For the Win
Review:A real page turner. Taking advantage of it being CC, I think I may attempt translating it to spanish (argentinian flavour) |
Review:A real page turner. Taking advantage of it being CC, I think I may attempt translating it to spanish (argentinian flavour) |
Hell yeah! It has been a lot of work but it's out at http://revista.python.org.ar
Some articles:
PyAr, The History
from gc import commonsense - Finish Him!
Painless Concurrency: The multiprocessing Module
Introduction to Unit Testing with Python
Taint Mode in Python
Applied Dynamism
Decorating code (Part 1)
Web2Py for Everybody
It's available in pretty much every format anyone can read, and if your favourite is not there, we will make it for you or may I be smote by the flying spaghetti monster's noodly appendage!
AFAIK there is no other Python magazine being published (feel free to correct me), so it's kind of a big thing for us in PyAr (the Argentina Python community) that we are doing one, and in two languages.
But why stop here? Want it to be available in your language? Contact us at revistapyar@netmanagers.com.ar it may be doable!
And of course, very soon there will be a call for articles for Issue 2, and trust me: that one's going to be epic: this one was just a warmup.
Review:Some things were fun, but it's not my cup of tea. |
Here's what I'm thinking: how hard could it be to make PyQt app deployment absolutely easy? Well, I am guessing: not very hard.
Here's the trick: see what works in the real world, and adopt it.
Question: what has deployed billions of apps and has its users happy? Answer: phones app stores.
Question: how do they work? Answer: well, that's not that short, so let's start explaining.
As I see it, a reasonable app store has the following components:
You can't deploy from the store if you don't know what you are deploying into. If the target platform is shaky, you just can't know how to deploy without user assistance, and we are trying to make this easy for the user, which means that's not acceptable.
So, what's a stable deployment target we can provide?
PyQt (so we can deploy GUIs to all major desktop platforms)
Python standard library
Selected modules
What can be (and should be) bundled with the app?
Pure python modules
Artwork and other resources
What may be bundled:
Python modules written in C/C++, but you then have to redo the app for each platform, and that kinda sucks.
Apps should be able to check if there is a new version of them in the store, to ask for upgrades.
Apps should be added by the deployment platform nicely into the host system's menus, desktop, etc.
Some way to charge for apps. Even for open source apps, you could ask for U$S0.99 if you install them through the store. Optional, of course, and up to the app owner.
Ad platform? There must be a good one for desktop apps somewhere?
A website that downloads a "package" associated with a local deployment application.
A app store app. Install things not via web, but via a desktop application.
I don't expect a functional version of this would take me more than a week working fulltime to implement. Of course then there are all sorts of usability, looks, etc. things to consider.
And... I am going to do something I very rarely do. I am going to ask for money.
As an experiment, I have setup a project at http://www.indiegogo.com/Qt-Shop and set a funding goal of U$S 600.
There you can fund me. I promise that if the project is totally funded, I will deliver. If it isn't, I may deliver anyway. I would prefer to have the money though.
The platform would be released under GPLv2 or later.
Warning: rant ahead.
Yesterday the government of Argentina announced that they are giving way 3 million netbooks to students. They also announced that they are giving them the option of Ubuntu or Windows 7.
There was, of course, the typical reaction from the FLOSS side: why are they giving Windows to the students when Linux is better? It's unfair that the government pays for Windows!
I am here to tell you to grow up and stop being a baby. I am here to tell you to stop treating others like babies.
I think I can do this because I am immune to criticism from the FLOSS crowd: I am a member of that crowd. I have an awesome FLOSS pedigree, I have used nothing but Linux for over 15 years. And I have a thick skin and I don't care much what other people say, in principle, unless they give me good reasons to care. And I am telling you to stop complaining.
I am telling you that if the only reason to use a specific piece of software is because it's cheaper, you are accepting that piece of software sucks.
I want people not to just use Linux, I want them to want to use Linux. I want them to wait anxiously for the next release of Ubuntu or Firefox or whatever.
And the first step towards excellence is wanting to be excellent. If having to pay nothing for Windows or Ubuntu there is a certainty that Windows will win, then Ubuntu freaking sucks and needs to improve. People are not adopting it even if it's free? Then something is wrong, and figuring out what is important.
But even more important than finding the missing piece is knowing a piece is missing. Open source has grown complacent. It's grown self righteous. It's become adolescent, sure of its awesomeness and immortality.
I don't believe in many things, but I do believe in free will. I believe that people are not morons, I believe that if they prefer Windows, it's because it does something better, and I believe that whatever that is (and I don't really know what it may be), it can be found, and can be improved, and can be replaced, and other things can be added, and people will want to use the better product.
And if they don't... well, at least we fought an honest fight, and we did our best, and we (hopefully) had fun in the process, and pushed the envelope, and created nice things, and the users are better off in the end even if our babies are not the chosen ones, because we raised the level of everything.
For example, before Linux, Windows sucked much, much more than it does now, and I think many of those improvements were because of Linux, and I am happy that today Windows users have a OS that doesn't stink.
I want free and open source software to be used because it's awesome, not because it's cheap. Awesome and cheap I can live with. Just cheap? That sucks.
And the constant "they use windows because they don't know better"? That's patronizing and condescending, and very, very annoying. And if it annoys me, who is not the target of the lame condescension, trust me, it annoys the crap out of Windows users.
Grow a spine, get your asses into gear, start making awesome stuff, kick ass with quality. That's why we are here. Not to be the cheapest date in town.