gnome – Page 8 – Lucas Rocha

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!

Plugins in The Eye

Eye of GNOME 2.19.2 is the second under-heavy-development release of Eye of GNOME in the direction of GNOME 2.20. This is a special release: it’s the first one that ships the new plugin system which allows developers to extend EOG’s UI and behavior. Of course, a lot of polishing is still needed but the possibilities are quite vast.

Special thanks go to the Gedit and Epiphany teams because most of the EOG plugin system code came from those projects.

As usual, please, crash, play, use, crash again, extend EOG as much as you can. :-)

First EOG plugin

As a proof of concept for the plugin system, I wrote a very simple plugin which nicely integrates EOG and Postr.

Eye of GNOME and Postr playing together.

Menu item added by the plugin.

Plugin manager in the Preferences dialog.

Three important notes about the screenshots and the plugin:

I haven’t released the plugin code yet because it’s just a proof of concept thing. Now I need to write it the right way.
The thumbnails pane in Eye of GNOME is using a patched GtkIconView which makes the selections much more visible.
For those who use Postr, you probably saw something different in its UI. You’re right! I’ve made some improvements in the thumbnails pane. Ross already merged in the main repository.

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.

FISL2007

So, I’ll attend FISL this year. I’ll be giving a talk about Maemo and another about the latest news of GNOME. The latter is part of the GNOME brazilian community meeting where we’ll also have a talk by the pt_BR localization team and some discussion about marketing activities, how to bring more brazilian contributors to GNOME and so on. If you’re planning to attend FISL next week and love GNOME, you can’t miss it! :-)

I’m really excited about FISL this year because it will be a nice oportunity to go meet some of my best friends and nice free software people (well, those two groups overlap in many cases).

Hildon Desktop Plugin Howto

For those brave developers who are using Sardine to use/test/develop the bleeding edge Maemo stuff, this post is for you. :-)

Well, I’ve already shown before how to write Python plugins for Hildon Desktop. This time, I wrote a howto for writing C plugins for Hildon Desktop with the new GTypeModule-based API. All plugin types (Task Navigator, Status Bar and Home) are covered.

For those other super-brave developers who are building Hildon Desktop outside Scratchbox, it’s a good oportunity for you to test our plugin system and give some feedback, send patches, and report bugs.

The howto is available at:

http://maemo.org/maemowiki/HildonDesktopPluginHowto

Go Go Go!

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!