Hackfests – GNOME Foundation

Evince hackfest taking place in Strasbourg ahead of GUADEC

GUADEC is only a few days away, but some GNOME contributors are already gathering in Strasbourg to improve the GNOME document reader, Evince.

Their goals include: making further improvements to accessibility support, implementing tiling support to allow infinite zoom, improving the support for PDF annotations, revamping the comics back-end and reviewing and integrating pending patches.

The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME Accessibility team, and Evince developers. It also involves a number of Google Summer of Code students.

The event could not have taken place without the support of the GNOME Foundation.

You can learn more about the Evince Hackfest on the event wiki page.

Evince logo

GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest Underway in Berlin

GNOME contributors and developers are currently gathered in Berlin, Germany, for a three day Developer Experience Hackfest. The event is focused on the GNOME application developer platform. Participants working to ensure that developers can easily create high quality applications for GNOME.

Topics being covered at the event include:

GTK+ planning, and the roadmap for new widgets and capabilities.
Developer tools, including editors, DevHelp, and debugging tools.
Application development documentation, including tutorials, API reference documentation, and the GNOME developer website.

Detailed updates can be found on Planet GNOME.

The hackfest is being generously hosted by Endocode, and has been sponsored by the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Documentation Hackfest Concludes in Norwich, UK

The GNOME Documentation Team met in Norwich, UK, this week for a five day hackfest. Held from January 26 to January 30, the event was hosted at the University of East Anglia’s School of Computer Science. The hackfest was very successful, and included fifteen attendees as well as five remote participants.

Docs Hackfest 2014. Picture by Frederic Peters

The team used the event as an opportunity to prepare GNOME’s user documentation for the upcoming 3.12 release. Other highlights of the hackfest included:

A new, easy and more visual appealing design for the help viewer Yelp.
A major update of the long awaited GNOME Administrator Guide.
An improved and updated organization of the documentation of the email client Evolution.
New features in Mallard, the markup language used for writing the GNOME documentation, and the related tools.

The event was made possible by the sponsorship of the GNOME Foundation. Many thanks to the University of East Anglia for providing such a great venue.

Attendees from the hackfest will, along with many other GNOME contributors, attend this year’s FOSDEM conference in Brussels this weekend. GNOME will have a stand at the event, and there will be a party on the Saturday night.

WebKitGTK+ Hackfest Underway in A Coruña

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The annual WebKitGTK+ hackfest is currently underway in A Coruña, Spain. Going into its fifth year, 2013’s event is the biggest so far, including an unprecedented 30 participants.

The four day event is focusing on everything web in GNOME and GTK+. WebKitGTK+ developer Claudio Saavedra reports that multiple web processes and user interface improvements to the GNOME web browser are both priorities for the hackfest.

You can follow all the action on the @WebKitGTK+ Twitter feed.

The event has been made possible by sponsorship of Igalia and the GNOME Foundation. Other sponsors are helping with travel costs, accommodation, coffee and snacks. Many thanks to Samsung, Adobe, Company100 and Cable Labs.

igalia

GNOME contributors prepare for Developer Experience Hackfest

Over 20 GNOME contributors are preparing to travel to Brussels, Belgium, for a three day hackfest this week. The event aims to improve the GNOME development experience by making it easier to create GNOME applications. Hackfest participants have wide-ranging plans and will be looking at development tools, documentation and development frameworks. They will also work on plans to make it easier to install and distribute GNOME applications.

Collaboration is an important part of GNOME’s culture, and the project is seeking to work with other upstream communities in the effort to improve its developer experience. As a result, members of the Linux kernel community will be joining the GNOME contributors in Brussels, where it is hoped that an agenda for future collaboration can be established.

The FOSDEM conference immediately follows the Developer Experience Hackfest, and the hackfest participants will be there in full force. FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of free and open source software developers in the world, attracting several thousand hackers annually. There will be several presentations made by GNOME contributors, as well as a GNOME Booth and GNOME Beer Event.

The GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest is being sponsored by the Betagroup Co-working Space and the GNOME Foundation.

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GNOME WebKitGTK+ hackfest

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the conclusion of the WebKitGTK+Hackfest. The hackfest was held December 9-12 and was hosted once again at the Igalia offices in A Coruña, Spain. This hackfest has been very successful with more than twenty attendees from Igalia, Collabora, Adobe, Intel, Samsung and Red Hat.

WebKitGTK+ hackfest 2012 picture by Joone Hur

The hackfest was extremely productive, and highlights of the tasks that were worked on there include:

Many improvements in Web, the GNOME web browser: a new incognito mode to minimize the risk of being tracked both on the internet and in your own computer, a slick new UI for the search, revamping the creation of Web applications by selecting better icons and names, adding undo close tabs, preventing empty download-only windows and preliminary work for the integration of the Document Viewer in the browser.
Switching from Pango to Harfbuzz to render complex text.
Porting the WebAudio backend to GStreamer 1.0.
Better DOM bindings.
Many bugs fixed for accelerated compositing with Clutter, both in ELF and GTK+ ports.
Stabilization of the libsoup API.
Improvements in the memory use of the V8 Javascript engine.
2D-canvas accelerated support using Cairo OpenGL.
Better HTML5 media controls.
A new API to retrieve a screenshots from web pages.
Progress in accessibility support.
Documentation.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

User Observation Hackfest Announcement

A group of GNOME contributors will be gathering to accomplish important work. A User Observation Hackfest that will be hosted at the openSUSE Summit in Orlando, Florida (USA), on September 21-23, 2012. The purpose of this hackfest is to gather knowledge to seed GNOME’s Pattern language for user interfaces and consequently improve the GNOME 3 experience for users.

One key aspect of this hackfest is a day trip to the City of Largo, Florida. The City of Largo has a significant deployment of GNOME in the public sector. Giving us an exciting opportunity to watch and talk to every day people who use GNOME on a day to day basis and observe how GNOME works for them.

The User Observation Hackfest is open to everyone. If you are a passionate about GNOME 3 then we would love to hear your voice. Please come down, register, and see us at the hackfest!

You can learn more about the User Observation Hackfest on the event wiki page.

As a side note, the openSUSE Summit will be running an original fundraising event called Pie for Pi in order to help the GNOME Foundation to sponsorize contributors to attend hackfests.

GNOME UX Hackfest Kicks off in A Coruña

GUADEC is only a few days away, but GNOME contributors are already gathering in A Coruña and getting down to some important work. Today marks the beginning of a two-day design event that is being hosted in the Igalia A Coruña office.

The UX Hackfest brings GNOME designers and developers together to review ongoing development initiatives. Features that are in development will be tested and discussed, and future development activities will be planned. The event aims to ensure that the next version of GNOME is the best ever.

The hackfest brings together members of the GNOME design team, in addition to key developers. It also involves a number of new GNOME contributors with the help of Google Summer of Code and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women.

This event could not have taken place without the support from sponsors: Igalia and Red Hat. It has also been supported by the GNOME Foundation. Many thanks to all.

You can learn more about the UX Hackfest on the event wiki page.

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Excellent Progress Made at GNOME Accessibility Hackfest

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of the ATK/AT-SPI Hackfest which was held from January 18th to 22th at Igalia’s offices in A Coruña, Spain. There were attendees from several companies and organizations including Red Hat, SUSE, Igalia, Mozilla and Nokia with different backgrounds and expertise in areas like GTK, ATK, AT-SPI2, Qt, WebKitGtk+ and Gecko.

Picture of the attenders to the hackfest

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The hackfest was very productive, some of the highlights included:

It was agreed to remove key events emission from GTK+ as soon as an alternative implementation is provided. Several approaches for this implementation where discussed.
Accessibility support for WebKitGtk+ has been further improved with a big refactoring of the code, as well as exposing WebKit2Gtk+ accessibility hierarchies to ATK/AT-SPI.
Ideas for a more efficient and effective AT-SPI2 cache policy were discussed, with the goal of keeping DBus messages traffic to a minimum.
There was an important discussion about global vs per-object events. The aim here is to make sure that only the relevant events are sent to accessibility clients. In the short term, the current goblal-events hook-based implementation will be maintained, but we will be exploring alternatives.
It was concluded that in order to enable accessibility support by default, we shouldn’t use ATK-bridge as a module, but integrate it in the core platform. Several possible approaches were discussed, and we set the aim of having a concrete plan decided by the time GNOME 3.4 is released.
These and other accessibility underpinnings were worked on, which will effectively improve the experience of GNOME users who need accessibility features.

There are many challenges in the near future of accessibility and GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!.

The GNOME Foundation and community are very grateful to the sponsors of this event:

Hackfest Plans to Improve GNOME Accessibility

GNOME accessibility contributors will be gathering for a four day hackfest in A Coruña, Spain, next week. Together, they will be working to enhance GNOME’s assistive technologies, which allow people with disabilities such as visual, movement, hearing, cognitive and language impairments to use GNOME software.

The hackfest will be focusing on two key GNOME accessibility technologies – ATK and AT-SPI. These facilities allow GNOME applications to be used through accessibilty technologies, such as screen readers.

The hackfest is being hosted by Igalia who, alongside the GNOME Foundation, are sponsoring the hackfest. See the hackfest wiki page for more details.

GNOME is currently campaigning to raise funds to support its ongoing accessibility efforts. Help us to make 2012 the Year of Accessibility for GNOME!

Tag: Hackfests