Let's Push Things Forward

What's better than a fresh release of Soylent? Two fresh releases of Soylent!

Soylent 0.1.8 - Tastes better than the original

This release is just a quick bug-fix that should make Soylent run better out-of-the-box.

Changes

• Fix the installation path of the glade file (Florian)

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.8.tar.gz
md5sum: 606792c4a090906f5249f08a39d3bf09

It's time again for a new release of Soylent!



Soylent 0.1.6 - Ready and rarin' ta go!

This release brings a lot of little improvements, most notably contact editor bug fixes, a few UI clean-ups, and a fantastic logo by Hylke Bons!



Perhaps most importantly, this release hints at a big push in the near future: libsoylent, which we plan to be a simple-yet-powerful way to integrate easy people-based interaction into your desktop application. The code in the 0.1.6 tarball is mostly stubs, and the API is far from finalized, but look forward to early previews in the following releases.

I'll be giving a talk on Soylent: Past, Present, and Future in a couple of weeks at GUADEC in Istanbul, Turkey. If you're going to be at GUADEC, make sure not to miss it!

Changes

• Added a Project logo (Hylke Bons)
  
• UI clean-ups:
  
  • Add a regular menubar
    
  • Move editing options from button bar to Edit menu to save space
    
  • Add presence-setting menu
• Install a proper .desktop file, so Soylent shows up in the Applications menu
  
• Clean up autotools config (Gilles Dartiguelongue)
  
• Squash lingering Person Editor bugs
  
• Code clean-ups in anticipation for libsoylent
  
• Initial libsoylent stubs (Sven Pfaller)

Warning

Soylent is still a work-in-progress. Though I don't think it has any serious data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install this release.

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README).

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.6.tar.gz
md5sum: e8f262f3edbf7ae53e5c522703c88f80

Sven just posted the draft for the libsoylent API (the soon-to-be-rockin' "People library").

Basic design goals

• People cohesion!:
  
  • Consuming applications won't have to manually associate peoples' accounts on various protocols (which is actually a lot tougher than it sounds)
  
  
• Make it trivial to:
  
  • Read and (where applicable) write contacts' attributes
    
  • Start a synchronous or asynchronous communication channel with any contact
  
  
• Base around libebook's EVCard:
  
  • Gets us vCard's flexible support for arbitrary key/value pairs
    
  • Brings the benefits of vCard's wide adoption in software in general
    
  • Shares the standard Gnome addressbook with Evolution and the rest of the desktop
  
  
• Simplicity:
  
  • Should be easier to use than EVCard directly yet avoid EContact's inflexibility
    
  • Leverage Telepathy's power while limiting its exposure to the libsoylent-consuming app

We'd really appreciate any and all constructive feedback (preferably on the mailing list, but comments in either of our blogs are, of course, welcome).

If you work on an app that could be enhanced with simple, powerful access to people and their metadata, I've got some questions for you:

• Is the API missing anything that you would expect you'd need (convenience functions included)
  
• Do you see any fundamental design flaws?
  
• Does some function just plain look weird? Let us know! :)

I'm very pleased to announce that Soylent has a project in the Google Summer of Code 2008!

Sven Pfaller will be specifying and implementing libsoylent based on the people-related functionality in Soylent. Once we have libsoylent, we should be able to really integrate people into the Gnome Desktop.

I'll be mentoring Sven, and this project is a part of Gnome's Summer of Code projects.

After a few months' worth of massive code clean up, we're proud to
present a new release of Soylent:

Soylent 0.1.4 - Nothing has changed. Everything has changed.

How much is "everything"? Since 0.1.2, we've added 5286 removed 3232 net
lines. Version 0.1.2 had 4964 lines. We've replaced everything on the
car but the paint.

As the release name suggests, there aren't many user-visible changes to
this release, but the re-write should make development a whole lot less
painful.

So if you've been holding back until the code is readable, your time has
come!

Changes

• Massive code clean up:
  
  • Carefully check nearly every function return value
    
  • Make custom functions return meaningful values
    
  • Organize functions within files much better
    
  • Use consistent function names
    
  • Use consistent style
    
  • Should make the code base much easier to work with
• Fix a handful of misc. Person Editor bugs

WARNING

Soylent is still a work-in-progress. Though I don't think it has any serious data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install this release.

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README).

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.4.tar.gz
md5sum: 21f7104bfe2f9e4646c81154dc53a9e8

Some of you may or may not have noticed that there hasn't been a Soylent release in a little while.

It's not for a lack of development - I've actually been hacking on Soylent (albeit slowly) since the last release.

The good news: I've been fairly productive in the work I have done, and it should help a lot in the long run (especially for other contributors).

The bad news: This work hasn't included any new features, so it won't look or act very different for regular users.

I've put a lot of time and effort into refactoring and generally cleaning up the Soylent code base. That is, everything should be name much more consistently, the code should be easy to navigate, and most importantly, nearly every function with a meaningful return value is checked. This should also make the code much easier to test and split into a separate library.

In the time since I started Soylent, I've learned a whole lot about coding best practices (especially in C). Unfortunately, Soylent had become a bunch of hacks that reflected my "state of the art" at the time of each hack, which lead to an inconsistent pile of code.

SO — the cleanup process is nearly complete, and the next release of Soylent should be a whole lot easier for developers to dive into. After that, I'll be jumping head-first into cool and useful new ideas I've had on the back burner :)

Much to my surprise, Soylent has been suggested as an idea for a Gnome Google Summer of Code project by rockstar pre-lawyer Luis Villa.

I found out because a university student (Sven Pfaller) contacted me to see if I could mentor him on Soylent. We've been discussing ideas rapidly over the last week, and I'm really looking forward to bringing new contributors into the project. I have to admit that it gives me sudden inspiration as well.

The only concern is the requirement that Gnome mentors be a Gnome Foundation member. I applied as soon as I found out (last Saturday), but it may be a really close call - the application says processing can take up to a month. Since the Summer of Code timeline says all mentors must be signed up by April 11th, I'm assuming I have to be a Foundation member by then.

Does anyone have any suggestions for ways I can speed up the membership application process? Or should I just wait patiently? :)

I'll leave Sven's Summer of Code application to explain the project idea we worked out. At the same time, I've added another idea to the idea wiki page about making group event planning easy in Soylent (think: scheduling a party in under a minute, including calendaring). I think it'd be a fun idea and depending on the implementation, has a wide range of difficulty levels (who's up for a challenge?!).

You know I'm excited when I bust out the interrobang.

Time marches on, and so does Soylent. Here is the latest Soylent release: 0.1.2 - Leper Loaf.

This release adds a couple of features and squashes a few bugs.

Soylent needs your help! If you find this project interesting, please suggest a feature, describe a bug, write some code, tell a knock-knock joke, whatever you think will help move us forward -- no contribution is too small!

For the particularly ambitious, the README notes a few interesting missing features and bugs (of varying difficulty).

Changes

• Flush out the action button context menus whenever the selection changes
  
• Disable the action buttons when multiple people are selected (until we handle multi-person actions properly)
  
• Enable the Presence menu to set the presence of all accounts at once
  
• Build in support to use Contacts as the contact editor (disabled until my requisite Contacts patches get applied upstream)

WARNING

This is still an early-development-quality release. Though I don't think it has any serious data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install Soylent 0.1.2.

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README).

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.2.tar.gz
md5sum: 2d96fdc26eccff4dd19a2025c19f29f6

Soylent now has a Subversion module ('soylent') on the Gnome svn server. Since I want to eventually propose Soylent for inclusion in mainline Gnome, I think this migration is a good step forward.

To check out the latest Soylent code, run the following command:

svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/soylent/trunk soylent

I intend for the trunk to always be buildable, and generally stable. If you have either problem, please email this list and let us know!

(The mailing list will remain at Code Think for the indefinite future.)

As always, I encourage questions, comments, and patches. And now is an excellent time to get involved!

Let's make Soylent rock!

I'm proud to announce the second Soylent release: 0.1.1 - One Tasty Dilemma. This is primarily a bug fix release; expect future releases to be more interesting.

Changes

• Fix a number of contact editor bugs
  
• Open contact editor in a separate window to avoid tying it to the main window dimensions (which may be very inappropriate)
  
• Make contact editing a distinct action with its own button
  
• Perform automatic contact edit saves
  
• Fix a build bug (Rouslan V. Solomakhin)
  
• Scale all avatars to the same maximum dimensions

WARNING

This is still an early-development-quality release. Though I don't think it has any serious data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install Soylent 0.1.1.

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README).

Contributing/Contact

For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head
to the Soylent development mailing list: Soylent development mailing list

Release Tarball

http://netdrain.com/soylent/soylent-0.1.1.tar.gz
md5sum: b430f4d3c8059e0440b32de68e302f48

At long last, here is Soylent 0.1.0!

Description

Soylent intends to be a "people browser" that wraps every useful bit of information about people into single, cohesive objects. So your friends may have a dozen IM screen names, email addresses, website usernames, icons, hundreds or thousands of photos, and so on. Soylent is meant to bring all those types of communication and content together so you can perform and reach them within a few clicks.

We're using the best-of-breed libraries to achieve our goals in the cleanest, most universal ways possible. That means libempathy/libmissioncontrol to perform Telepathy-based communication (instant messaging, voice and video communication), Evolution Data Server for email and contact store. Eventually, we're planning to tie into the Gnome Online Desktop and Mugshot to pull the power and features of social networks to the desktop.

Screenshot

Alright you jackals, let's get this out of the way:

Soylent's (currently somewhat-sparse) main Browse View.

New Features

Since the last post (ie, during GUADEC) I hooked up the Email and Chat action buttons and their lists. So now you select someone, (if they're online), you can just hit the Chat button and open an IM window with them. If you care about which IM name you use to reach them, you can choose it from the list. Email works the same way, except of course that it's unconditional to any availability. I haven't hooked up the equivalents for Phone and Video since I haven't had time to test it with anyone yet. Also, I don't have a web cam yet. Any recommendations? (Of course, it has to work with Linux and Telepathy. Preferably one that modern distros would support out of the box or via supported packages.)

WARNING

This is a developer-quality release. Though I don't think it has any data-mangling/deleting bugs, you should assume it does. Back up ~/.evolution before you install Soylent 0.1.0. While you're at it, back up the rest of your personal data. You've been putting it off long enough, haven't you? :)

There's also a laundry list of Known Bugs (see the README). I just need some time to plow through them, but I figured it'd be best to get out an initial release sooner rather than later. Here you go, Naba! :)

Contributing/Contact

Rob was kind enough to set up a mailing list (not to mention hosting the mainline git repo this whole time!). For any bug reports, questions, comments, feature proposals, etc., head to the Soylent development mailing list.

Thank Yous

Of course, there are some people I'd like to thank for helping me work toward this first release.

• Rob Taylor - for kick-starting development and project and mailing list hosting and for making me do something useful with my spare time! :)
  
• Xavier Claessens - libempathy ROCKS! Thanks for making life easier for me! :)
  
• Telepathy and Mission Control projects - Ditto!
  
• Ross Burton - for providing wisdom about e-d-s
  
• The Gnome community - for massive inspiration. Soylent would be a lot less interesting without so many great people to develop with and for, and to use Soylent with!

Release Tarball

soylent-0.1.0.tar.gz (md5sum: acb71157f9d8f18d524b0d796e4fec3f)

I've been working on Soylent practically all of my non-work, non-sleep time lately, since GUADEC is rapidly approaching. Here's the latest:

Infrastructure

I took some time to get somewhat familiar with DBus and Telepathy, originally planning to hack together basic IM services integration directly on top of Telepathy. However, Xavier Claessens convinced me to try out his excellent libempathy(-gtk) libraries (included in the Empathy source). Wow! I'm surprised there isn't more buzz around them, because they seem to be very well-designed and easy to use. I guess I didn't expect "Just Works" in a library. Thanks again, Xavier! You saved me a lot of work.

Since libempathy handles the IM/Telepathy end of the theoretical libsoylent (mentioned in my Soylent Preview), I'm instead planning to work with Xavier to eventually roll e-d-s integration/Person object cohesion into libempathy. At that point, libsoylent (and the work it would involve) becomes completely unnecessary. Hooray!

Early IM integration

Now Soylent knows which if your Evolution addressbook contacts are online, we can show their availability. Currently, we append "[*]" to each person's name if they're available, "[...]" if they're away/busy, and do nothing if they're offline. It's really primitive, but I've got plenty of fancy ideas for the future. More once I implement some of them.

Of course, the core reason we care about availability is whether we'll be able to talk to a given person RIGHT NOW. I'm planning to hook up the actual IM functionality in the next few days.

Some other low-hanging fruit is the ability to populate peoples' icons from their IM buddy icons. Finally, something worth taking a screenshot of!

You can see a few of my friends' availability, as well as a few icons. I didn't set any of their icons manually.

(We don't yet save these buddy icons into Evolution Data Server, because I can't figure out how to translate a GdkPixbuf into an EContactPhoto. Anyone know how?)

This automatic metadata importation seems critical and amazingly compelling to me. There is so much information we can gather from our friends with amazingly little effort, so long as our apps pick up the slack. Eventually, I think we can get the per-contact overhead down to you entering a single email address, and them making a few clicks to grant you a pre-defined level of access to their information. Or even less (if a mutual friend "introduces" you, it could just be a couple clicks on each end).

Release

I haven't yet decided whether I'm going to do a first release of Soylent before, immediately after, or a short time after GUADEC. I haven't started a project before, so I don't yet have a feel for the ideal balance between "release early" and "don't release a broken pile of bugs". If any of the more experienced developers have any words of wisdom, I'd love to hear them!

GUADEC

I'm going to be giving a lightning talk on Soylent at GUADEC We'll see how much I can cram into the ~3 minute slot I'll have (according to my calculations). Last year was my first GUADEC (and first time meeting most Gnome developers in person), and I had an amazing time. The people certainly are an inspiration for working on Soylent in the first place. Anything to help bridge the gap between an email address and sharing stories with other hackers/friends/family/co-workers over a couple of local specialty beers!

I'm still trying to find someone to split a 3-person room in the Etap Hotel. I'll be there from Sunday, the 15th through the night of Friday, the 20th. If you're going to GUADEC but don't have housing yet, let me know! (Someone mentioned that the "3-person" rooms in Etap only have 2 beds, so I'm planning to just split the room with one other person, unless you and a friend are willing to split a double bed.)

(Without getting too much into the back-story, Soylent is an idea I originally had more than a year and a half ago, fumbled a little, and eventually stalled out. But some months ago (with the encouragement and help of Rob Taylor) I revived it, and am slowly-but-surely building it toward a refined vision.)

Soylent is a "people browser", in the same way that Nautilus is a file browser. Soylent displays your Evolution Data Server contacts by (buddy) icon and full name, allowing you to perform person-based operations, such as starting an IM conversation, video/phone chat, email, editing contact information, etc.

Our current level of functionality in the main view. We don't support the insensitive widgets yet.

The contact editor. This mostly all works. But it could use more than a smidgin of love.

We're starting basic, but it seems like we can extend the functionality greatly without making the UI much more complicated. For instance, dragging one or more files onto someone would initiate a file transfer (if they accept it on their end); dragging one person onto another would share their contact information with each other (again, assuming they both allow it). Dragging text onto someone could initiate a conversation (a bare URL could send it to an unobtrusive "Friends' Links" (sub)application, website, or something along those lines).

Approximately what Soylent should look like within a few releases. What you see is what you (will probably) get.

Goals and Strategies:

• Pull together disparate contact information and state into cohesive People objects.
  
• Make actions on people as intuitive as possible.
  
• Minimize data duplication
  
  • eg, only store "pointers" like IM names, email addresses, blog URLs; don't store the contents of latest blog posts, emails, etc.
    
• Minimize effort duplication (hook into existing libraries and services)
  • Work upstream as much as possible: contribute to those projects as necessary to fix bugs and add naturally-useful functionality. Some of the stack Soylent taps into could use some scrubbing
    
• Make Soylent as universal as feasible
  • We use Telepathy instead of libgaim because Telepathy seems like a much better architecture (especially in terms of extendability and general long-term relevance and adoption)
    
  • We use Evolution Data Server for contact storage right now because it's about as feature-complete as we could expect (the only major area it's missing are per-website usernames for contacts). It's also fairly universal within Gnome (and thus most distros) as the default address book backend.
    
  • We eventually want to split the basic contact functionality out into its own library, so that we can have consistent, desktop-wide access to people and their metadata.
    
    • For example, Jono has said that he wants future versions of Jokosher to use Telepathy to allow music/audio collaboration over the Internet. libsoylent would factor out some of the work of exposing People rather than usernames to the Jokosher user. For the actual audio streaming, Jokosher would still use Telepathy. In other words, libsoylent will give applications a user-friendly way to gather the proper URI to initiate communication, not actually carry out the communication. Telepathy already exists, and I'm not a big fan of abstracting other peoples' abstractions :)
      
    • GTK+ could eventually include a standard "Select Person" dialog based on libsoylent, just as it includes a standard "Open File" dialog now.

Hopefully that gives everyone a decent idea of what Soylent is and will be. I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments!

Edit (2007-05-09 23:47 PDT): I've realized how many times my face has shown up in the last two posts (especially if you factor in the same hackergotchi next to it on p.g.o). I promise to punish everyone with my face a little less in the future :)