For those who had planned to go to Berlin especially to catch the Openwengo workshop on Thursday, I am sorry to let you know that I will be in Paris for some important meetings, and won’t be attending LinuxTag this year.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be hitting the road again.I’m eager to meet up with Openwengo and GNOME people when travelling – drop me a line if you’re available.
So there we have it. Aside from that, the company has organised a “retreat” for a few days in the South of France (oh, the pain) and I’ll be going up to Paris every week, as I have been for the last 6 months.
Ho hum.
Andy Oram from O’Reilly and Associates (a very nice guy over email, and a man I would like to have a pint with one day if our paths ever cross) wrote an article on O’Reilly Radar about the problems he has with the desktop in general, and free software desktops in particular.
I’d rather have lean visual effects with minimal distractions (which can look very attractive) and let desktop developers focus on getting programs to be more open to each other and work together more tightly. I’m getting tired of moving between one silo of an application to another, a division I’m finding increasingly arbitrary.
In brief, Andy wants to have a set of pluggable components, each doing one thing well, which get brought together for a seamless user experience where that makes sense. I agree, but as Federico points out:
To turn a personal tool into an application robust enough for other people to use takes three times as much work as developing the personal tool. This includes polishing, documentation, and debugging.
To turn an application into a library (which Brooks calls a “programming system product”) so it can be used in the way I’ve asked as a component also requires three times as much work as developing the application.
Andy talked to myself, Federico, Lubos Lunak from KDE and others on the nature of the desktop, and what was going on right now to address that. All in all a little utopian and perhaps a bit simplistic, but a good read nonetheless.
It’s been long, it’s been painful, and it’s been one of those projects where I’ve been saying for weeks that we’ll be releasing very soon now, but it’s here!
The WengoPhone 2.1.0 represents a big step forward from the 2.0 release for a couple of reasons – not least is that it is stable and usable on Linux. We’ve added some major features too – secure calls with sRTP when the SIP platform supports it (which is most of the time), interoperability work to make it easier to configure accounts with SIP providers other than Wengo, a heap of usability fixes, and some nice work mby translators at LaunchPad which got us 100% translations in 13 languages – not too shabby.
Binaries are available at the OpenWengo website and source files and contrib binaries are available (or soon will be) at the developer’s community site.
