Category: community

The Drooling Macaque Band @ GUADEC 2007

Great news! The Drooling Macaque Band will make a concert at GUADEC2007 in Birmingham. This is because the conference agenda fits perfectly on ours because it starts in 15th July, just after our concert with Jamiroquai, and goes until 21st of July, just before our concert with U2 and Radiohead. This means that we’re available for the whole conference time and we will make GUADEC 2007 rock even more because…

1. We rock!
2. We play “Wish You Were Here” and “Come Together”
3. We rock!
4. We organize jam sessions which makes everyone have fun
5. We rock!
6. Ah… we rock!

(Hmm, we could make a song out of this…)

Of course we’re a very organized band and have setup a wiki page for GUADEC2007 stuff. If you don’t believe we rock, have a look at some pictures and a video of our previous GUADEC concert at Vilanova (Spain).

It seems the concert will take place on Tuesday night during a cool conference party. If you’re interested in being part of the world famous GNOME band, add your name in the wiki page and be aware that we’ll probably do a rehearsal some day before the concert. Of course, the idea is to give space for a jam after the concert, so if you play some instrument, feel free to add your name there too.

Seriously, this is going to be fun.

Spinning off Hildon

As pointed out by Carlos in GNOME Mobile mailing list and Quim in his presentation at LinuxTag, Hildon will become an upstream project. The idea from now on is to make Hildon a more independent and community-driven project as it’s going to be used in different contexts other than Maemo (i.e. Ubuntu Mobile). This means that Hildon won’t be a Maemo-specific project anymore and will have its own release schedule, roadmap and community.

As a consequence, we decided to move the full Hildon stack to GNOME infrastructure. This way we can stay closer to GNOME community and stimulate collaboration between both projects. We’ve started the migration process already but it will take some time because we need to first re-organize our internal way of working to make sure everything is fine after the migration. Big thanks to Olav for the great and quick help!

For those who don’t know: what is Hildon?

Hildon introduces a new desktop for handheld devices. It comprises a lightweight desktop, a set of widgets optimized for handheld devices, a set of theming tools and other complementary libraries and applications.

We’ve created a page GNOME wiki. There you can find a brainstorming space for the release schedule and roadmap, a status page for our migration to GNOME, and how to get involved in Hildon. We already have a mailing list in GNOME servers. If you are interested in Hildon development, don’t hesitate to subscribe!

GNOME Roadmap Released

The GNOME Roadmap for 2.20 (and partially for 2.22 and future 2.x releases) is available at:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap

The GNOME Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members.

We hope this roadmap increases the awereness about the future steps of the project inside and outside the community and helps us to look forward and plan where we want to go.

For a quick overview of our roadmap process, please see:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process

Let’s make GNOME rock even more!

Roadmap Process – Reminder for GNOME maintainers

Dear GNOME maintainers, the deadline to reply the roadmap information request for your modules is May 7. It’s very important to have your replies so that we can have a high quality roadmap for our next stable releases.

To know more about the Roadmap Process, go to:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process

To keep track of all the gathered Roadmap information, go to:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Modules

The Roadmap Process is going really well so far and I think we’ll be able to spot some really nice things about us as a community (I’ll blog about it later).

GNOME Roadmap – Information requests sent!

We’ve sent the roadmap information requests to all module maintainers.
If you are a maintainer/developer of a GNOME module and haven’t
received this message, feel free to just follow the instructions
described here (and let us know we missed you and/or your module).

As soon as we (The Roadmap Gang) have a first draft of the GNOME 2.20 roadmap, we’ll heat
up some discussions in desktop-devel-list about this and the future
stable releases of GNOME in order to get feeback about the roadmap,
discuss about potential cross-module plans, and so on.

GNOME @ Summer of Code 2007 – Update

It’s been a while since the Summer of Code 2007 started. So, it’s a
good time to give you a quick update about what’s been happening.

We received 174 applications this year – just a little bit less than
last year (181). The overall quality of the applications is good.
Therefore, we expect to have some really nice projects in 2007. :-)

As decided in the first GNOME SoC organization meeting, the final
list of chosen applications will be decided by a selection committee
composed by ~10 well-known GNOME community members. The selection
committee members were either invited by the SoC admins or explicitly
volunteered to be part of the committee.

The SoC selection committee is composed by:

  • Christian Kellner
  • Murray Cumming
  • Christian Schaller
  • Paolo Borelli
  • Raphaël Slinckx
  • Bryan Clark
  • Lucas Rocha
  • Federico Quintero
  • Shaun McCance
  • Behdad Esfahbod
  • Thomas Wood
  • Ryan Lortie
  • Vincent Untz

It’s good to remark that the participation of the community (with
ranking and valuable comments) has been helping us a lot. Thank you!

We are giving our best in the selection process and we expect to be
giving the results in the next couple days.

GNOME Roadmap Process


Here we go! Vincent and I have been working on a roadmap process for GNOME. Well, here’s the result:

  http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap/Process

We expect the following benefits from the process:

  • Stimulate a roadmapping culture inside the community so that we discuss more often where we want to go (based on concrete plans);
  • Increase the awereness about the future steps of the project inside and outside the community;
  • Help with the release notes writing.

As announced in d-a-l, all maintainers will receive a mail asking some questions about their plans for the modules they’re maintaining. Also, we’re looking for more people to be part of Roadmap Gang. So, if you’re interested, contact us.

Hei Ho, Let’s Go!

Writing a cool Python plugin for Hildon Desktop

Ok, now that I’ve shown how easy is to have the basic code for a Python plugin running in Hildon Desktop, I’d like to demonstrate something more useful and cool. I did this screencast presenting how to write a plugin which randomly shows images from your “Images” directory in your Home area. Cool hun?


Click on the image to watch/download the screencast (10 minutes, 8 MB).

Some (obvious) improvements for this plugin would be:

  • A configuration dialog where you can define the images directory and the delay for image switching.
  • Disable image switching when the device idle or when the Home area is not visible
  • Switch to next random image when clicking on the plugin.
  • What else do you want? :-P

Enjoy!

——–

Sidenote 1: yes, the screencast shows Hildon Desktop running on a 800×600 resolution. :-)
Sidenote 2: some people have been asking if Hildon Desktop is available in N800 already. The answer is no. Hildon Desktop is a major rewrite of maemo-af-desktop and will be shipped in the next major releases of Maemo. Of course you could run it on your N800 at your own risk. :-P

eog-ng becomes trunk


You’ve seen some cool development news in my blog about eog-ng branch, right? The good news is that last weekend I merged eog-ng in trunk as part of the GNOME 2.19/2.20 development cycle. This means that we have a solid, faster and more stable code in EOG from now on. Some highlights:

  • Feels faster and more stable (the application core has been totally rewritten and optimized in several ways. This means you will feel that EOG startup is much faster, it uses less memory and crashes much less)
  • New image collection pane (cleaned up to make it look nicer with a one-row view. By setting “hidden” gconf keys you can place the collection pane on any window side – top, bottom, left, right – and it can be resizable or not)
  • Toolbar in fullscreen
  • Image property dialog
  • “Open with” support to quickly images on other applications

Many/Special thanks to Claudio Saavedra and Felix Riemann for the important contributions to this new code. You rock my world guys!

Plans for 2.20

  • Editable toolbar
  • Printing for multiple images
  • Plugin system
  • Support for IPTC and XMP
  • General UI polishing, mostly in
    • Image collection pane
    • Image properties dialog
    • Preferences dialog
    • Error/warning feedback
  • More code refactoring
  • Bug fixing, bug fixing, bug fixing, …

Get Involved

You can find a list of bugs/tasks here (follow the instructions there):

  http://live.gnome.org/EyeOfGnome/RoadMap

As I always say: contributions are always welcome! Give some love to EOG today and have a better GNOME image viewer tomorrow! Let’s make EOG rock our world! :-)

Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0
This work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0.