Author: GNOME Foundation

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.