December 19th, 2008 |
Telepathy, Empathy and collaboration
The idea of collaboration as implemented by Sugar Labs in the XOs is something truly fascinating. The direction is definitely to incorporate desktop wide collaboration in all future operating systems. I read a recent article in Wired that actually spoke about the future direction of Microsoft windows being this type of unified integration in their OS. They have started on this, but it probably won't show for a good number of years. On linux we have it a lot of it now! and its improving all the time. The service responsible for this is called Telepathy, and is at the heart of not only Sugar, but Gnome and Kde now too. Because of this standardization of a xmpp communication protocol across the entire desktop, instead of having to build a new comms protocol every time for every application, it is making it very easy for application developers to add collaborative functionality to their apps.
This is done through tubes. Tubes are a way for the server to offer a socket to a messenger contact, the remote contact accepts the socket and they can begin to write/read data on it. the big advantage is that with tubes, even if the connections are NATed on both sides, the apps can still share data.
What follows is an experiment in setting up a collaborative environment under Gnome. A lot of the collaborative stuff is really quite alpha/beta still, so this is just an exercise in setting it up for research purposes.
First up we have the telepathy layer and common apps that run with it. We will be installing Empathy for chat, video, audio and sending files. This fairly newcomer is quickly becoming the de facto standard chat client due to its wide support for other protocols and deep integration of telepathy into itself and the desktop, as well as tube support. It will most likely replace pidgin as the standard chat client in Ubuntu starting with Jaunty. Here's a screenshot with a variety of plugins installed and a custom theme:
I have been running it for a good week now, and it seems very stable, albeit requires installation from the Telepathy PPA to give it the latest features.
Add the the telepathy intrepid ibex PPA and install empathy:
sudo echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu intrepid main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list /dev/null sudo echo "deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/telepathy/ubuntu intrepid main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list /dev/null sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install empathy telepathy-idle
If you had pidgin before, empathy will automatically import all your accounts into it upon first start up. You can then remove it afterward as there is no point in having 2 apps that do the same thing. If you plan to use facebook messaging, you'll have to patch haze.manager and add a facebook-im profile. Also note I did this already having the facebook plugin installed for pidgin, so ymmv:
wget https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=20810 mv attachment.cgi?id=20810 ~/.local/share/telepathy/managers/haze.manager wget https://bugs.freedesktop.org/attachment.cgi?id=20811 mv attachment.cgi?id=20811 ~/.local/share/mission-control/profiles/facebookim-haze.profile
One thing that is currently sort of missing from empathy is file transfer, which is only possible over Salut. The good thing is, that making a Salut connection is incredibly simple, and requires no server as it works directly over avahi. This is the same protocol used by Ichat.
The really interesting stuff, though, happens when you set up an ejabberd server which allows for collaboration to happen across a variety of applications in a variety of ways. To set up ejabberd, take a look at a previous article I wrote, and follow the ejabberd parts:
http://www.nubae.com/sugar-on-ltsp-ubuntu-intrepid-ibex
Once ejabberd is setup, you can add accounts to be used on your local network via the web interface by browsing to: localhost:5280 and clicking on users to add them. You can then use those details to connect to a jabber server via empathy. Other plugins for empathy are being worked on and include things like sharing webpages to contacts and sharing contact details from calendars. The future looks bright, but there are already some applications that work well with telepathy and collaboration in various forms.
Inkscape is a vector based imaging application that allows for collaboration via its messageboard facility. It's easy to install:
sudo apt-get install inkscape
It is currently a way to send files to and from other jabber apps, as well as chatting, but it will certainly grow to incorporate other collaborative functions. Here's a screenshot of it in action:
The other big app to do collaboration is Abiword, and it allows multiple users to edit a document in real time, each writing their little bit and collaboratively changing areas. The collaboration for Abi Word is done either through the standard ejabberd manner, or via a direct tcp connection. This works not only across computers and networks, but across operating systems too! You can collaborate with windows users just as easily as with Linux users and apple users. Install it:
sudo apt-get install abiword
Here is a screenshot:
A well known app amongst developers, Gobby allows for users to create sessions and then join them, and work on documents together. It is highly useful for hackfests and gatherings, and is used by the Ubuntu devs when they are at such gatherings. It can show a list of documents, users, and then the ability to work on those. Right now, Gobby is avahi based, with plans to support xmpp/empathy in the future.
sudo apt-get install gobby
To get an idea of where this is all going, I looked at a couple of other apps, which are not quite finished yet, but certainly give food for thought. One was Jokosher, which intends to allow collaboration through audio, allowing instruments across the network, voice over ip interviews, and all of this streaming in real time.
The Rythmbox music program has many advanced features, one of which is showing the status in your im according to the music playing. It also allows for sharing of music across the network, with password protection if needed.
Finally there are various games like tictactube and gtetrinet which create tubes to share sessions between each other, and I imagine this trend will multiply across gnome games, allowing for collaborative gaming experiences.
