Ready for the awesomeness that is Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week, we have a shiny new Lernid for you all to rock the week with. Lernid is the online learning tool for getting the most out of our learning weeks. It makes connecting a doddle and provides interactive features such as showing slides, web pages and more.

The new 0.6 release has had a tonne of bug fixes and is by far the most stable release yet. It also includes these new features:

• New icon – awesome new icon, and looks smooth as silk in docky too.
• Nick completion – just like a normal IRC client, type in the first few letters of the nickname, hit tab and boom! there is the nick!
• Option for show time in class and chatroom – want to see the times? Simple.
• Possibility for pausing automatic browser updating – don’t like that browser updates? Sorted.
• NickServ authentication – now you can use your nickserv password when connecting.
• Question button – want to ask a question in the right format? Click the Question button and then type in your question. Job done.
• Gwibber support (tweet the ongoing session) – click the Event menu when a session is running and Tweet current session to share your attendance with Twitter/identi.ca/Facebook/FreindFeed etc (only works on Lucid).

Kudos to Michael Budde for taking over the reigns on Lernid as the new maintainer, and for the fantastic little Lernid community for making such a stunning release!

Getting Lernid

It is highly recommended that you download this version of Lernid ready for the event. This is how…

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

You can download Lernid for Karmic from the releases PPA. Just click Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal and cut and paste in these commands.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

Then click Applications -> Internet -> Lernid.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

If you are running Lucid, Lernid is easier to install than ever as it is now available in Universe! Thanks to the awesome Didier Roche for his work today in getting this into the archive!

As such, installing Lernid is as simple as using the Applications -> Ubuntu Software Center or typing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

Then click Applications -> Internet -> Lernid.

I wrote Lernid because I just wanted to JFDI a solution to something that I thought could squeeze a huge amount of extra value out of online learning events. I am proud of where the project stands now, but I think now is the time to move stewardship of the project over to hands with more time and oversight to keep up to date with a growing Lernid development community. With this in mind I am proud to announce that the new leader of the Lernid project is Michael Budde.

Michael has taken a phenomenal amount of initiative with Lernid and has been keeping on top of the many merge requests and bugs while I have been busy cavorting around the Internet with work. I had a call with Michael today to talk through the transition, and you good folks can expect Lernid to bring in a session leader mode, easier question asking features and other awesome features. I am excited to see where Michael takes the project. I am also excited to see how other distributions and projects use Lernid now that it supports user-specified server configurations.

So, folks, please join me in welcoming Michael as the new Lernid Leader and a continued healthy future for our new e-learning tool!

Just in time for Ubuntu Developer Week I have rolled out a new release of Lernid; a simple tool for connecting to our learning events. The new release fixes a bunch of bugs, makes the IRC Chatroom view a native widget (instead of the crusty web view), modularizes Lernid, adds a terminal for making playing with Linux commands simple, adds application indicator support on Lucid and fixes some daylight savings time issues. Thanks to the many contributions to this release from the Lernid team.

Quick screenie:

With a new release of Lernid out and an awesome week of Ubuntu developer learning events ahead, I wanted to explain how you can get all this goodness up and running. It is a doddle…

Step 1: Install Lernid

Installing Lernid is a piece of cake. There are packages available for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Alan Bell did a wonderful screencast showing how to install Lernid. You can see it by clicking here. Please note the screencast shows an older version (0.4) but the steps should be the same for the new Lernid 0.5 release.

Just click Applications->Accessories->Terminal and enter:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

You can now load Lernid from Applications->Internet.

Step 2: Join Ubuntu Developer Week

Joining Ubuntu Developer Week is also deliciously simple:

1. First load Lernid by clicking Applications->Internet->Lernid.
2. When Lernid starts, select Ubuntu Developer Week and enter a nickname and click Connect.

You can then click on Schedule to see the list of events happening and the times (in your local timezone). The sessions will happen in the Classroom pane and you can discuss the session in the Chatroom pane.

NOTE: We have heard of a bug when clicking Edit->Preferences causing Lernid to crash. Right now the workaround is don’t click on preferences.

There we go! Having a rocking week and I look forward to many of you getting your first taste of Lernid.

Many of you are probably curious to see Lernid in action, so tomorrow I will be giving a short presentation (around 20 minutes) to talk about Lernid…using Lernid! I will talk about the project, it’s direction, show off a few features and answer questions.

It will take place at 7pm UTC. To get involved you will need to install and use Lernid to connect. Install it by following these instructions (on Karmic):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

When it is installed just do the following:

1. Click Applications -> Internet -> Lernid to load Lernid.
2. Select ‘Ubuntu Example Week’ from the Event drop-down box and enter a nickname (don’t include spaces in the nickname, this is a known bug).
3. When Lernid loads you will see the session scheduled for tomorrow and what time it is in your local timezone. When it comes to the session time, fire up Lernid: you will see the session happen in the Classroom pane.

I am looking forward to showing you all Lernid tomorrow!

Imagine you are interested in joining the fictional Ubuntu Example Week event. No longer do you need to know what the heck IRC is, figure out what software you need and figure out how to connect and join the right channel. Simply fire up Lernid:

When Lernid starts all you need to do is select the week you wish to participate in and enter a nickname. When you connect you will see all the sessions that are part of the event and the current session will be indicated with an arrow:

In the Classroom pane you can see the main session happening (only the session leader talks here), and in the Chatroom pane you talk with other session participants about the current session.

When the session starts, the session leader can show the first slide by simply typing in [SLIDE 1] and the slide will appear conveniently in the top-right of the Lernid window: this means you can see the slide and the session at the same time. For you session leaders and organizers, all you need to do is save your slides as a PDF (which OpenOffice.org and other office suites can do), put them online somewhere, and add the slides in the Description in the iCal feed that contain the sessions. Lernid will do all the rest in terms of automatically downloading the PDF and displaying the correct slide to Lernid viewers.

At this point Lernid viewers can now not only see the session going on and chat about the session, but can also see the slides triggered by the session leader as they happen. This already provides a far more interactive feel to the sessions.

Now the session leader wants to show all of you lovely Lernid viewers a web page. To do this he/she just types in the URL in their session and Lernid will automatically load it into the built-in browser and show it to you, but still show the main Classroom and Chatroom channels so you are not distracted away:

Now the session leader wants to get back to the slides and triggers the next slide by typing in [SLIDE 2] and Lernid automatically flicks back to the slide view and displays it, again never taking your eyes away from the main Classroom and Chatroom channels:

With these features we can breathe new life into online learning channels that are based on IRC. Lernid now provides a simple means for people to get involved: no more faffing around having to learn what IRC is and how to get connected, and when you are connected via Lernid, you can view rich content with slides, view web pages instantly and easily see the schedule of events, all converted to your local timezone.

So…what’s next? Well, I want to fix a few remaining bugs and then roll out a 0.4 release to my PPA, which I hope to have ready as a nice little Christmas present. The next step is to then remove the hardcoded Ubuntu server configuration which I added for convenience sakes and instead add a preferences dialog where you can select from multiple server configurations. This means that our friends in Fedora, OpenSuSE, Debian and elsewhere can rock their learning events with Lernid too. My plan is to merge these features in, fix any last remaining bugs and then consider Lernid as 1.0, ready in time for Ubuntu Developer Week.

It has been a fun journey, and thanks for all the wonderful contributions, patches and encouragement to and for Lernid. I really hope it helps enliven our rocking learning events!

UPDATE: Check out the new Lernid Website.

This is how it works: imagine you are giving a session at the upcoming UBuntu Developer Week or Ubuntu Open Week. The sessions are scheduled in the iCal feed, and in the Description you can add the following to your session:

[SLIDES: http://www.myaddress.com/slides.pdf]

This PDF file contains slides for your presentation.

When it comes time to run your session, you type in [SESSIONSTART] in the IRC channel and all Lernid clients will go and download the PDF file and display the first slide in a small and convenient, and resizable pane within the interface.

The session leader can then change to the next slide by typing the following in the session:

[SLIDE 2]

This will then change the slide and display it for all Lernid clients. This now means that in tutorial sessions we can display presentations to viewers while the session is going on. This is a huge feature for our learning weeks. Also, don’t forget that we also have functionality built into Lernid to display URLs shown in the channel too in the built-in web browser. This is all helping Lernid to become a solid platform for online training.

This is how it looks:

The feature landed in bazaar today, but it will take a little while for me to eek out some of the bugs. As such, don’t expect it to work flawlessly in the daily builds of Lernid. My aim is to have these bugs squashed by the new year.

Rock and roll!

As such, Quickly and I are friends. Good friends.

What excites me most about Quickly is how it helps opportunistic programmers to be productive and feel accomplished in their work. This in turn leads to huge opportunities around diversity in the application space. My excitement is not just about Quickly as software, but an ethos that is at the heart of Open Source.

To explain more about this, my friends at ZDNet published an article I have just written called Unchaining the opportunistic programmer. Go and check it out.

For extra bonus Quickly content, check out our Shot Of Jaq shot too.

Today I kicked out a new release of Lernid – Lernid 0.3. This release packs in some juicy new features and bug fixes, and we are edging closer to Lernid 1.0 ready for our next major learning event: Ubuntu Developer Week.

This release brings the following new features:

• Refined Interface – the interface has been re-factored to make better use of space and work better on smaller-resolution screens such as netbooks.
• Schedule View – Lernid now has support for real events. Events are specified using an iCal feed: this means that any calendaring application can be used to create and publish events. Events are now displayed in a special schedule view, in chronological order.
• Local Event times – traditionally events in our Ubuntu learning weeks were always shown with the internationally confusing UTC timezone. Now all events are shown in the users local timezone. Goodbye, confusion, it was nice knowing you.
• Notifications – 10 minutes before an event begins Lernid will pop up a nice little notification bubble to remind you that an event is about to start. No more missing those rocking events!
• Improved Browser Feature – Lernid has a built in web browser in which sites relevant to the session can appear. Switching between sites is devilishly simple, and we now have Reload and Stop buttons.
• Automatic Website Loading Triggered By Session Leaders – a useful new feature I added today ready for this release adds a listener for web addresses in the main classroom session. This means that when the session leader mentions a web address, it will automatically show in the browser pane. This offers a first-of-its-kind feature for our learning weeks in which content can be delivered to attendees automatically without them having to do or type anything, right from inside Lernid. Other listening features are planned in future releases.
• Translations Support – we now have translations support fully built into Lernid, with available translations in Arabic, Asturian, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (United Kingdom), Esperanto, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Lojban, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Telugu. Thanks to our awesome translations community for all their hard work!

Thanks to David Planella, Lucian Adrian Grijincu, and Andrew Higginson for contributions to this release.

Also, Lernid is built using the Quickly framework, and if it were not for this awesome tool, I doubt I would have ever started hacking on Lernid. If you have ideas for cool desktop applications and have an affinity with Python, you should give it a whirl. More information about Quickly and links to the always wonderful Didier Roche’s tutorial is here.

Getting Lernid

Lernid is still very much in development. This 0.3 release is still considered a pre-release and not final. This release is considered a more stable release in our scheme of pre-releases though. You can get it from my PPA. Simple issue the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonobacon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

(Right now Lernid 0.3 is still building, so there may be a delay until it is available to you)

This will deliver each new release of Lernid directly to your desktop in Update Manager updates.

If you would like to play with the crack-of-the-day, the always awesome Nathan Handler has set up a daily builds PPA. You can add it with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

Enjoy!

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lernid-devs/lernid-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lernid

When you have run this, a new Lernid package will regularly appear in Update Manager.

As ever, do bear in mind that this is unstable software: it may well crash and burn. More details on the PPA are available on it’s Launchpad page.

In other news, I have re-factored the interface a little to make better use of space in the top portion of the window – we now have a Schedule and a Browser tab:

Also, thanks to David Planella’s awesome patch which fixed the translations not being loaded into Lernid, we are now shipping with an awesome selection of languages. We do need your help to get these translations finished though, and it is as easy as typing translations into a website. Take a look at the languages that need translating and if you need help, take a look at this page.

Finally, my current goal is to get Lernid fixed up ready for an official 0.3 release. To help with this I have been filing bugs targeted at that release. Please do go and test Lernid and file bugs that you find here.

I have added a bunch of new features this week to Lernid:

• Notifications – events that are shown in the event list will now appear in the notification area. A notification bubble will pop up 10 minutes before an event begins to remind you it is starting.
• Multiple Browser Pages – the browser view now has a drop-down box where you can select between different pages. This code is now ready for me to build in support for an URL to trigger a page load in the browser. This means that when you are watching a session and the session leader mentions an URL, the browser view will automatically update with the page. This provides an opportunity for the session leader to deliver content to that view in near real time: this is a first for these kinds of online learning sessions.
• Translations – thanks to a patch from the always awesome David Planella, Lernid now makes use of the growing list of available translations. Lernid in your language: nice!

For the eye-candy lovers, here is how our little baby looks at the moment:

As ever, code, bugs, translations and more are available in the Launchpage project.