of this into the main monodoc tree soon. Unless you want to help, please don’t ask me about it.

Have fun…

We have also released an unstable version of gtk+ 2.8 bindings for
people who want to start experimenting with the cairo API. This release
is not for the faint of heart, and comes with no API stability guarantee
for the new 2.8 API. Again, this is a source only release and the
tarball is available for download at:

http://go-mono.com/sources/gtk-sharp-2.0/gtk-sharp-2.7.1.tar.gz

Since 2.8 is a relatively small API change over 2.6, we hope to quickly
move to stability. If you find any issues, with the new API, please
raise them promptly to ensure they are fixed. As always, please file
bug reports for any issues at http://bugzilla.ximian.com under product
gtk#.

It is very important for as many people as possible to test this release and report any problems so 2.8.0 can go out the door as soon as possible. Hopefully starting after 2.8.0 we can start to see new versions of GTK# released very soon after new releases of GTK+, so mono developers dont have to wait 6 months before being able to take advantage of new features.

I have a breezy repository with Mono 1.1.10 and GTK# 2.7.1, but if you use it please remember that these are NOT official packages and are very very likely to break your system.

deb http://packages.filefind.net/ ubuntu-breezy dotnet

If you have any problems with them do NOT ask for help on the mailing list or in any IRC channels, please contact me directly.

I will be giving an informal presentation with Andrew about Mono and Meshwork at Seattle Mind Camp next month.

Seattle Mind Camp is a self-organizing, digitally minded, entrepreneur-driven, overnight Seattle confab.

What happens when you put 150 of Seattle’s smartest geeks in an empty office building for 24 hours? We’re not sure either, but we’d like to find out. It’s time to meet and connect with those involved in the interesting projects going on in Seattle in a relaxed environment. Come, camp out, create.

More information at http://www.seattlemind.com/. If you are in the Seattle area and interested in attending, check the website or let me know.

If you have a few minutes to spare, a directory with a bunch of images/photos on your drive, and mono/xsp/libgdiplus installed (1.1.9 recomended), here’s something to try:

cd /path/to/images/or/photos/or/whatever/
svn co https://svn.extremeboredom.net/QuickThumbs/trunk/web .
xsp

Now open your web browser to http://localhost:8080/. Have fun.

Writing software is always trying to find the balance between simplicity and functionality. Why is it that modern software for Windows seems to sacrifise all functionality for what in my opinion is artificial simplicity?

Today I was at someone’s house trying to fix their Anti Virus software. All of a sudden one day Mcafee just stopped working, popping up errors constantly. Even though the errors clearly stated that the engine failed to load, the “virus scan status” said everything was fine.

Problem Number 1: Over-simplified web-style user interfaces

Guys, seriously. If I want to look at a web page i’ll open my web browser. Stop designing your user interfaces to look like a web page, its completly worthless. I don’t understand why people want to make the web and the client look identical. I think that seporation here is a very good thing and very important – especially for security. Yes, these UIs usually look pretty snazzy, but in the end something that works is what matters… and although many companies seem to have forgotton this – it is possible to write client software that looks good.

Problem Number 2: A lot of windows software can only be installed via an ActiveX-based installer.

I uninstalled the software and proceeded to reinstall it. Since it was purchased online you do not get a CD, you have to install it over the internet. So in Firefox I click the little download link on the mcafee website and am told that I must use internet explorer to install mcafee!

This is just plain insane. First, you have to use internet explorer to install the software, and second, you cannot burn the installer to a CD or anything – you have to have a connection to the internet to run it.

Problem Number 3: Vauge Errors

So frusterated, I load IE and navigate to the website, tell it to install… and it errors!

The error simply said that the installl had failed. It did not say what failed, it did not give any hints as to what failed or why it failed. It simply said that it failed. It gave a few very helpful suggestions to fix the problem which were closing all your programs, restarting the computer, and trying again.

I tried this, and it still did not work. At this point it was getting late and I was getting impatient. I downloaded AVG Free edition which uses the “download and run the installer” that I am used to, and has a very nice easy to understand user interface that just works. It might not be quite as pretty, but as the owners of the computer said to me “As long as it works, protects the computer, and is easy to use I dont care how it looks”. AVG is and does all these things.

My initial impression of AVG was so good it makes me want to buy the pro version, and I probably will recomend that they buy it. When was the last time you could say that about your software?