Nick Richards — Nick Richards

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 is a process that has been taken on and intensified by the major browser makers and of course, websites. »

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 ‘My’ anywhere. »

New today, part of the last few months work. MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks. Hope you like it. »

Being stuck in another country certainly does allow you to spend more time doing things that you like to do, but which the urgency of proximity based interaction usually displaces. In this case it’s spending some time putting things onto here. Not much, but a little. In this case, here’s some things I’ve highlighted on my Kindle. Heretics (G. K. Chesterton) - Loc. 292-93 “Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable. »

BT said it was “delighted to help Rutland Telecom” although it added that it hoped it would allow other service providers access to its new network. “Otherwise there is the risk of a local monopoly developing, which is never good for consumers,” said BT Group Strategy Director Olivia Garfield. A strong contender for the Irony Prize 2010. »

I’ve given a couple of presentations about designing Moblin in the last few months. Since they’re now public on the internets I can talk about them here. This is quite difficult to do since they contain a lot of video, attempting to show how we create (with our lovely hackers) the compelling motion that Clutter can deliver. So you’ll miss all that ‘behind the scenes’ excitement. The two presentations are quite similar in many ways, you’ll certainly see repeated motifs, but that’s just because we’re trying to create a family of design around Moblin (and I’m a bit lazy). »

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. »

I’ve often been asked why the Moblin Web Browser doesn’t support full screen mode and I always answered with two points. We had some rather more important things to get done first, like saving cookies and making Flash work. I couldn’t work out a design to make it work without causing the rest of the application to suck. Now, point 2 was mainly my problem and I admit that, but the solution was sitting right there in front of me embedded in our existing behaviours and until I was explaining to jimmac exactly why we couldn’t do it I couldn’t see how it should work. »

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. »

I’m delighted to say that the BBC launched iPlayer Mobile on the N95 today. It’s one of the projects I’m most proud of working on and it’s still great. So if you have a decent Nokia phone and are on the 3, Vodafone or ‘WiFi’ networks, give it a spin. Well done David Madden and the team. »