Interview: Paul Cooper, Moblin Apps and UI Engineering Manager

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on October 27, 2009 at 8:37 am

Paul Cooper has worked as a developer and advocate for open source software for over 10 years. Currently he manages the Moblin Netbook UX Engineering team, part of the Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

Prior to their acquisition by Intel, Paul was the Business Development Manager at OpenedHand. In 2003 Paul and former colleague Scott Thompson founded OpenAdvantage at the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University). OpenAdvantage was the first and only independently-funded vendor-neutral Open Source solutions centre in the UK which helped over 250 local business take advantage of Open Source solutions. Previously he has worked as a web developer, programmer, database administrator, systems administrator, IT gofer, administration assistant, bouncer, box maker, sports coach, bicycle mechanic, musician, and paper boy.

Paul lives in Birmingham with his wife Jude, daughter Ileana, son Timon and 3 demanding cats.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OTC)?

Paul: My approach to things has always been to find a bunch of smart people taking on interesting challenges and somehow find a way to tag along. And that's what OTC is; a (big) bunch of very smart people tackling a lot of very interesting challenges. Plus me tagging along trying not to look too stupid and make some small contribution :-)

Dawn: What are some examples of how your team has improved the user experience for Moblin?

Paul: We do a lot of things, and I'm bound to get in trouble by forgetting someone's very important work :-) But broadly our work is focused around three things: the UX shell, the Media player, and the Browser.

The UX shell consists of the zones, the toolbar, and the various panels: myzone, status, people, internet, media, applications, zone switcher, and system panels: bluetooth, power, volume, and network.

The whole UX is built on top of our UI library, Clutter, which allows us to draw upon the expressive power of Intel Graphics Technology in a netbook (and in the future other devices). In addition to the base elements in Clutter we've created a set of UI elements, called NBTK, that allow us to build our specific UI for netbooks.

There are many improvements across the board from 2.0 to the upcoming 2.1. If I were to highlight a few:

  • UI now scales to any screen size above the standard netbook resolution of 1024x600/576 - this means your netbook plays nicely with external monitors and can also be used on the growing number of Atom based nettop devices.
  • Streamlined the zones experience for faster applications startup and zone switching
  • New bluetooth panel for pairing and managing BT devices
  • Support for 3G connections
  • Many improvements in the browser: windowless plugin support and other plugin improvements, expanded right click menu, keyboard shortcuts, find in page, many small visual design tweaks, and many, many bug fixes.
  • Media player: In 2.0 we tried to abstract over audio, video, and images and treated the same in terms of interactions and the playlist interaction. In 2.1 we tried to keep the same approach of the media player while streamlining a custom view for each media type to make it more specific.
  • We have an online catalog of applications at the Moblin Garage and a client app called Moblin App Installer, which allows you to view and search the catalog and install or uninstall applications.

Dawn: Can you tell us a little more about your work with GNOME Mobile?

Paul: Really, I don't do a great deal - I do my best to represent the project at conferences and within Intel. But, like any open source project, the work happens in the trenches with engineers from various mobile and embedded companies working on the various GNOME components as well as their own GNOME Mobile based systems (for example: Intel with Moblin, Nokia with Maemo, Vernier with the Labquest, etc).

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working on Moblin?

Paul: Well apart from hanging out with my wife and kids, which is always fun, I volunteer my spare time at my local University coaching American Football. I'm the Offensive Coordinator of the University of Birmingham Lions, and we are the defending National Champions. Our first game of this season is on November 6th, so with that and the upcoming 2.1 release I'm going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks!

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Comments (1)

October 27, 2009 6:59 PM PDT


lin qaing		 Really, I don't do a great deal - I do my best to represent the project at conferences and within Intel. But, like any open source project, the work happens in the trenches with engineers from various mobile and embedded companies working on the various GNOME components as well as their own GNOME Mobile based systems (for example: Intel with Moblin, Nokia with Maemo, Vernier with the Labquest, etc).

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