Gnome contacts, Empathy and communication

So, Gnome 3.2 is going to include a new application: Gnome contacts. This is good news indeed and the application looks good as well. I guess this means that Evolution will be able to use (at least eventually) Gnome contacts instead of its own address book. Secretly I hope for a future with a simplified Evolution, quite possibly split into several different applications, but hush, please don’t tell anybody.

Now, I’ve been thinking about something. If we store our contacts in Gnome contacts (well, actually in Evolution Data Server, but contacts is its front-end), will we be able to also use this instead of Empathy’s buddy list? I’d like to not have to maintain two different lists of contacts, if possible. Notice that I don’t have anything against Empathy, just that I feel that the buddy list part of Empathy would no longer be necessary with an application that provides a contacts list.

I remember some time ago there was a lot of talk of a people brower. When I first heard of this I remember visualizing something like a file manager, but with people and groups instead of files and folders. A photo, a name and the obligatory context menu. In my dreams, I remember being able to drag and drop documents onto a contact and have that document magically delivered to that person without me knowing or even needing to worry about how it happened. That UI that I saw in my dreams may have had its flaws, but I think there was quite a lot of interesting discussion going on at the time, and I’m not sure what happened to the ideas.

Most of the time, I really could care less what underlying protocols I use to communicate with my friends. If I want to chat, just let me know that the person is online and initiate a chat. Who cares whether we are using XMPP, Yahoo, or anything else? If I don’t like Yahoo, then I don’t sign up for an account on Yahoo. Problem solved, I will never communicate using Yahoo’s protocol.

If I want to send a document to somebody, couldn’t it be as simple as just dropping the document on an entry in an address book application? Couldn’t some service be in charge of finding out the best path? “Is the person on the local network and has a samba share that I can access?” No. “Is the person online using any protocol that supports file transfers?” No. “Okay, then I’ll just attach it to a plain ‘ol email and send it off!”

I might want to discuss with several people at once. Instead of me having to waste time trying to find a protocol that supports multi-user chats (or chat rooms, or whatever you want to call it) that every single person that I want to include in the conference happens to use, isn’t this typically the type of thing that software should handle far better? Find it for me, and let me concentrate on the discussion instead.

I’m sure I just felt somebody think “I see, you want to dumb down Gnome even more!” Well, yes maybe. It could be that my life is become more complex in many different ways, so I want a Gnome that takes more decisions for me, giving me more time to worry about more important things. It could equally well be that I’m growing older, and finding it more and more difficult to keep a hundred  things in my head at once. It could also be that I’m actually growing dumber and therefor need a Gnome the degrades together with me, although I hope that is not the case, because I was probably pretty dumb to begin with (I have no memories of Einstein moments during my childhood). Seriously, however, I don’t feel that simplifying the lives of its users necessarily means dumbing down Gnome.

Passionate Mandarin

Over the last few days, I’ve become aware of something. As I’m becoming more and more familiar with the syntax of Mandarin and my vocabulary is steadily increasing, I’ve noticed that my Chinese sounds horrible! No, it’s not the tones, I think I can manage fairly well with them by now. It’s something else. I sound like a news reporter (of the classic kind, the ones who delivered news of a massacre without even blinking an eye).

My Mandarin sounds stale, there is no passion whatsoever. I tried recording myself, and when I hear myself saying “I am so happy to see you”, I don’t sound particularly happy at all. I might have said “I hate you”, but I sounded indifferent. And what happens when I try to sprinkle in a little bit of passion onto the words? You got it, the tones go out the window.

The best remedy is to hear how the language is spoken by the Chinese themselves, since they are able to express feelings in a natural way, without having to think about it, as I am doing. Now I’m watching soap operas, chat shows, cartoons, you name it. So far, it seems to me as the tone of the word that is to be emphasized gets slightly exaggerated, perhaps slightly elongated. But I could be wrong.

But if I’m not wrong, if the tone really does get exaggerated, then I run into a new problem: as I am preparing to emphasize a particular word, I lose the tones of the surrounding words. Challenging, to say the least. Probably more so, because I’m trying to achieve this consciously, whereas a natural speaker emphasizes words without really thinking about it.

 

My language learning wish-list

Hey Innovative Language Learning, thanks for the six new languages. I’m especially happy about the addition of Hindi, but Hebrew turned out a pleasant surprise. I’ve never really thought about learning Hebrew before, but listening to a few episodes quickly changed my mind. Hungarian is a challenge, but I’m not giving up. Dutch is another language I had never thought about learning, but which I’m beginning to enjoy.

Now, since I’ve given you all this praise, maybe you would care to listen to a few humble requests from a simple language learner. It really pleases me that you are giving space to “less popular” languages as well. I have a few languages that are on my learning list, and would like you to consider them for the future.

First of all, Maltese. Languages that are spoken at junction points between different cultures have always interested me, since they tend to be heavily influenced by several surrounding languages. Maltese is no exception, with influences from Semitic as well as Latin (or Romance) languages, as you can read here.

Speaking of Latin languages, wouldn’t Latin itself be a good idea? Dead, I hear you say? Dead? I think not. You can listen to the news in Latin and if you get tired of facebook or Google+, you could try another social network. And even if it were dead, it is a part of our history, especially for those of us who come from the part of the world that speaks a language derived (at least in part) from Latin.

Another language that is rich in history is Turkish. I am sure that you are already getting a lot of requests about this extremely interesting language. I’d like to add my name to that list: +1 for Turkish.

The next is not a language or even a language group, but the languages from a whole continent. What about African languages? Isn’t it time that Africa, African culture and languages gets properly integrated into the world? I say yes. Actually, it already is happening, since there are translations being done of several open source applications into various African languages.

The obvious African language candidates are big ones like Swahili and Hausa, but there are so many interesting languages spoken on this content. I have a personal favorite in Ga, which is a language spoken in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. Ga is what you might want to call an endangered language because it has relatively few speakers and the number is in decline. However, Ga (as every other languages), is a part of our shared human tradition, and we should not let it disappear. With every language that dies, a piece of humanity dies along with it.

Staying on the topic of neglected languages, what about the languages of the (Native American) Indians? Since childhood the mere word “Cherokee” has fascinated me, and I think the Cherokee language would be a nice candidate.

Seeing that Swedish has been added to your list of language learning sites, there are two other Nordic languages I was wondering if you could possibly consider: Icelandic and Finnish. Both seem to be near-impossible to learn. But both interest me, nonetheless. By the way, is it true that Finnish is related to Hungarian?

This is getting long, I know, but let me just end of with one other language I’m interested in: Anglo-Saxon. English is a really interesting language because of it’s history and Anglo-Saxon is a part of that history. I think it would be really neat if you guys would one day offer anglosaxonpod101.com!

Well, I better stop short here. I haven’t even had a chance to touch on so many other languages I’d love to learn, such as Irish (or Irish Gaelic), classical Greek, Yiddish, Ainu, Persian and others. I know my list is long, and I obviously know that I can’t have all of the above (and even if you were to provide them, I don’t know where I’ll be able to find the time to learn them all), but I’d be most grateful if at some point, even in the distant future, you would take at least one or two of them into consideration.

Weather information in Gnome 3.2 and beyond

One of those little cute (but mostly useless) features in Gnome 2 was the weather applet. When Gnome 3 came out, weather reporting was gone. However, it didn’t take long for an extension to be written to give us back this nice little feature. It may even be that this will be officially included in Gnome 3.2.

I was thinking, wouldn’t it be even nicer if, instead of just showing the current weather conditions, Gnome could attach extra information to appointment reminders? For example, let’s say that you have a scheduled (out of office) appointment at 15:00, and that the weather prediction says that it will rain in the afternoon. You could then get a reminder like this

You have a meeting with Mr. Rossi at 15:00 at Bar Such-and-Such. Seeing that it is going to rain, you might want to bring an umbrella.

This got me thinking a bit further. Apart from weather information, there could be other services providing other information that could be (possibly) useful. With a TomTom service and a traffic information service, you might be able to get a message like the following:

You have a flight to catch at 13:30. The journey from here to the airport should normally take 1 hour, but seeing that traffic is really heavy today, you may have to add an hour. To be on the safe side, it is best that you leave in 15 minutes.

I tried to make a simple mockup. I absolutely suck at Inkscape, but I hope you get the idea still. This reminder also gives you the option to act based on the extra information that is provided based on the weather outside.

My question is, would anybody else find this a useful feature? Would it be worth collection weather information, traffic information and any other type of information that is available and use it to give advice or warnings in evolution reminders?