Month: August 2013

GUADEC 2013 has been a blast. We talked, we planned and we worked. We met old friends and we made some new ones. We had 42 talks, two sessions of lightning talks, two parties, 15 working sessions, three hackfests, a football match, a city tour, a Creative Commons film night, 3D printing, a hexcopter and an AGM. We made exciting plans for the future. We met new partners.

Thank you to everyone who helped to make this conference so amazing. We’re already counting down to GUADEC 2014.

The final core day of GUADEC began with a keynote by Cathy Malmrose. Cathy is CEO of ZaReason, which sells computers pre-installed with Linux. She talked about the goals of ZaReason: to provide beautiful, high-end computers that can be freely used. ZaReason machines are used by FedEx, NASA’s jet propulsion labs and Stanford’s AI Lab, among many others, and uses local shops for assembly and support.

Cathy spoke passionately about the affinity between ZaReason and GNOME, and her desire for a closer working relationship. She said: “To thrive F/LOSS must be part of the hardware chain. Hardware & software must work together.” For her, GNOME has all the pieces and has produced an incredibly valuable codebase that she wants to support.

Then it was time for talks. Juan Pablo Ugarte presented CSS support in the Glade interface designer. There were cheers when he revealed that he had created his presentation slides – which included animated backgrounds – purely using Glade, which even let him export to PDF. Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias and Joanmarie Diggs also spoke about their work on PDF tagging, which improves formatting and accessibility.

Stef Walter’s “More secure with less ‘security'” provoked an extremely positive reaction. He talked about plans to improve the security of GNOME software while also enhancing the user experience. As Stef talked, the auditorium Twitter wall filled up with comments like “A sudden outbreak of common sense!” and “Stef talks gold”. At the same time, Anish Patil and Mike Fabian gave a talk on their recent predictive input methods, which allows an input method to automatically complete words as the user types. They described how necessary it is to have effective features like this for parts of the world like indea, where there are more than 25 languages.

After lunch, Martin Robinson gave a talk on the work done to integratie WebKit2 into GNOME for version 3.8. This was a major undertaking, and brought new features and enhancements to the platform. Martin and Carlos discussed some of these, and gave advice to application authors on how to best take advantage of them. In the other room, Marta Maria Casetti presented her work to produce guides and tutorials for new programmers working with GNOME technologies. Giving his second talk of the conference, Jeff Fortin Tam presented the latest development work on Pitivi, a GNOME video editor application.

The end of the day – and the final session of the core days – was interns’ lightning talks. A large audience gathered to hear about the many projects that have been undertaken by interns on the Outreach Program for Women and Google Summer of Code. A huge number of topics were covered, including dual screen presentation mode in Evince, a new GNOME avatar picker dialog, work on geolocation support, PitiVi, GCompris, redesigned Date & Time settings, a new Maps application, focus and caret tracking in the screen magnifier feature, a new sound recorder application, a major upgrade to Cantarell (the GNOME font), porting color management to Wayland, folder encryption support in Nautilus, search and selections in the new Music application and an F-Spot faces tool. There was a round of applause when we heard that one of the interns has taken over maintainership of the GNOME Dictionary. We also saw the return of Richard Schwarting’s Foxy mascot.

As the core day came to a close, the conference organizers took to the stage and were given a huge standing ovation for all their work. Many of the conference attendees then embarked on a walking tour of Brno, which gave them a chance to see some more of the city and learn its history.

Photos courtesy of Garrett LeSage.

GUADEC is still going here in Brno. The conference has switched modes from days of presentations to a busy schedule of working sessions. This is the first of our reports on what happened over the weekend, starting with Saturday 3rd August.

As the temperature continued to rise, the conference continued at full force. A drone was seen flying around the venue, and attracted a lot of attention. The Twitter walls in each of the auditoriums also continued to be the subject of much hilarity as people posted their comments during the talks.

Day three’s keynote was a question and answer session with the newly elected GNOME Foundation Board of Directors. We spent an hour talking about the Foundation’s plans for the coming year, and had a productive discussion about how to improve our marketing and public relations efforts. Then we were into talks once again.

First up, Srinivasa Ragavan spoke about Evolution as an email service, while in the other room Emily Gonyer spoke about FLOSS & Education. Srinivasa explained the plan for splitting Evolution into a mail data service which could serve emails to other applications. He also demoed a working email factory as well as a small application using Evolution as a service. Emily Gonyer described her home schooling experiences and talked about how children can learn using computers from an early age. She also talked about the importance of teaching children to use computers creatively and not purely to consume commercial products.

Next, Philip Withnall, spoke about testing GNOME components that use online services. He described his work to enable diagnosis and recording of the interaction between local libraries and servers. At the same time, Jan-Christoph Borchardt gave a presentation about how GNOME and ownCloud can work more closely together. Jan, who is a designer working on ownCloud, spoke about the opportunities for syncing data between GNOME and the cloud. His motto: “Just. Sync. Everything.” He also spoke about the importance of protecting users’ privacy, which is a goal shared by GNOME.

After lunch, Bruno Cardoso Lopes introduced LLVM and Clang. GNOME indirectly uses LLVM through the llvmpipe software rendering engine, and the Gedit Code Assistance Plugin also uses Clang to assist coders with helpful messages and compilation hints. Bruno explained several beneficial and potential uses of LLVM and Clang by GNOME, for example the LLVM LTO and interprocedural optimizations, the Clang static analyser, and the LLVM ARM backend.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya gave a report on the progress of our fantastically successful Outreach Program for Women, which is now offering internships for women with 16 different organizations. Aleksander Morgado and Carlos Garnacho explain the basics of Tracker and gave practical SPARQL examples and tips about how to use the database. At the same time, Ekaterina Gerasimove gave the annual “Documentation State of the Union Talk”: a summary of the last year’s documentation work, and the team’s plans for the future. Zeeshan talked about GNOME’s new geolocation framework, called geoclue2, as well as the new GNOME Maps application. Maps uses data from OpenStreetMap, and can determine your location using a variety of mechanisms, such as Wi-Fi, and GPS.

Jeff Fortin Tam gave a fun talk about managing bug databases, called “Extreme containment measures: keeping your bugs under control”. His talk contained lots of practical strategies and tips on keeping your bug count low, and getting the most out of your bug reports. In the other auditorium, Sriram Ramkrishna and Andrea Veri gave a report on the activities of the GNOME Sysadmin Team.

The day ended with the first of our lightning talks sessions. A host of presenters gave short talks on a wide variety of subjects, including EasyTag, Boxes, gettext, Cantarell, measuring display latency using Arduino, the words of Jane Jacobs.

In the evening, Mozilla generously funded a party at the local Starobrno brewery. Much fun was had by all.

There’s a motto in the GNOME Project: “GNOME is people”. GUADEC is the best place to experience that first hand: it is our chance to spend time with and enjoy the company of contributors. Meet GUADEC 2013.

The temperature rose once again in Brno today. Thirsty hackers were seen sheltering in the shade, while the local conference team shipped in extra water for all the participants.

The day began with our second keynote of the conference, by Matt Dalio from Endless. Matt spoke passionately about bringing computers to the billions in the world who lack access to them, and his plans to utilize GNOME technologies to do so. It was an inspiring talk, which got an extremely positive response from the audience. During the talk, the stories of real people who currently don’t have access to computers and the internet were told, and Matt challenged the GNOME community to develop our software with their needs in mind.

After the keynote, we once again hit the track rooms for another day of talks.

First up, Emmanuele Bassi spoke about the future of Clutter, while in the other room, Tim-Phillip Müller talked about “What’s cooking in GStreamer”. Emmanuele talked about the current difficulties experienced by both Clutter and GTK+, and the plan to resolve these by merging them. The plan is to make Clutter internal an internal scene graph for GTK+. Emmanuele also issued a health warning for those searching for slide images on the internet. Since the GTK+ hackfest in April, some progress has been made here.

Tim-Phillip described progress within the GStreamer project. He announced that the 1.2 release will be on time for GNOME 3.10, and that 1.4 will bring fewer new features, but more cleanup, QA, polishing and documentation improvements.

GTK+ was a theme for today’s talks. After Emmanuele, Tristan van Berkom spoke about the UI developer experience with Glade/GTKBuilder. One of his key messages: “a good developer experience is one which reduces the steps involved in creating software.” He demonstrated his recent work with template widgets. We also heard about new work that will allow drag and drop repositioning of controls, and a demo of this raised a big round of applause. Matthias Clasen also gave a talk on GTK+, and showed the audience how to create a new application using GTK+3. This used the standard documentation which is supplied with GTK+, which provides a straightforward step-by-step tutorial

In one of the last sessions of the day, Benjamin Otte gave his talk, called “GTK: To Infinity and Beyond”. He talked more about the plans described in Emmanuele’s talk, and spoke about the plans for the future. According to Benjamin, our new GTK+ widgets have well thought out APIs and are well tested. He also spoke about plans to ensure stability in GTK+ in the future.

Wayland was another theme for the day. Robert Bradford gave a talk on Wayland, “the future of Linux graphics”. That was followed by a Wayland panel discussion, which included Robert, Owen Taylor and Kristian Høgsberg. Here there was much talk of the future and ongoing work to have GNOME 3 and applications running on the new display manager. Many of the details are being worked out, and GNOME is expected to be running on Wayland in the near future.

Finally, we had the annual GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting. Karen Sandler (the GNOME Foundation Executive Director) opened by welcoming new Foundation members, and encouraged everyone to attend the question and answer session with the Board of Directors on Sunday.

Reports were given by each of the GNOME teams. Allan Day (design team), the Release Team (Andre Klapper), the Bugsquad (Andre Klapper) accessibility (by Juanjo Marin), localization (Petr Kovar), websites (Andreas Nilsson and Fabiana Simões), the membership committee (also Fabiana Simões), marketing (Emily Gonyere), outreach (Marina Zhurakhinskaya), system administration (Andrea Veri) and documentation (Sinhdu Sundar).

There was lots of interesting news during the presentations…

• Jasper St Pierre filed the most patches again for another year.
• Strasburg is the capital of Europe
• Our outreach efforts are going from strength to strength. GNOME now offers internships for women on behalf of 16 organizations.
• GNOME 3.8 supported a total of 52 languages, thanks to the work of our localization teams.
• Andrea Veri, the GNOME sysadmin, is the web team’s favourite person in the whole world (and got a big round of applause).
• In 2012 we received more donations from individuals than in any other year previously.

After that we had presentations from our new treasurer and Karen Sandler. And finally, the annual pants award was presented to Allan Day. We expect to see him wearing them for the rest of the conference.