During the last months I have mostly been busy with university. Unfortunately things tend to take a bit longer than expected… But now, having only only one exam left, I took the chance to get up to speed with the latest GNOME, Linux and FOSS development.

The general “theme” for GNOME 2.26 seems to be getting rid of legacy dependencies like libgnome(ui) everywhere, which is very nice. Also, there’s a lot of small-but-welcome improvements here and there. Finally PulseAudio will be properly integrated into the desktop (if the remaining bugs can be fixed before the final release, it will rock). Brasero is a 1st class GNOME app now: the team has done some impressive work, just look at the level of integration they accomplished during the last development cycle!

While WebKit/GTK again didn’t make it into GNOME 2.26, the progress still seems to be huge and it should really “be there” for release+1. Even without it, Epiphany got some really nice improvements (woohoo bar!).

In other news, the coming Thunderbird will follow Firefox and provide a nice native look. I really hope the motivation to draw all the needed icons will be high in the weeks to come…

I’m also pleased to hear that OpenOffice is finally starting a GUI revamp, even if this effort will take quite some time: every journey starts with a first step.

Following GNOME development since around 1999, I moved to RedHat Linux and later to Ubuntu. It took me a while to get involved, but I slowly started contributing and last year I was given SVN commit rights after writing some patches for Evolution and Brasero.

Later that year, much of my attention was caught by Firefox 3. After Mozilla had shown interest in better GNOME integration, I spent a lot of time filing bugs, prototyping stuff and bothering the likes of Andreas Nilsson, Jakub Steiner, Lapo Calamandrei and Kalle Persson to do the new icons. Sorry guys.

At this point I want to take the opportunity to thank all the people who have spent countless hours over the last years to improve GNOME, Linux and Free Software in general!

My personal todo for the month to come:

• continue work to improve the looks of Evolution and Seahorse for 2.24
• finish my “integrate even better into GNOME”-addon theme for Firefox
• if time permits, help with this

I’m still not addicted to blogging in any way, so don’t expect too much from me in the future. I mostly did this to satisfy some individuals (”You should really get a blog, dude!”). Plus, I had the feeling that I should at least *try* it before graduating from university.