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- Granite Developer Adrien Plazas: Interview
Granite Developer Adrien Plazas: Interview
Submitted by cassidyjames on Sun, 10/02/2011 - 02:06In the past, we've highlighted contributors to elementary with an interview and overview of their work. Today I'm picking that up again; I was able to chat with Adrien Plazas (a.k.a. Kekun) about his involvement in elementary. Follow along to get an insight into the work of Kekun.
Hi Kekun! Tell us a bit about yourself.
I am Adrien Plazas, nearly 24, and I leave near Montpellier (in the south of France).
How are you involved with elementary?
Actually, I feel like a free electron gravitating around more serious desktop developers. I am developing my own elementary comic book reader, Strip, and sometimes I hack Granite a little; for example, I am working on a new "About" dialog for Granite. Shown below.
I also started to code a terminal emulator for Pantheon (inspired by a mockup by Daniel Foré, shown below), but it ended being a task too complicated for me right now, as I am still a beginning hacker.
What sort of things do you do besides elementary development?
I recently started to work with a local association who promotes free culture (software, etc) and helps beginners who are curious to discover and use this software.
I also stopped working and went back to university to learn IT, with the goal of working in the FLOSS movement.
How did you get involved with development in general?
In January, 2010, I had absolutely no programming skills but wanted to help the elementary project by creating more apps. The next month I learned Python and GTK2; it was quick and I started to train myself by coding a replacement to the awesome but dead project "Comix" (shown below). Strip was born.
More recently I learned Vala, GTK3 and SDL.
So you're still pretty new to development! It's awesome to have you on board with elementary. How did you get involved with elementary?
It was first via the forum of the project. When it disappeared, I moved to the IRC channel and more precisely the development channel.
If there was someone out there who wanted to also get involved with elementary development, what would you think their skillset should look like?
As a begginner and FLOSS enthousiast, I'm really open minded about that. If this person knows less than me, that's not a problem and I can teach him/her what I know. If he/she knows more than me, it would be an honor to learn from him/her. Both have already happened.
If someone does, in fact, want to get involved with development, how would you suggest they do so?
If they want to help me to develop Strip or whatever I am working on, this person can send me an email or look for me on the elementary developer IRC channel (#elemenetary-dev on irc.freenode.net). This place is also a good starting point to understand how its developers are working, and to get involved in the whole project.
By the way if someone want to work on Pantheon Terminal, do it! It deserves a better hacker than what I am at the moment.
What are some of your upcoming plans or projects for development?
Once I'm done with the new "About" dialog, I plan to improve Strip a lot. More precisely, it needs a lot of debugging, removal of useless buttons and functions (like the lens and the library), reduction of the display modes available to make it more automagic, and coding of other programs and/or functions like an ebook reader and a library manager to make a complete elementary book management suite. And also packaging, that's very important!
Anything else you want to add?
I hate to read trolls saying elementary OS is "just a Mac OS X rip off," and I encourage them to look more deeply and see the differences. As the time is going, I see elementary developing its own touch, making it different from its so called "source." It's these little touches that I love the most in the project.
That's awesome, and very true. Thanks so much for your time!
You're welcome
There you go, ladies and gentlemen, Adrien Plazas, a.k.a. Kekun. It's great to get to know some of the devoted contributors that make elementary what it is. It's also important to remember that everyone starts somewhere; in Adrien's case he started a short time ago and is already a huge help to the project. Also keep in mind that no matter your skill level, you're welcome to be a part of the community.
Patiently waiting for Luna.
For now I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 and waiting for the upgrade on October 13.
is it a good idea to learn c++ before trying to learn Vala?
C++ is a lot tougher than Vala. Java, C, or C# would be better choices if you wanted to learn Vala.
You don't even need previous experience with programming with Vala; an understanding helps, and knowing others makes it easier to understand other concepts, but Vala is a clear and easy language.
Here I go about the Mac issue again...
This should be obvious but... it doesn't matter how original elementary actually is if you need to ask people to "look more deeply" for them to see that. You are just proving that it looks similar, and that's the whole problem.
What I think it should be done to evaluate the matter is some user testing. Take a few notebooks to some public place and start promoting elementary, and then take notes of how the average person reacts to it.
I personally don't care if elementary looks like Mac or not. In fact I appreciate when products are influenced by good ideas. Really, the whole concept of a Desktop was popularized by the Mac to begin with so fundamentally it's going to have some Mac influence.
Nothing is truly original anyway. All things come from something else. The icon dock and expose are just a natural evolution of the task manager, window management and icons. Copying off of Apple should only bother Apple investors not users.
I don't either, as long as it's on my desktop, but the idea is to make more people use Linux, right? If so, then how does our target, Windows and OSX users, reacts to it? We already know how Linux users do.
Honestly, I'm divided on this issue, that's why I suggest doing this. If in the end it does more good than harm it should be fine, but honestly, everyone I've shown Luna asked me why it looks like a Mac. That doesn't help the cause much, which is a shame because Pantheon is really great.
Unless the desktop outright sucks I doubt those users will really feel that strongly about it. They might not even know (or care) what an OS is. Most people wont even look at a new OS unless it's pre-installed on a computer sold at Bestbuy, Walmart or the Apple Store.
Sure it would be nice if all it took was a "innovative" and "completely unique" desktop experience to win over Windows and Mac users but the consumer market is no fairy-tale world.
They won't feel as strongly about it as Linux users do I'm sure, but it might be enough to get them more interested on a Mac than on Linux.
And it's not about being 100% unique, just unique enough.
But enough of that, I'm very interested in that Strip application of yours.
The feature I would like to see the most is some extra scrolling options, like being able to set different keys (I can't be the only person who is tired of using the mouse wheel) and different amounts of scrolling per key press.
Will Strip work for any ebook. Will it allow me to manage my ebooks and copy them to my Nook?
I'm not totally sure if I'll add ebook capabilities to Strip or make another specialized app, one day, to manage them.
About the library management : it will definitively be managed by a different app.
Remember that if it happens, it will not be in a month, neither three.
Are we going to see any Council Notes this week?
Yes sir! http://elementaryos.org/journal/council-notes-october-1-2011
About the Pantheon Terminal, why not something like TermKit (see http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit ) instead of yet another boring terminal emulator?
Wow, that's a cool stuff! We need something like that for elementary OS! Of course, with option for classic mode too.
That looks SWEET. I would definitely get behind something cool as long as it's done tastefully. It looks like maybe his design skills aren't up to where his idea is ;)
Call me crazy, but that whole idea seems very backwards. Why would I waste my time with a terminal that sort of does GUI if I can use actual GUI apps? I use the terminal precisely because it *isn't* a GUI. If I wanted to use one, I would. Specifically catting a PNG and having it display the actual picture... WHY? If I wanted to see the picture, I'd open it. If I'm catting a binary image it's because I want to view/pipe the raw data around.
Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting idea, I just can't imagine why it would be useful.
No that's not the part I thought looked sweet. That part I could care less about. But using a real progress bar in place of the ascii art, icons in ls, possibly having a path bar, autocomplete, etc. That's all very interesting stuff imo
I like how it is done with ascii symbols as it is a terminal, If you want to add a GUI to a terminal is crazy. Nice looking but still.
Interestingly, an old Apple UNIX fro about '93 included a similar utility; open a UNIX binary from Finder and it'd pop up a dialog letting you add switches and stuff and execute. No graphical progress bars or ls icons, but it worked.
If you like to learn python http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/ is a great place to start. one of the best video tutorial I've come across conducted by Google.
Well, elementary os prefers to use vala for all their apps; python documentation lack is not definitely a problem nowadays: you can find books, tutorials and so on anywhere.
agree with you. but posted the link for @bhaismachine. too bad there aren't any good tutorials for people who know nothing about vala to get started.
Nice read, this! It should be noted that there is a typo in the article just after the interview: “They you go” should be “There you go”
Thanks, fixed it ;)
I know python and OOP, but I find the vala tutorial really hard to understand. I wish there was a better way to learn it (books or so...)
I started Vala with roughly the same skillset as you (OOP + Python), and I can sympathize with you that the official Vala tutorial is pretty terse. Only after I had been working with Vala for about half a year was I able to read and understand all of it in its entirety.
I will say that the best way to learn Vala, in hindsight, is to start writing Vala code. Read existing Vala code (there is a LOT of elementary Vala code to play around with). Ask questions in #vala on irc.gimp.net and #elementary-dev on irc.freenode.net.
We as elementary are trying to make the process easier by creating tutorials for developing Vala apps for the elementary platform. It's very early in development, but here's the start: http://elementaryos.org/docs/developer-guide/hello-world/creating-project
Seems really nice! I will definitely help with that kind of documentation when I learn Vala :)
I wonder how you learned Vala. I tried learning Vala before but I encountered a lot of problems with not knowing C and all its relevant libraries, which seemed to be assumed as background knowledge in the documentation.
I learned vala from scratch basically, I just knew php, javascript and a bit of python before. For me the best way was to just get started and read the documentation when I hit a barrier that kept me from continuing, but this is just how I learn, others may not be able to do it that way.
Yeah, this interview is wonderful :)
Kekun is really a great help indeed! He often helps me, especially for the GTK part.
Honestly, don't hesitate to ask him some help ;)
Thanks for this interview. I had commented this earlier that I want to start reading about Python and GTK too. My research requires me to work on Python though I work on hardware so I will have to learn it sooner or later.