Try it!

I’m proud of being part of a great community of people who is able to accomplish such a big amount of work and have this great libre desktop ready to go.

I’m just a user, fan, I used to do some translations and I do collaborate now with some bugs and patches to a few projects, nothing like a lot of good friends here who, for me, are real heros. It’s amazing the work some people is able to do. Hat off to them!

As a proof of that work you can see the weekly commit digest and see how more than 200 hackers make more than 2000 commits (sometimes even more than 3000) per week to get ready this awesome project.

I know there are some fears from people using GNOME 2, but a lot of those fears are just myths, so people like me that work at downstream distributions for specific set of users and big deployment can be relaxed.

I just want to save some words of this humble post to some people I’ve been working with sometimes. People I know that have been working really, really hard to make this new GNOME 3 world more accessible to everyone, the GNOME a11y Team. They had too much things against them, but they are really hard workers.

Special kudos for two big friends and a11y hackers: Joanmarie and Ale

Muy buenas

Para quienes no lo sepan, Orca es el proyecto libre principal en torno a las tecnologías de accesibilidad en el escritorio. Últimamente se está haciendo un gran esfuerzo por mejorar este aspecto y se quiere obtener todo el feedback posible.
Como la comunidad hispana es una de las más implicadas en este y otros aspectos del escritorio se acaba de abrir una lista en español para que puedan participar más activamente dando experiencias de usuario. A continuación les copio el anuncio oficial para que tengan la información y la difundan en los círculos que crean conveniente.

Muchísimas gracias

Nueva lista de correo de Orca en español

Estamos encantados de anunciar la creación de la lista orca-es-list, una lista de correo oficial de GNOME para los usuarios hispanohablantes del revisor de pantalla Orca.

Facilitar la participación a usuarios no-angloparlantes con la comunidad de Orca ha sido durante mucho tiempo uno de los objetivos, no conseguidos hasta la fecha, del equipo de desarrollo de Orca.
Ahora, gracias al apoyo del Consorcio Fernando de los Ríos, la participación continuada de los desarrolladores de Emergya, y la voluntad de usuarios hispanohablantes de Orca de contribuir con su tiempo y conocimiento, el equipo de desarrollo de Orca está en posición de mantener dicha lista de correo.

Para suscribirse basta con rellenar el siguiente formulario:
https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/orca-es-list

Estamos muy agradecidos a todos los que han hecho posible esta nueva lista de correo, incluyendo a GNOME por facilitar la infraestructura de hosting. ¡Esperamos verte por la orca-es-list!

El anuncio en inglés en
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2011-February/msg00012.html

–El equipo de desarrollo de Orca

NOTA: El anuncio original de esta lista, aparte de en la lista en inglés de Orca ha sido en este post de uno Alejandro Leiva, uno de los mantenedores del proyecto.

I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog but I’ve been spending my time helping the awesome GNOME a11y team with is making big progress and a huge effort to keep the project alive and healthy.

I’m looking forward to meet all the enthusiastic a11y developer than are going to come to Seville the next week

Well, and of course, to Joanmarie that comes before and is being so patient (sometimes ) with me  ;-)

My apologies for any mistake on the translation process. If there are any, they are for sure mine, not his. Well, actually my friend Rober (aka “the guy who fix my bad English” ) was fixing some mistakes already

The post:

As part of the Guadalinfo Accessible project Juanje Ojeda , Lorenzo Gil (from Yaco) and myself, were invited by Stormy Peters and Paul Cutler to the Gnome 3.0 Marketing Hackfest Zaragoza , an event organized by the Gnome Foundation, ASOLIF, the CESLA and the Governments of Aragon and Zaragoza, where was the place where the plans for the Gnome 3.0 launch: communication, promotional videos, etc. were going to be cooked.

Our objective was clear: to open ways of collaboration with the Gnome Foundation and present our intentions to develop projects, in terms of accessibility for the Gnome desktop. The Consorcio Fernando de los Rios is currently bidding in Andalusia: Improvements, bugfixes and to imitate the JAWS’s behaviors on Orca; image acquisition, improved recognition and export formats on OCRFeeder and reading the text with Orca from PDFs on Evince .

In the event was also present Dani Baeyens from Warp, who will also work in Gnome accessibility projects under the contract of Fernando de los Rios Consortium, improving Caribou (Gok replacement) and functional integrity of predictive text, Presage .

When we arrived at the event, the table of participants were discussing concrete actions on the initiative of Ambassadors Gnome, but we soon could start to present the developments that we, Yaco and Emergya, were involved. In a round shift Lorenzo, Juanje and I told the massive use of Gnome is promoted from the local government in various ICT initiatives: Guadalinex , Education , Guadalinfo and the the Network of Libraries , which justifies a special effort to promote and address the problems of assistive technologies and public services are fully accessible to all citizens.

Speaking about Guadalinfo, we presented the project as a true laboratory of accessibility, because apart from software improvements, a big purchase of assistance devices for visual, cognitive and motor disabilities is being done. Stormy Peters at this time we said if we had any picture, I remembered that Pedro Marín, from the Guadalinfo center of “Peligros” (Granada) had shared on Facebook a few and these were projected in the room:

Attendees were surprised by the examples of use of assistive technology devices with the Gnome accesibility assistances and asked us to hang material on the Gnome 3.0 website: photos or videos of real people using Gnome and devices in the Guadalinfo centers. We had a first task.

At lunch time, we dived into the issue with Vincent Untz and Licio Fonseca who advised us on ways of collaborating with the community to gain acceptance of our developments.

In the afternoon Paul and Stormy sat down with us to see what we could do –the companies- for Gnome and viceversa. We insisted on that the local government has a real interest in supporting accessibility projects, for its projects and that these developments, are given back to the community. If we get visibility and acknowledgement for these initiatives in the community, we are sure more projects will come. We trust in Gnome as a Government-friendly community and that’s how they want to be received aswell. Paul asked us to work directly with the developers of the applications through the traditional communication ways that are usually used in the community: mailing list, irc, etc..

And that way we started, Lorenzo made public its intentions to improve Evince and Alejandro Leiva, from Emergya, ours . The reception is being good, and the community is reporting feedback. This starts up!

UPDATED (10/05/18): Fixed the Lorenzo’s name at the first paragraph and the urls, that were all wrong.

But two weeks ago some friends and me were at the GNOME Marketing Hackfest at Zaragoza to talk with some people from the GNOME Foundation about accessibility and GNOME. The reason is something I’ve already told in others posts, that a few Spanish companies are going to collaborate between us and with GNOME a11y projects to bring as improvements as we can to our loved desktop.

My friend and colleague Félix Ontañón (aka fontanon), who is leading the part of the project that is being doing by my company has written a very good summary (the original in Spanish) of the meeting.

This project really excite me because GNOME was the first FLOSS project I met about 9 years ago… I was more with the GNOME Hispano team and project which were using GNOME such a custom distros, but GNOME has been always for me a reference as community big project. Mostly because the human factor. It’s like a big family

For this reason and because a11y is a very important issue which need so much effort, but usually it doesn’t have enough resources, I’m very excited to be able to contribute directly to the project I love the most

From my company we try to contribute to FLOSS community but the most of the times we don’t have the rights to publish the code we do, so it is like a dream to have a client who specifically ask us to work directly with upstream and to work as the community does. We hope to have this kind of opportunity more often. We really do!

If you have any advise about, just tell me, please. We are very open to collaborations and to any opportunity of write free code and knowledge.

Stay tunned because we will tell you all the progress we make and more good stuff

I didn’t expect to have so many people here. The meeting was mostly improvised and with just few weeks of preparation, but we had hackers from many different places of Spain. I think the session with more people had over 30 attenders.

The people didn’t fit on the room so they were looking through the windows. It was cool

People didn't fit inside the room

We even had Rodrigo Moya teaching us about CouchDB and DesktopCouch from another region of Spain using an open tool for video/audio meetings. Rodrigo was great

There was more good sessions, but for me was especially interesting the explanation about how the new XInput2 and GTK+ works with multi-touch interfaces made by Carlos Garnacho. Another session especially instructive for me was the one about GObject Instrospection and Gjs by Lorenzo Gil (lgs).

I knew about GObject Instrospection, but I didn’t know it was so easy to add to the current libraries and all the adventages we all have with that. Really good stuff….

But we also have a meeting about how some companies from here (Emergya, Yaco, Onirica and Warp by now) are going to approach some projects about to improve the a11y on GNOME. The projects were asked by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society and we all want to be coordinated with upstream maintainers and GNOME goals, so it could be really useful.

This sesion was interesting and we are now in the same page to talk this week with the GNOME Foundation people at the Zaragoza Marketing Hackfest. I think these projects and the collaboration is being proposed is going to be really good for everybody: GNOME, our client and first of all, the users.

Let’s see

Here will be a bunch of Spanish hackers talking about GNOME technologies and having fun.

The program is ready so we will talking about:

• DesktopCouch by Rodrigo Moya
• Git for GNOME developers by Carlos García (Kal)
• Multi-touch support in GNOME by Carlos Garnacho
• Gjs for begginers by Lorenzo Gil (lgs)

But we will be also talking about a11y on GNOME and how to coordinate the efforts we (Yaco and Emergya) are doing with some projects that are being paid by the Consortium Fernando de los Rios for the Knowledge and Information Society with the GNOME a11y developers.

Here’ll be also Dani García (danigm) a friend who was working with us at Emergya and now is working with our friends of Yaco, to show us his project TBO, a GTK+ app for designing and creating comic strips from GNOME. The idea is that he could present the project and the rest of hackers make sugestions so the project will be fully GNOME friendly.

This could be a good help for those who want to start their own project for GNOME and don’t know exactly how do it right.

Well, I hope to see a lot of good hackers and friends there.

See you on friday night for the warm up

I’m the first thinking that the old traditional desktop is that, old. And we need something new.

I like things I see about GNOME Shell and so on, but I’m a geek!

I mean, I do use virtual desktops or spaces, but I like to mess with my system and I always have running my Guake terminal.

I remember when Compiz came up, everyone was so excited with the things it could do. It was so cool, so fancy and that was going to be the right tool to attract normal users to our desktop, because it was a lot of better than Vista…

That was cool, but I don’t really see much people using those effects nowadays… Ok, transparency and smoothness on windows stuff, is used, but no much more.

So now people who are thinking on the next release of their distros for non-very-tech-users (like Guadalinex), are a bit afraid to be forced to use a very new concept, which is cool when you are geek or somebody teach you about it.

To upgrade a few thousand of users to a very new desktop concept is a quite hard challenge… Even having a helpdesk services, online documentation and forums.

I just hope those new concepts be really easy to catch or somebody make any kind of “first use lesson” for them.

Actually, for regular end users I think I prefer something like Litl OS or Chrome OS. That is a change of concept, but into something they already know: the web. And also the mediacenter and web interfaces.

Well, it’s just a personal thought…

Anyways, we’ll see next year… I wish the best for my favourite desktop and their hackers, so let’s have a bit of faith

I’m from Gran Canaria, the place where the event is going to be, so I like to give you some advices and recommendations:

• Sun protection. Here the sun can burn you if you don’t take some protections. Some times seems like it’s not so sunny, but it could be dangerous if you are from a northern area.
• Don’t drink top water. The top water here is supposed to be good enough for human consumption, but the true is that nobody here drink it. We always drink mineral water. And also here was a incident a few month ago about top water’s high levels of boron. That now is normal, but you know…
• Here there is not so many place with vegetarian food but we try to find all kind places for eat nearby the event. You’ll find that info (which will be updated) at the wiki.
• The important phone numbers are also at the wiki. Remember the international code for Spain is +34
• In Gran Canaria (Spain), electricity is provided normally at a voltage of 220 V and 50 Hz. But you’ll probably find adapters at the mall (Centro comercial Las Arenas) just in front the event’s place.
• Here in Gran Canaria we talk Spanish, so you can find useful the list of common words and expressions we have at the wiki. If you already know Spanish, you need have in mind that here we have some different words (eg. Autobus = Guagua).
• The most useful lines of guaguas (buses) for going from or at the auditorium are the lines 47 and 17.
• Taxi is also a good option. Probably you’ll pay 4 € for a normal ride (from the Auditorium to the farthest hotels.
• There will be a infodesk where you’ll find people who can bring you some help. The contact person will be Fabio, but there will be more people there.
• I will be also around there during the weekend, I can’t be sure about the rest of the week. Anyways, if you need touristic/local information or just any info of Canarias or Gran Canaria, find me (Juanje Ojeda) and ask me
• If you have a group of people who want place for lunch of dinner, ask for me at the infodesk, I’ve been talking with some places to try to arrange this king of things.

I just like to add that Gran Canaria is much more than beaches and sun. So try to get into the countryside or to different part of the island. They are so different between them hat people usually get surprised.

I’ll highly recommend to visit Teror, Tejeda, Agaete, Artenara (and the Tamadaba pine forest), Mogán, Agüimes, Santa Lucía and, of course Maspalomas. There are more interesting places, but with those you’ll get the idea

Well, we’ll meet you at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

I had the opportunity of knowing a bit Brussels: the beer, the chocolate, the waffles, the city center… very nice place… errr, but the weather… rains and cold… not really my type.

The FOSDEM itself was amazing. So many people from so different projects (hackers and users).

Kudos for the organization people, they did just great. Huge and great work!

I missed some friends over there but I met new friends and I could talk a lot about the GCDS (Gran Canaria Desktop Summit), which is going to be a very important event. It seems that people from GNOME and KDE are ready for collaborate as much the time over there let us.

I very exciting about the event and all the think are coming with it.

By the way, there are new mail list for the event:

http://mail.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/mailman/listinfo/gcds

Stay tuned!

The other thing I want to write is about my break.  I was in a break of my job for having time for me and some personal stuff. Well, that break is now over

On Monday I come back, but I have some changes. I’m going to work on a six months project, out of the office (actually at the client office) but in a good a nd interesting (at least for me) Spanish free software project.

I’m really exciting about this too, but I’ll wait until I start (on Monday) to talk about the project and what I’m going to do in it.

Well, I’m keep reading, learning and searching some stuff more that on Monday I have to be prepared

See you! Happy hacking!