Category Archives: Yorba

A Coruña on My Mind

Ok, ok, yet another post-GUADEC wrap-up.  A few things worth sharing:

* The keynote Adam and I gave this year, “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development”, went off great.  I would say “without a hitch” but of course there was a hitch thanks to the usual hardware juggling act of connector-A-won’t-fit-in-the-port-B.  After a quick switcheroo of computers and emailing the slides around, the keynote went on without trouble.  We appreciate everyone who attended and gave us the chance to voice our thinking on this topic.  The questions were great too.

People have asked for slides and video of the presentation.  Download the slides here.  As for video … I don’t know when that will be available, but I’ll post it here when it is.  William Ting gives a nice summary of our talk at his blog.

* Adam was interviewed about Yorba and funding open source development.  Check him out at World of Gnome talking about the history of Yorba, Vala, and more.

* One of the more exciting aspects of GUADEC was all the interest people expressed about Geary.  It seemed everyone I met had something positive to say about it or offered some thoughtful advice or suggestion about its direction.  There’s an old saw: “Three economists, four opinions.”  Well, three email users, four email workflows.  Everyone uses email differently.  I feel that’s the central challenge we face.

To everyone who is either running Geary or wants to try it: please don’t run Geary 0.1.  (I want to italicize and underline that sentence as well, but I’ll spare you.)  Although it’s only a few months old, so many improvements have been made since then, from features to performance to stability, no one should be using it.  Instead, please run from our git repository.  Or, if you’re on Ubuntu, try our Daily PPA.  I know some people find it sketchy to run from trunk — especially anything that touches your email — but trunk is far better than running 0.1.  I have high hopes for 0.2 (coming soon!) but there’s no reason to wait until then to see what Geary’s up to.

* Finally, I’d like to chime in and compliment the A Coruña organizers for putting on a great conference this year.  Everything flowed smoothly and without a bump (although I’m sure the organizers have plenty of behind-the-scenes horror stories).  I know one thing about A Coruña: I’ll never look at a lighthouse the same way again.

Yorba at GUADEC, A Coruña

Five of the Yorba crew will be attending GUADEC in A Coruña this year: Adam, Eric, Lucas, Charles, and myself.  This is Charles’ first time to GUADEC, but the rest of us should be familiar faces to many GUADEC regulars out there.

Adam and I will be giving a keynote on Friday, July 27th titled “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development”.  This is a topic we’ve been thinking a lot about lately and look forward to sharing some of our thoughts with all of you.

Yorba will also be hosting a BoF/workshop on Geary, our new email client for the GNOME desktop.  This is for anyone and everyone interested in Geary as well as the future of messaging on the GNOME desktop.  We’ll be discussing our vision and would love to hear yours as well.  The workshop will be on July 30th, 12:00 – 13:00 in Room 2.2a.

Looking forward to seeing all of you in A Coruña!

Hello World!

There’s nothing like starting a new year with a new job.

This is officially Day One on the job (I’m counting yesterday as Day Zero) as Yorba’s production engineer. I wear quite a few hats here: I sit on the front line of support and testing and also take care of the website, office matters and systems.

I am also the self-appointed director of happy hour.

I’ve known Adam for several years and it’s been very exciting to watch from the sidelines and see how Yorba has gone on build the most widely used photo manager on Ubuntu. It’s a real pleasure to be a part of the team and help contribute to these awesome products and the free desktop.

A little about me:

I’m a general purpose nerd. I’m an avid board game fan, I love pinball, can’t get enough of BSG and can solder a mean joint. San Francisco truly is a paradise for us geeks!

I dig communities. I’ve managed developer relations for software companies for the past several years and am BIG on making sure you guys and gals are having a good time with our products (or at least letting me know where it hurts).

So don’t be a stranger! I look forward to getting to know some of you, our users, in the coming weeks.

 

Continuing adventures of the Travelling Gnome

For the past month the Yorba offices were home to a strange two-faced creature.  As of today, the little guy left our offices to embark on the next stage of his journey around the world.

Here’s some vacation photos of the Travelling Gnome’s stay here in San Francisco.

Taking in the view at Dolores Park
Checking out the cable cars
Visiting the historic Mission San Francisco de Asís
Counting sheep
Enjoying a latte
At a San Francisco GNOME hacker meetup

For more on the Travelling Gnome, visit his website.

Yorba Backports Project announced

Shotwell ST

Today, the Yorba Foundation is proud to unveil our Yorba Backports Project.  The Backports Project, codenamed Project DeLorean, brings the simplicity and ease of use of Shotwell, our open-source photo manager, to a number of legacy (but still loved) operating systems.

Our automatic porting technology uses evolutionary Markov neural trees to automatically and “intelligently” port Vala and GCC software from a modern software stack to a legacy software stack.

Neo Shotwell
Here’s a list of some of the ports we’re going to be offering, all of which will be available for download later today.

Yorba founder Adam Dingle said the Backports Project “…[breaks] new ground for Yorba, with key synergies transforming existing paradigms.  The Backports Project leverages our brand’s bleeding-edge reputation for seamless innovation integrated with rich media solutions and productized frameworks for the enterprise.”

Shotwin for Workgroups
This historic milestone is also the first time X.org and Gtk have been ported to many of these systems.

* Shotwell //e for Apple //e
* Shotwell ST for GEM on the Atari ST
* Shotwell/2 for OS/2
* Shotwell for Workgroups for Windows for Workgroups 3.1
* MacShotwell for System 7
* Shotbench for Amiga Workbench
* Shotwell VMS for MicroVAX systems
* NeoShotwell for NeoGeo arcade cabinets
* geoShotwell for GEOS

Shotwell VMS
It’s important to note that some features didn’t make it into the first version of the backport due to time constraints.  Notably, we did not include video thumbnails, due to the number of Totem dependencies.

The work on the Yorba Backports Project took many months for our interns to complete.  Now that the project is finished, let’s all congratulate our interns and welcome them back into the world and out of the basement office we had locked them in.