GUADEC Highlights

I learnt that Lapo is a real-life human being, and not a robot.

Meeting awesome new contributors.

Hanging out with old friends.

Matthias’s slides – who needs presentation software, when you can write a GTK+ app to do the job?

All the keynotes, especially Matthew Garrett’s.

Getting to meet Timm Bäder, who’s behind the awesome Corebird. I even got around to sending him some patches.

GNOME’s new privacy team.

Jan’s talk on design in ownCloud was great, as usual.

The lightning talks were a lot of fun this year.

Jim Hall.

Working on the design of Clocks with Lasse.

The picnic.

Font hilarity.

Christian’s plans for Builder.

Lots of enthusiasm around application sandboxing.

Great stuff from Benjamin on GTK+ CSS. There was a small group of us designers applauding from the back.

Le Snooker.

Working on the new Weather design with Giovanni.

Arnel gave me lovely dried mangos.

Finally, someone blew the whistle on The Swedish Conspiracy.

GNOME.Asia 2014

I just got back from a great trip to Beijing, for GNOME.Asia 2014. This was my fourth GNOME.Asia, and I’ve been to every event since 2011 in Bangalore, where I participated in the GNOME 3.0 hackfest. It was great to meet up with the GNOME.Asia crew once again. They’re a fantastic bunch, and it’s always a pleasure to meet friends from Asia. Photos from the event can be found on Flickr.

This year’s GNOME.Asia was co-hosted with FUDCon APAC. Combining the conference with another event worked really well, in my opinion, and helped to boost participation and share the organisation workload. This could be an effective formula for future events.

On the Saturday I gave a talk about sandboxed applications for GNOME. This is something I’ve been working on recently (I’ll blog about it soon, I hope), and I think it’s an important topic, so it was good to get the word out. In general, I thought that the talk went pretty well, and it was a good opportunity to present our plans to Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers.

Highlights from the conference included Lennart’s keynote on systemd and David King’s talk on GNOME 3 application development. We ended the conference with a really nice discussion about the GNOME Foundation. It was great to see so much interest in how GNOME operates.

Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me to attend this event. I’d also really like to thank the conference sponsors.

LGM 2014

I have just returned home from this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting, which was held in Leipzig, Germany. As always, it was a great event, which is somewhat unique in bringing together art and design practitioners with programmers and engineers.

LGM is a good opportunity to meet with friends in other projects, especially graphics applications. I was really happy to be able to spend time with members of the GIMP and Inkscape projects, and hope that this will lead to closer ties and working relationships in the future.

GNOME and Libre Graphics have a lot in common. GNOME design uses free tools developed by the Libre Graphics community, and we practice open design in the way that many of those at LGM also do. I think that GNOME also helps to bring people into the Libre Graphics community, and it was nice to see a good contingent of people from GNOME at LGM this year. This is something that Jakub and I talked about in our presentation on the last conference day.

The Libre Graphics community is creative and passionate, and I always feel refreshed after LGM. Big thanks to the organisers for putting on another great conference.