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.”

Heretics (G. K. Chesterton) – Loc. 1001-2

“He is in a perpetual state of temporary honesty.”

Changing My Mind (Zadie Smith) – Loc. 1394-96

“Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really realism?”

God’s Fury, England’s Fire (Michael Braddick) – Loc. 5063

“Overall, the King’s position was not bad, which meant that his opponents” position was not good”

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).

So, designing Moblin for netbooks:

And designing Moblin for MIDs:

Both presentations have versions with speaker notes linked inside them, although, as ever they were only a very rough guide to what I actually said. If you want to know the real truth, you had to be there.

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.

1. We had some rather more important things to get done first, like saving cookies and making Flash work.
2. 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. When the user sets full screen they’re sending a message about what they want to do. It’s a message we’re already set up to hear.

One of the design features of Moblin is the Toolbar, which hides at the top of the screen until you need it. But when you’re in full screen mode, not only do you not need it – but you’ve told us that you don’t want it at all. You’re watching a movie or making an important presentation and our values of politeness and focus mean that we really don’t want to get in the way. And this is great for the browser, it’s just what we want. So, here’s the deal. Press F11. Go on, you know you want to. This’ll get you into full screen mode. I know it’s not exactly the most discoverable thing in the world but we’ll look at that entry point in future.

The clever bit is that the toolbar is supressed in full screen mode (you can still get to it with the Home key if you really want to) so we can hijack the behaviour that users already know about and return to normal mode by popping up to the top of the screen wherapon the browser toolbar will slide down in a downright slinky fashion restoring you to normal mode. Or, alternatively you can press F11 again, but where’s the fun in that? There’s some other cool bits and pieces but that’s the main excitement.

That solves point 2, but what about point 1? Well, during my talk at GCDS Chris was otherwise engaged and followed that through with some awesome work this weekend and pushed the fix. Top man! You’ll be able to get hold of this in tested builds in a little while after it’s passed through QA but if you’re very impatient then you can build the code yourself using these handy instructions.

So feel free to ask us why we don’t do things that you want, it may be that we work out how to do it right whilst we explaining why we can’t.

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.