Recent content in gnome on Nick Richards
I love adaptive interfaces and technology that blends in more than the average human. I’ve spent literally years tinkering with ‘frecency’ ordered lists, bought a meural screen and have recently been glorying in the fantastic GNOME Adaptive Brightness . On that last point, whilst GNOME already has Automatic Screen Brightness, and it is a good feature, dmy3k’s extension goes…
I do not always want to know what time it is. This is a slightly awkward position for someone who keeps making clocks, but there we are. Quite often the useful answer is not 17:42 . It is “quarter to six”, “nearly lunch” or “you should probably start thinking about leaving”. The precise time is useful when catching trains, baking things and joining calls; the…
Last summer I wrote up Octopus Agile Prices For Linux , a small GTK app to show the current Octopus Agile electricity price and the next day of half-hourly rates. It did one thing, which is a good number of things for a desktop utility to do. Since then the app has become a bit less narrow. But it now does enough more that the launch post undersells it, and in a couple of places sends people…
USB-C is excellent, provided you don’t look too closely. I’ve been seeing a drum beat of interest in the internals of USB-C. Darryl Morley’s macOS WhatCable , Chromebooks exposing lots of lovely info about emarkers , USB cable testers and a bit more. Very infrastructure club topics. So I made a small GTK app also called WhatCable which is intended to show what Linux knows about…
I’m on the Octopus Agile electricity tariff, where the price changes every half hour based on wholesale costs. This is great for saving money and using less carbon intensive energy, provided you can shift your heavy usage to cheaper times. With a family that insists on eating at a normal hour, that mostly means scheduling the dishwasher and washing machine. The snag was not having an easy…
Endless have recently released the first beta of the 3.8 series for their Linux based operating system. As someone who used to work there in product, and is still friends with a number of Endless-ers I upgraded my personal machine and checked it out. This is a “trip report” of my notes and may be a little bitty but I hope it’s useful feedback for the developers and designers and…
I was lucky enough to be sponsored by the GNOME Foundation to attend the 2019 Linux Application Summit, hosted in Barcelona between November 12th and 15th 2019. It was a great conference with a diverse crew of people who all care about making apps on Linux better. I particularly enjoyed Frank’s keynote on Linux apps from the perspective of Nextcloud , an Actual ISV. Also worth your time is…
The start of a new year often brings change. Our family has increased in size, which is very exciting. I’m also moving on from Endless and have a new job Managing Product at Lucid . I’m sad to be leaving my friends at Endless after a couple of delightful and very satisfying years but I’m also very pleased to be working with Jonty and Jono again. I still remain as emotionally…
This year at GUADEC in Almería I was lucky enough to give a talk entitled “Product Management in Open Source”. I’ll give a text synopsis of the talk below but if you prefer you can watch the whole thing as delivered at the Internet Archive or have a look at the slides, which are entirely mysterious when viewed alone: The talk begins like so: I’m Nick Richards. I’ve…
A while back I made a Pinpoint COPR repo in order to get access to this marvelous tool in Fedora. Well, now I work for Endless and the only way you can run apps on our system is in a Flatpak container. So I whipped up a quick Pinpoint Flatpak in order to give a talk at GUADEC this year. Flatpak is actually very helpful here, since the libraries required are rapidly becoming antique, and carrying…
The not-super-great-open-source code hosting system Gitorious has been acquired and shut down by the much-better-and-open-source code hosting system GitLab. This is an overall net win for humanity but does have a few downsides. A few years ago Intel and Nokia selected Gitorious to host the source code for their MeeGo Operating System. With the upcoming shutdown, that code was about to go offline.…
A few years ago I worked with a number of my former colleagues to create Pinpoint , a quick hack that made it easier for us to give presentations that didn’t suck. Now that I’m at Collabora I have a couple of presentations to make and using pinpoint was a natural choice. I’ve been updating our internal templates to use our shiny new brand and wanted to use some newer features…
Today was my last day at Intel. It’s been an exceptional experience working with the guys and girls in London to make things that people haven’t seen before and do it in an open fashion. It would (and did) take a wonderful opportunity to make me want to leave and I’m really looking forward to telling you all about it when we announce what we’re up to. In the meantime, have…
I was delighted to be asked to give the GNOME community keynote at the recent Desktop Summit in Berlin. It was entitled “ Iteration’s what you need ” and talked about getting better at making software. GNOME of course was one of the early pioneers of time based releases. They allowed things to get better, six months at a time and started to decouple features from releases. This…
I read this on the internet today. It’s pretty good and made me think I should probably share some of the work I did for Moblin Netbook the year before last. Note: this does not apply to MeeGo. Moblin is different. This is what you always need to remember when translating it into another language. Moblin is not OS X, GNOME, Windows or a phone. Moblin is not you, we do not use…
New today, part of the last few months work. MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks . Hope you like it.
We designed an operating system for phones too. Another awesome job from everyone in design and implementation. As ever, I’m proud to work with you all.
If you happen to be heading to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in a couple of weeks then I’d encourage you to come and see my talk on designing Moblin at midday on the 8th July. It’ll be fun.
Moblin is different. If there’s one phrase that sums up what I’ve been trying to do with the last six months or so it’s that. After all, all of the stuff that’s out there right now already exists. Doing the same thing again does not create a compelling reason for people to use your software. So we set about putting our money where our mouth was and started building…
After a very happy and rewarding time I’ve left Fjord and today I started working in the Intel Open Source Technology Centre with the old Opened Hand crew in London. It’s good. We’re going to make some nice stuff. I’ll let you know when you can have a look.