Thought Outflux | Anirudh Sanjeev

I love the Sup email client. It’s incredibly good with keyboard shortcuts, modal editing, and lets me use vim to write email. Unfortunately, it was slightly cumbersome getting it to work and when I first found out about it it looked rather plain and unappealing. I always found that so many open source projects, especially those with smaller teams, completely ignore the website – and treat it as something that just needs to be updated from time to time.

I found this other interesting project called Shotwell, written by this very interesting company called Yorba. Shotwell is a rather basic, but very user friendly interface. What surprised me most about their project was the website. The fonts are drop dead gorgeous, there’s great attention to detail, and there’s even a good set of screenshots. I found it hard to believe it wasn’t an expensive, proprietary Mac app, as they stereotypically and usually have the best website.

No, Shotwell is a fully free and open source tool.

The website was so nice, and so was the tool. This led me to go around and find out more – and discovered that the website has been designed by Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst and is licensed under Creative Commons. I then immediately felt the importance of improving brand image by the means of a good website. Since Sup is such a fantastic project which often goes unnoticed, I felt that I should contribute by giving the frontpage an update and highlighting the fantastic features of the tool. And what better place to start from than the great Shotwell website.

So after a few hours of writing, I finished this:

http://anirudhsanjeev.org/temp/supsite

Yeah, it’s a line-to-line ripoff and as a red blooded hacker, I hate that. But that’s what’s problematic – design is very very hard for programmers to grok. A few nice pictures, a little minimalism and some elegant typography can go a long way – but we gotta put lots of links, news posts, this and that – and clutter it with a lot of nonsense. Still, what I’ve done is perfectly legal, I’ve provided adequate attribution.

Notice immediately how you want to download and try out the email client, as compared to the old website. What is interesting is that it works both ways – I remember seeing this web framework called “Denied” a few days back, which got *62* points on Hacker News, which prides itself on having some pretty intelligent users. When I saw it, I thought “okay, the website is pretty and the code samples and screencasts are nice, but what’s the big deal?”.

Turns out the whole thing was an April Fools’ Joke. While I really gotta hand it to the author for taking so much effort, it proves an interesting point – someone who was able to get 70 watchers on a github project, from something that does nothing *solely* for the reason that it has it’s own subdomain and a good design implies how little people actually care about the content. Maybe free software projects need to start hiring designers to improve their frontends. I know that this seems incredibly shallow, but it seems to be a large part of who we are.

Let’s play a game. Pick out competing choices purely based on how appealing the frontend seems to you.

1. Ruby or Python
2. GNOME or KDE
3. Emacs or Vim
4. Fedora or Ubuntu or Opensuse
5. Banshee or Amarok
6. KDevelop or MonoDevelop or Anjuta

Oh, how we’re swayed by a pretty face.

Click on image to view full size

Can we get any more awesome than this?
Only time will tell.

[M-x infomercial-mode]
[world is black and white]
Want to endow your patch with awesome code-review functionality and impress fellow hackers? Email, attaching patches, wrapping, line widths got you down? Want to give feedback on code but can’t because you don’t want to copy, paste, quote and appease the demons of fixed-width formatting?

Some people said patchbin.com was the answer. Yes, it made collaborating a lot easier by making each line a comment thread, and it’s a lot saner than attaching an entire patch – it would make life on IRC, email and chat so much easier. Alas, I can’t be bothered to copy an entire patch into the clipboard and paste it into a new webpage.

Sigh. You know what would be badass – a commandline based uploader for patchbin. But of course there’s no such thing. It’s not like I can just pipe the output of a diff command into another program which would automatically upload it to patchbin. I’d just say “git diff|patchbin” or “cat awesomefeature.patch | patchbin”, and that’d be it. Haha! while that would be overwhelmingly awesome, that does not exist.
[world becomes color]

Oh my! Look what the heavens have dropped into my address bar! It can’t be!

http://anirudhsanjeev.org/projects/PatchBinUploadScript

Oh! Praise the gods of open source for this 50 lines of concentrated awesome!
[/informercial-mode]

(I am bored and need coffee. Can you tell?)

A little sneak preview of my latest project.

While talking over chai with Ramkumar, I thought aloud that it might be a neat idea if I could start a code review by just pasting a patch in something like pastebin and get a code review functionality like Google’s Mondrian or Reviewboard. I should be able to paste a patch like in Pastebin and see a visual diff and also be able to send it to mailing lists where people can make comments. I was looking to write a small app to brush up on my django skills and to practice deployment on a production server and this seemed like an ideal opportunity.

The project was a little more complex than the original one-weekend timeframe I anticipated, but I’m happy with the way things have come out.

Here’s a sneak preview of the near-complete app. I’m just fine-tuning the diff parsing algorithm and need to purchase VPS hosting and deploy the app, and hope to do that by tuesday.

Here are some screenshots: 1. Pasting a new patch:

1. The default diff view:

1. Creating a comment

1. Replying to a comment (you can reply on either side):

Hopefully this will make collaborating on patches a lot more I was using this patch from the linux kernel patchwork site for display here. The backend is completely open-source and is written in django and will be hosted on prgmr or linode.