Android: The Open Source Cell Phone

By Chris DiBona, Open Source Team

As you might have heard, on the 22nd of October we will start to see the first deliveries of the T-Mobile G1, the first phone based on the Android mobile platform. This is an incredibly exciting time for us, the culmination of over three years of work done by hundreds of people at the companies that make up the Open Handset Alliance. All of us are waiting with bated breath to see how the phone is used and what its impact will be on the future of mobile phones and computing.

But that's tomorrow....

Today I'm very proud to announce that we are releasing the code that went into that same revolutionary device. Let me present Android: the first complete and highly functional, mass market, Open Source mobile platform. Built with and on top of a bunch of Open Source software, this is one of the largest releases in the history of FOSS. Our goal was to make millions of terrific phones possible, to raise the bar on what people can expect from any mobile phone and to release the code that makes it possible.

So check out the code, build a device, send in some patches and become a committer.

Android is terrific now, and with every new developer that joins us Android gets better. Not just for the Open Handset Alliance, not just for Google, and not just for T-Mobile G1 users — but for everyone. Through the use of Open Source we can change how the world thinks of cell phones and portable computing, together.

If you'd like to know more, visit the Android open source page and read all about its debut there.

Thousand Parsec and Google Summer of Code

By Tim Ansell, Technical Solutions Engineering Team and Thousand Parsec Project Co-Founder

This was the second year that Thousand Parsec partook in the Google Summer of Code™, and we accomplished even more than we did in our very successful first year. For those who don't know, Thousand Parsec is a framework for building turn based space empire building games. Many different types of rulesets can be developed which have a wide variety of features.

In 2008, we had 8 students, all of whom successfully completed their projects. Together they made a massive contribution to our code base, writing more than 130K lines of code across 5 different modules. This year we were also pleased to see a great deal more collaboration and interaction between our students and Thousand Parsec's wider community.

One of the most exciting projects to come from Summer of Code 2008 is our new 3D client. This takes our existing libraries and couples them with the sweet Python bindings for Ogre 3D(another 2008 mentoring organization) and builds a rich client full of eye candy. Since the completion of the Summer of Code, Eugene Tan has been hard at work to make his first release happen, and plans are on track for him to do so this week. Check out these screenshots for a preview:

Our primary server also got a workout, with 3 students working hard on improving its functionality. All our students work has been merged into mainline and will be in our next release (which is also being preped at this very moment). Ryan Neufeld and Dustin White both added new "quick play" rulesets, while Aaron Mavrinac added ability to remotely configure the server. This gives people a choice of 4 different games to play, 3 of which were developed as Summer of Code projects.

Our prototype and backup server also got some love with Juan Lafont contributing a quick play game of his own creation called "DroneSec". This ruleset required that he also improve many of the server's features and he is in the process of preparing a release.

Aaron, who initially worked on creating the remote configuration of tpserver-cpp, has also been working hard on adding single player support. His work touched and improved all our of modules and even other students' projects. Aaron is currently driving the next release of our primary client, which will include a wizard leting anyone setup a local game including the server, AI opponents and other options.

Two students, Victor Ivri and Vincent Verhoeven, each worked on creating AI frameworks and testing them out on the new rulesets developed this year. Having two frameworks allows us to continually refine their abilities and skills, giving people the ability to play non-trivial game
scenarios without having to find human opponents.

Zhang Chiyuan's project focused on a completely different tack: adding support for Schemepy to Thousand Parsec. His project allows Scheme to be used from the Python framework. Zhang completely rewrote the existing backends and added a bunch of new backends. In the process, he created a extensive compliance suite which allows for quick checking to ensure our backends are functioning correctly. He has also ported our Python client and servers and to the new interfaces.

Overall, we're very proud of all our students' work, all of which has made a dramatic impact on the health and usefulness of Thousand Parsec. Of course, the entire community hopes they continue to contribute in the future. We would like to thank the Google Open Source Team for all their efforts in running such an awesome program.

Finally, congratulations to all of our mentors and students for their many
accomplishments!

Zurich Open Source Jam 5

By Nóirín Shirley, Technical Writing Team

Google Zurich has been a hive of activity lately — with Code Jam, Googler for a Day, and now the latest Open Source Jam.

Our lightning talks were far too interesting and informative to confine to five minutes, but with snacks and beer in hand, noone seemed to mind.



Thomas Koch kicked off the evening, with a talk on using Vim as your IDE. Peter Arrenbrecht gave us an introduction to Patch Branches, and followed up with a quick demo during our break.

Paolo Bonzini told us all about his favourite project — GNU Smalltalk — and sparked a bit of a discussion on making a living from Open Source work. That kept us entertained while our experts worked to sort out some "technical issues" with the projector!



Once we got things up and running again, Gabriel Petrovay gave us a demo of XQuery support in Eclipse, using XQDT and Zorba. And, to round off the evening, Simon Leinen snagged himself a cool Google T-shirt by giving a talk about OSS vs "The Cloud"!

If you're still not sure what the Open Source Jam is — well, it depends on who shows up! It's an open forum for open source fans, hackers, and just plain geeks to get together, have a beer, and hear what's going on. And if you're looking for people to try out your latest patches, or to help you get a project off the ground, it's a great place to start a conversation. This time around, we had geeks from Germany and Italy, as well as plenty of locals — so there's no excuse!

But if you missed out on this one, don't worry — the Zurich Open Source Jams are semi-regular events. To stay informed about the details of the next one, or to catch up on discussions about previous ones, join the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group.

Hackystat's First Google Summer of Code

By Philip Johnson, Hackystat Project Administrator

The Hackystat Project had a great Google Summer of Code™ 2008 experience. Four students started the program, and while one had to drop due to sudden illness, the other three went on to successfully complete their projects. Shaoxuan Zhang worked on a Wicket-based user interface to Hackystat, and implemented a number of new features including support for "portfolio" analyses. Matthew Bassett developed a Hackystat sensor for Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Eva Wong developed a Hackystat sensor data visualization package using Flare. You can learn more about each student's experience from their own perspective by reading Matthew's, Shaoxuan's, and Eva's blogs. Finally, my blog contains a reflection on Summer of Code from a first time administrator's perspective. We definitely hope to be back next year, and encourage all Open Source communities to participate.

Congratulations to our mentors and students for their many successes this year!

Wrapping the Season of Usability 2008

By Ellen Reitmayr, OpenUsability

Inspired by the Google Summer of Code™ program, OpenUsability — an initiative to bring usability into FOSS development — developed and launched a similar but independent program, the Season of Usability. The Season of Usability sponsors students to work on usability, user-interface design, and interaction design and related projects with pre-screened Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects; each student is paired with mentors to help guide them on their project, with mentors chosen from a particular community's set of key developers and user experience experts. For their work, students receive a stipend of $1000 USD, kindly sponsored by Google's Open Source Programs Office, the Open Society Institute and Trolltech.

The second Season of Usability took place between May and September 2008, and has been deemed a great success by students, projects and sponsors! Ten students contributed to nine FOSS projects by doing user research, usability analysis or UI mockups. All projects were finished successfully — in average, the teams fulfilled 80% of their initial project goals. Given the fact that most mentors claimed to have set an overly ambitious roadmap at first, this is a very good value. We are especially happy that the Season of Usability inspired the students to further engage in Open Source — six of the ten students will continue their work on the project.

All students created project reports that are published on the Season of Usability website. Summarised, the following goals were accomplished:

Redesigning DrProject's Administration Interface

This project focused on improving the overall usability for project management portal software, DrProject, especially targeting a redesign of the web administration interface.

Along with mentors Paula Bach & Greg Wilson, Liz Blankenship, a student of Science in Information at the University of Michigan (USA), did a redesign of the web-based administration interface for DrProject. She documented her activities on her blog.

Redesigning Gallery's Image Upload Tools

The goal of this project was to improve the image upload tools of Gallery, a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website.

Mentored by Katrin Goetzer and Chris Kelly, Jakob Hilden did a comparative analysis and created mockups for a new image upload tool. His work is documented in Gallery's Wiki. After having finished his own Season of Usability project, Jakob offered to mentor two more design projects related to Gallery for a design course at the University of Michigan, School of Information.

Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE4

The purpose of this project was to finalize the Human Interface Guidelines for the K Desktop Environment.

Becca Scollan, a student of Science and Information at the University of Baltimore (USA), and Thomas Pfeiffer, studying Psychology at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) identified common interaction problems in KDE4 and created generic design solutions. Additionally, they complemented the KDE4 HIG by several guidelines. Their mentors were Celeste Lyn Paul and myself, Ellen Reitmayr.

Improving Jeliot user Interface and Workflows

This project focused on improving the user interface and workflows of Jeliot 3, an Open Source Java Program Visualization application that helps Java beginners to understand coding concepts. Sharad Baliyan, student of interaction design from India, identified possible pitfalls when newbies of programming make use of Jeliot, and created paper prototypes to overcome those issues. Sharad was mentored by Roman Bednarik, Andres Moreno and Niko Myller.

Toolbox and Palette Interaction for KOffice

The goal of this project was to improve the toolbox and palette interaction for KOffice, the office suite of the K Desktop Environment.

Supported by her mentors Celeste Lyn Paul, Ellen Reitmayr and Boudewijn Remp, Neha Pahwa analyzed the tool options of KOffice. She identified the major interaction problems and created first paper mockups for an improved tool interaction in KOffice.

3d Widgets for MakeHuman

The goal of this project was to design and test 3d widgets for MakeHuman, a free software for modelling 3-Dimensional characters.

Eugenio Passacantilli, student of Science in Communications at the University La Sapienza di Roma (Italy) designed and tested 3D widgets as a new concept to present options to users. Eugenio was supported by his mentors Stefano Fabri, Manuel Bastioni and Simone Re.

Handheld-Mode Interface for the OLPC XO Laptops

This project focused on designing a system of interaction for the One Laptop Per Child XO Laptop with limited input methods.

Along with mentors Mentors Eben Eliason and Marco Gritti, Alessandro Vona, student of Science in Communications, analyzed different handheld interaction models to come up with an interaction design for the XO Laptop handheld mode.

Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui

The goal of this project was to improve various tools and the overall usability of Qtpfsgui, an open source graphical user interface application that aims to provide a workflow for High dynamic range (HDR) imaging.

Supported by his mentors Roman Bednark, Giuseppe Rota, and Alexandre Prokoudine, Vladimir Smida created sketches for Qtpfsgui that will improve visual rather than parameter-centric working modes. Vladimir documented his work on his blog.

IM and VoIP with SIP Communicator

This project focused on the integration of multiple protocols in a single instant messaging application, SIP Communicator.

Mike Oren, PhD student in Philosophy at Iowa State University (USA), performed user research and a comparative analysis of different instant messengers. Mike was mentored by Raphael Wimmer and Emil Ivov.

A big "Thank You" to all participants and congratulations for all their good work!