Adobe Air is a new software platform from Adobe which mixes JavaScript and Flash technologies to enable developers to make rich Internet applications that can run on desktop computers. It is remarkable in the world of proprietary applications in the sense that it has included Linux support early on.

My previous post about Twitter clients might have hinted that I have had bad experience with Air applications in general. In this post I will vent of some of the grudges I have with this new platform on Linux.

This, again, not a very fair review. I have not taken the time to investigate the odds and ends of the platform and will overlook the developer’s point of view on the platform. I have heard over the tubes that programmers working on applications for the Air platform appreciate it, but that’s as far as my investigation (or lack thereof) have taken me.

Air applications aren’t so cross-platform

I have tried 5 Adobe Air applications, mostly Twitter clients: Spaz, TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, DestroyTwitter, Tumbleweed, Twhirl. Of those 6 applications only the later 3 worked out of the box on Ubuntu Hardy. The fact cross-platform compatibility isn’t guaranteed by using Air seems to be well-known of developers and most some them will not officially support Linux as an operating platform. This is a very bad average for a technology that is supposed to be cross-platform.

Air applications don’t fail gracefully

The failure mode for each of the non-working applications in also needs to be taken into account when judging quality of the cross-platform Air applications. The behavior of the applications I have tried is less than stellar. TweetDeck is supposed to work on Linux but in the cases where it fails, it shows a semi-helpful error message. Earlier version of TweetDeck failed in the same with Seemic Desktop fails. Seemisc Desktop works partially but the mail display of the application stays empty. SpaZ shows anything usable. Applications failing to work in such a way are very frustrating for the users because they are left to figure out how to use applications that are put in a undetermined state because of holes in the runtime.

Air applications that work on Linux won’t work on all desktops

Adobe Air doesn’t support anything but GNOME and KDE. I usually have the core components of both KDE and GNOME installed on the computers I use, so running applications relying on either desktop environment is not a problem. This is not the case with Adobe Air applications since they apparently rely on some specific features of GNOME or KDE window managers to work properly. This is something that is very seldom seen in the world of X-Window applications. X-Window Applications relying on components of either desktop will usually be happy running on any window manager.

Despite this, Twhirl will work okay-ish in OpenBox with only some graphical glitches to show for.

Adobe Air requires a compositing manager to decent.

I will admit that I’m rather old school and I have not joined the Compiz bandwagon. I did not use any compositing manager on any desktop I use. That means that all Adobe Air applications that use shaped windows, ie: all the ones I have tried, looked awful until I caved-in and enabled the limited compositing feature of KDE 3.5.

Air applications tend focus on the look

Look and feel was never a strong point of Adobe Flash. Flash based application usually don’t try to blend in in the rest of the system. In Adobe Air, Adobe are obviously trying to enforce some Feel in applications, but on the Look side, a lot still leaves to be desired. All Air applications I have tried put a very strong emphasis on design and not so much on blending with the user’s desktop. DestroyTwitter had been designed with fonts a lot smaller than the default size on my desktop. On my CRT screen, it made the application hardly usable. Even the option to use larger font in DestroyTwitter did not do anything to improve the situation.

The worst offender in that category in the applications I have tried is without a doubt Tumblweed, an offline client for the Tumblr web blog system. I had hoped this application would be nicer than editing blog entries through a web site, which is something I dislike. I was mistaken…

The application was removed after a few seconds as it obviously did not focus very much on making editing pleasant.

Okay, I swear this will be my last Twitter inspired post…

I have used multiple Twitter client since I’ve first started using the service. The reason for that is that most of them are in fact pretty bad and it took me a while to find the set of Twitter client I can use at home, at work and on my mobile device, on Windows but mostly on Linux.

I will not even try to make a fair review. The worst clients I have used have resided just a few minutes on the computer where I have installed them. This means the will be essentially based on first impressions. Also keep in mind that I have a strong interest in Linux even if I lately I have had to use Windows at work. I use Linux pretty much everywhere else, all the time.

To put things in perspective, I need to precise that I do not have high expectations from a Twitter client. All I need at the following features, in order of priority:

1. it must work on Linux; this sounds simple but most so-called portable client don’t
2. it must be visually pleasing, yet not look like an angry fruit salad; this is what shoots down a lot of Adobe Air application
3. have a reply feature; without this, people will lose track to what your reply to when you reply to them
4. have a retweet feature; because copying and pasting sucks

All additional feature are more layers of icing. Features such as followers management, themability, direct messaging, twitpic support, identi.ca support are useful but not required. I would happily use a Twitter client with only the feature I mentioned above.

So, here is my review of all the Twitter clients I have tried.

BAD!

Sadly, most client I have tried fall in that category. I have used some of them for so little time that I had to go back to the list of Twitter clients on the Twitter Fan wiki to make this list.

Twitux is available in the Debian and Ubuntu software repository, and that is its only quality. It’s also under-maintained compared to most Twitter client available.

Choqok is a Twitter client for KDE4. This is a client that will eventually become good, but I wasn’t impressed by the version I have tried.

Gwibber has too many GNOME dependencies for me. It did not seem to be worth the time compiling it on my outdated Ubuntu Hardy desktop and I don’t have anything GNOME related on my laptop.

twittaré is not a flattering name in french. This client works but has no distinctive features.

DestroyTwitter is a classy Adobe Air application. It works surprisingly fine in Linux but had one big problem at the time I have tried it: the default font it used was so small that I had to squint every time I looked at it. It might be worth the time to retry it since it has all the feature I want in a Twitter client.

Spaz is major Twitter client, and an Adobe Air application. Like many Air application I have tried, Spaz failed to work on Linux. I don’t even remember seeing the main window appear.

StickyTweet is made in plain C/C++ using the Win32 API so saying it is unappealing is an understatement. The guy that programmed that has probably lost a bet. Any high-schooler with a Delphi book could make a better looking application.

Ada is a minimal Twitter client for the Adobe Air platform. It’s very, very minimal. Too minimal. It worked fine on Windows. I have never used in on Linux.

twidge is a command line Twitter client from John “Real World Haskell” Goerzen. It does what it advertises and will be helpful to those more console-inclined than me.

twit.el is an Emacs script for Twitter. Even though I like Emacs a lot, I have never seriously considered using it. I have made it work on my laptop but never even the more features it may support. It is certainly a good option if you spend most of your life in Emacs. I don’t.

Seesmic, from the makers of my main Twitter client. I have never managed to make it work on Ubuntu Hardy. It starts fine but the user interface doesn’t work. It’s a well known client and some people apparently love it. I don’t remember seeing anyone saying that it works on Linux.

TweetDeck is another popular Twitter client, an Adobe Air application, that I could never get to work on Ubuntu Hardy. The program starts but then fail to work, but at least its gives a clear warning saying that it won’t work on the computer. This is also a very popular and heavily featured program that many people are using on a daily basis. It is also reported that it works fine on Linux but it seems my current distribution isn’t supported.

Okay

This is the list of clients that are probably not bad but that I have not seriously used for some reasons.

Twirssi is an irssi script. I have used irssi as my IRC client for a while now so it wasn’t illogical for me to try and see if I could merge Twitter and IRC. I have got it to work on my main computer and used it for a little while. I have not adopted it since installing it manually with CPAN has sent me into a dependency hell that I could not get out of.

Twitter Opera Widget is a sort of plugin which Opera calls a widget. It made a lot of sense to me to use an Opera plugin to use Twitter since I constantly have Opera loaded at home and at work. I have actually used this client extensively when I started using Twitter. It had all the functionality I needed and was correctly maintained by its author. Sadly, this widget suffers from a pretty bad memory leak which made made my desktop, let alone my browser, unusable after a few days. I grew tired of waiting after the leak to be fixed so I ended up switching to Twippera. This is what makes me categorize this client in the Okay category, otherwise I would still be using it.

The Twitter webpage itself is pretty poor in features. The retweet feature that is present in most good name Twitter clients is currently being deployed to some user as a beta feature. This should put twitter.com down in the standings of Twitter client in terms of features. It’s nonetheless a fact that most Twitter user start by using the Twitter website itself and since it’s by far the most used of all client, it probably gets the job done good enough. I have used Twitter.com to sometimes to tweet and I am still using it to check on my follower list and my followers requests.

Good

Twippera is another plugin for the web browser Opera. It has less features than the Twitter Opera Widget but it has no memory leak which cripples my browser. I only left this client to search for a client with more features. I’m still using it on my laptop because I have not yet looked for a replacement.

Twhirl is the client I use on my desktop computer. It is an Adobe Air application, one of the few which work fine out of the box on Ubuntu Hardy. It’s a excellent Twitter client which supports all the basic features I need but a lot more. It’s unfortunate that it is using the Adobe Air platform and that its thus quite resource intensive and only work on GNOME or KDE.

Mauku is the only client I have tried for the Maemo platform on the Nokia N800, and it may be the only decent one. The Maemo 4.x version is missing several feature I desire from a Twitter client but the display is good enough to work with and I’m using it whenever I’m away from my computers but close to my N800.

Brizzly is what Twitter.com should be. It is an excellent web client to access Twitter which include several features that are available in desktop clients. Brizzly exposes its features in a single web page, which is better than what Twitter.com offers. The feature I love the most in Brizzly is the display of Twitter trends with explanations that are free to edit by Brizzly users. This has since been implemented in Twitter.com but in a way that is less efficient that what is shown by Brizzly.

The player

I’ve got this little device recently to replace my 256mb MP3 player. I was pleased that I got it pretty cheap during Black Friday from NewEgg Canada. NewEgg “leaked” their Black Friday rebates to Canada and reduced the price of that player to 85 CAN$ which is pretty cheap for a 8gb model.

At first, I must admit I was a bit sad with bugs and some missing features of the player. It is obviously an entry-level player. I’ve managed to find a satisfying way to work around all the bugs and uploaded 8gb of music to it and I’m happy since. I did not realize 8gb was that much content.

This post is a concentrate of the bugs I’ve found on the player and how I work around them. If you have better solutions, please comment on this post.

The bugs

MTP support

This is not really a bug, since this device works in UMS/MSC mode. Since I like to explore the capacities of my devices, I’ve nonetheless tried to get it to work.

For most Linux users, this player won’t work in MTP mode. I’ve only managed to make it work on very recent snapshots of libmtp. I got it to upload, but not to delete. I have not investigated that. Don’t count on MTP to work well until the next major Ubuntu release, Jaunty Jackalope. If MTP support was good, the most important bug on this player would be alleviated, but as it is not the case, please read on.

Bad sorting

The first and by far most annoying bug I’ve found is that the player doesn’t sort the ID3 tags on the player. The music files are displayed in the order they are uploaded on the player. If the player worked well with MTP, this wouldn’t be a problem because the media player will upload the files to the player in the correct order. File manager such as Konqueror don’t do that as it’s possibly slower to get the files from the disk in any kind of order. They are also multithreaded so that multiple files are copied at the same time. So if you upload on the player using Konqueror, the order will be screwed up. With file managers, the only options would be to copy files one by one by hand. This is obviously not a scalable process.

I’m satisfied to use rsync to copy files from my MP3 directory to my player. rsync copy and write the file in order.

rsync --verbose \
        --recursive \
        --times \
        --whole-file \
        --delay-updates \
        --modify-window=1 \
        --delete-before ~/Media/mp3/* .

I’m not exactly sure how this work and I now that my music is on the player, I don’t care enough to investigate it. Of course, I this probably is not perfect. I think that if I make changes inside an album, then rsync will just sync the changed file and thus the order inside the album will be screwed up. This could be automated but order will never be quite right. The only solution is correct sorting on the firmware, but, until that is fixed by iRiver, I’ll be happy to just reformatted the player and redo the copy overnight with rsync when I want to change the content of the player.

ID3v2.3 vs ID3v2.4

Most of my MP3 were correctly tagged using ID3v2 tags, but I initially did not know there were several incompatible versions of ID3v2. Amarok, as most MP3 players, read any ID3v2 versions, but writes only ID3v2.4 tags. The device simply cannot read those tags and will put files tagged in such way in the “Unknown Artist/Unknown Album” bunch, which is a PITA.

The first solution I’ve found was to use Kid3. It has a function to convert tags back and from ID3v2.3 and ID3v2.4. Kid3 is a fine program despite some UI shortcomings, but it doesn’t scale to gigabytes of files.

The next best thing was to use the EyeD3 library. EyeD3 is a simple Python program and library to manage ID3 tags. It includes features to convert between ID3v2 versions. I’ve lost the small script I’ve done to mass convert my MP3 files to ID3v2.3, but it looked a bit like that (untested) snippet.

tag.link("/some/file.mp3", eyeD3.ID3_V2)
tag.update(eyeD3.ID3_V2_3)

If I ever rewrite the script, I’ll post it here.

.ogg and Vorbis tags

The device doesn’t read Vorbis tags. For some people, this would be a total let-down. Not for me. I re-encoded I had as OGG to MP3. I have not investigated this further.

Playlists

The device uses .PLA playlists. The format of .PLA playlists is detailed here. I have not yet found the time look at this as playlists are not a killer feature for me.

LPlayer for the rest of us

I don’t consider I’ve discovered anything. All that informations I list here was scattered around the net. If you want more informations, please do Google and you will eventually find some.

The most important page I’ve found for LPlayer owner is LPlayer for the rest of us, which is a blog post similar to mine. I’ve tested all the information he has posted there and managed tp update my firmware, and encode a video to play on the player. Kudos to Tim De Pauw.

I’ve recently gave a try to Awesome 3 RC5. Again, like in my last attempt, I was forced to bail out.

I decided to try it at work because it is the place where I need the less applications. I mostly use a few terminal with Emacs to edit and Opera to browse. I also still use VMware, and yes, the problem I described last time is still present. I already admitted it was just an annoyance so this time I decided this would not stop me from at least trying to use Awesome productively.

I lasted roughly 2 days and a half before I was forced to admit defeat and move back to OpenBox. I don’t believe there are any formal studies done on that, but I feel getting used to a software graphic interface needs at least two step:

1. First is getting used to the controls, and being able to find its way into the interface. This might be short or not depending on the complexity of the said interface.
2. The second step is becoming productive in the same interface.

The steps can probably overlap, ie, you can probably become productive with an interface without knowing the full feature set of the interface, but you need a basic understading of the features before
becoming productive.

I can say that after 1 day, I was well in my way into step 2 of my learning. What really helped is that Awesome defaults are well choosen and easy to learn. In fact, I quickly felt the need to rebind some controls, which is something you can’t really before thinking you might be more productive if you move some bindings around on the keyboard.

I had already done that after a day or two. In fact, I actually rebound the Caps Lock key to be my modifier key for the WM. That was pretty cool actually.

Everything went fine until I started to know the key good enough to stop thinking that I was using a WM. At this moment, I found myself continually typing in the wrong window. My brain could not at any moment, know which window had the focus. Everything I switched
window, or moved window around, I had to stop, for perhaps 1/10 of a second, and check which window was highlighted.

Before surrendering to the familiar OpenBox, I asked people of the #awesome IRC channel for their opinion on my problem. The simplest trick I’ve seen was to edit the theme so that the focused window
border was of a bright color. I did set the border to be thick and red, but to no avail. Other suggestions were either not applicable to all windows, or would have required compizmgr, something with which I have no competence.

The problem is certainly not specific to Awesome. Any tiling window manager will probably lead to me typing in the wrong windows all the time.

I’m a little annoyed by this problem. With WM dealing with overlapped window, it’s obvious that that the top-most window is the window that has the focus. My working style with WM is usually to have a few (2
or 3) windows opened inside a single virtual desktop. I toggle between them using Alt+Tab. Windows are really side-by-side each other will overlap 95% of the time. I have not stopped to see how I
work the remaining 5% of the time. Do I type in the wrong window? I honnestly can’t say yes or know. When you work day to day, very quickly, with windowing environment, its the kind of thing you may not realize happens when it doesn’t really slow you down.

I’m off Awesome for a while now. I’m not ready to make it replace my working environment any time soon. Still, Awesome is really awesome. I recommend to everyone that is curious about tiling window managers to try it before any other. It’s just a personnal problem that I find myself incapable of using it.

New year

Happy year 2008. I would like to say that blogging more often is not one of my formal resolve for the year.

I will be happy if I consider I’m still blogging by the end of the year. All my other attemps at blogging regularly have failed.

KDE 4.0 has been released

Everyone following tech blog know that KDE 4.0 has been released this friday. I’m quite happy about that since I’ve been a KDE user since I’m full time on Linux. What has changed over the years is that I’m not longer a strong KDE advocate. I will always prefer KDE over GNOME, but I can’t say I would argue strongly for KDE against GNOME. Both a 2 very complete and excellent desktop environment.

The following is my opinion on KDE 4.0. I have tested the Ubuntu Gutsy remastered LiveCD for KDE 4.0. I’ll admint it’s probably not a complete experience of KDE 4.0, but what I’ve seen is enough for me to say that I will not use KDE 4.0 until a while.

I don’t understand people saying they don’t like KDE because it looks too much like Windows. I don’t really care about how my system look if there is a good operating system under the hood.

The look of the environment for me is not a good reason to dislike a desktop environment, be it GNOME or KDE. I’ve got good reasons to dislike GNOME, and most people probably have good reasons to dislike KDE.

Both environment can be themed to change several aspects of their graphical appearance. Also, you can change components of the system until you find the look that suits you. Once that is done, you are left with what really matters in the environment: the quality of the software suite. That is, I believe, the only worthy point of comparison.

The subject has already beaten to death so I’ll keep the following short. This is not an exhaustive list of my opinions about KDE.

The good: it’s KDE 4.0

KDE 4.0 is the next step for the KDE environment. It will get all the development and all the cool apps. If I stick to KDE in general, I will eventually use KDE 4.x, but maybe not KDE 4.0.

The bad

Unstability

I expected nothing else of KDE 4.0. It’s a dot-zero release and thus as many shortcomings and bugs.

When I tried the SuSE LiveCD for KDE 4.0, I badly wrecked my system to the point I had to shutdown my virtual machine. Don’t ask me what happened, I don’t remember. It was with an older version anyway.

With the Ubuntu LiveCD, Gwenview crashed twice, one time right at the moment it was starting.

This is not unexpected. I’m used to living on the edge with very recent software so I am familiar with applications crashing. Sometimes I will even fire-up the debugger and try to fix the problem.

Lack of KMail

I’m a KMail user. I know I could use KDE 3.5 KMail in KDE 4.0 yes, but I can also run KMail in KDE 3.5.8 too if there is not more reasons to switch to KDE 4.0.

The ugly

There is one thing that keeps me from using KDE 4.0 right now. If someone instructs me how to fix that, I’m a taker.

The huge taskbar

It’s huge. Like, 5 times the size I would want it to be. To maximize screen real estate, I have configured my KDE 3 kicker to be minuscule. It’s current 630 pixel wide, and just 30 pixel high, on a 1600×1200 19 inch screen. There is no taskbar, just the system tray, a small set of shortcuts icons, the clock and the desktop switcher. I’ve become used to switching between tasks using Ctrl+Tab and other shortcuts.

I’m not gonna install KDE 4.0 packages and run a KDE 4.0 session on my system until this taskbar can be shrinked to the size I want.

I have posted a Debian bug about the problem I have had with VMWare and the Awesome window-manager.

Turns out that the shortcuts only works when the mouse is not over the VMWare virtual screen. That means it is less annoying than I first expect, but still annoying nonetheless.

JD was nice in installing VMWare to diagnose the problem. I know some developer who would not have bothered to install such a big piece of proprietary software to debug a problem which probably annoys just one person, me, in the whole world.

VMWare is a critically important tool for us at work. I’m not gonna get into details of why and how we use it. It will be better left as the subject of another post. I don’t feel I need to justify the bug I posted, but it is very important for me that I’m able to use this tool efficiently in my development environment.

awesomeness in a package

I had a overly involved articles to write about an idea for a project I have. Unfortunately, I have had no time to sit and write about it.

Instead I decided I would try Julien Danjou’s Awesome Window Manager.

First I must say that I felt weird installing awesome through apt-get (apt-get install awesome). One would expect that awesomeness would have been harder to install. It also feel strange to write about. Then I realized you could also install happy in Debian. There is no funny or sad yet though.

I have something for the potential effiency of tiling window manager. I somehow feel that if I can get used to one of them, I’ll be terribly efficient around my desktop. Whenever I try one of them, I usually come back to my sense. Getting used to that whole new key map usually take more patience than I have.

Objectively, awesome is a nice window manager. It’s sober and fast. It took a short while for me to be able to know enough keys to find my way around it.

Mod4

awesome uses the ‘Mod4′ modifier by default. Once I got awesome started, it struck me that I did not know what “Mod4″ was. Turns out that on my setup, ‘Mod4′ is bound to the Windows key. It is a nice thought from the other to get that key to some use.

Zsh job control

Zsh, my current shell, does not do job control the same way I remembered Bash did. If you fire a shell in X, start a graphical app, then logout from the shell, Zsh will tell all the application to shut themselves down. I tried Bash, and apparently it does not do that, or it is being smarter with it.

Floating windows

I knew it because I once used Ion, but I would like to point out that Awesome, just like Ion, can also deal with floating window just fine. Awesome is also pretty smart about small pop up window, and displays them as floating window instead of tiling them just like applications window. I vaguely remember not seeing that with other window manager although I could be wrong.

Thunderbird/IceDove

This ** program doesn’t like being tiled. It seems I have to run it in a full screen window.

System tray

Being a minimalist wm, Awesome doesn’t have anything that can hold system tray applications. This doesn’t mean much too me at work, but it’s a big drawback for my computer at home, on which I run several applications that feel at ease in a system tray. Pidgin is probably the best example of such application.

I know there are probably some ways to hack around it, just like there are some alternatives to Pidgin, but that means using up more of the little patience I have.

VMWare

Really annoying bug. VMware console shortcut keys don’t work when VMWare is run with Awesome. It certainly deserves a bug report as it is the reason I can’t be using Awesome. I see tiling wms as a way to free myself from the mouse by using mostly the keyboard. VMWare being one of my main work tools, I cannot afford to switch to a wm that would keep me from using it in a efficient way, even if the wm is generally efficient for everything else.

After I write this, I will logout from Awesome back in my KDE setup where VMWare shortcut keys work.