I really enjoyed my week in Gran Canaria with all the desktop hackers, it was a great event. Such a great location for a conference. It is great to see such innovative stuff going on for the desktop. This year it was a joint event between GNOME and KDE, which I think was a great idea. However, I really don’t feel like I had enough opportunity to mingle with KDE folks and attend their sessions. I hope we can do more in the future to encourage that.
I think the most interesting thing for me was Telepathy. The telepathy sessions were very impressive, and I spent some great time with the awesome team at Collabora, keep up the great work! I’ll just say it… tubes just make me drool, so much potential to be tapped into. Hopefully after this week, more people are inspired to go out and create amazing stuff that uses telepathy.
Zeitgeist really interests me as well, I have been wanting an easier way for users to interact with their data. Personally I think all interaction with data should be contextual, present the data to the user based on what they most likely want. I can’t wait to see Zeitgeist become integrated in the desktop and really start to blow the socks off of our users.
GNOME Shell is certainly interesting, I am very excited to see people trying to really change they way the desktop behaves. Lets not be afraid to shake things up a bit. However, I am not sold on it yet though. I think there are many issues that still need to be worked out, can’t imagine it can be designed properly and implemented in time for 2.28. I know it won’t be default in 2.28, but I think some of the basic work flow stuff needs to be nailed down before it can be released. It really seems far from that now. It will be exciting to watch it evolve and see how it ends up.
Last but certainly not least, CouchDB. There was some cool demos showing live bookmark syncing in firefox as well as contacts shared between both GNOME and KDE applications (evolution and akonadi). Using CouchDB as a common desktop database for storing configuration and application data makes it very easy to synchronise that data between multiple computers. Just imagine having the same bookmarks, contacts, photos, music, etc all shared between all your computers automatically.
Of course there were plenty of great parties and hacking sessions. The Igalia and Collabora parties were a blast, and two nights we spent hacking on stuff in the hacking room all night. Who needs sleep?
