Club Silencio

Summer is almost over, or rather, my summer vacation is almost over. In the last weeks I have been actively working on GNOME like I hadn’t in a long time… Monday I will go back to work, but even if I will not have as much time, I will try to keep my level of involvement as high as possible. This renewed enthusiasm comes largely from one decision: attending GUADEC.

I have been working on GNOME for more or less ten years now, but I attended GUADEC just once before (Stuttgart 2005) and I figured it was time to go again and see if a visit to the self-congratulating echo chamber could renew my interest and motivations… and guess what: it did!

GUADEC was fantastic, the location, the organization, the people, the talks, the food, but you probably heard this many times now…

Discussing implementation details (courtesy of xjuan)

Between a talk and the other I also came to the realization that I needed to work on something fresh and fun, so while in A Coruna I finished the redesign and rewrite of Baobab, GNOME’s disk usage analyzer, that Ryan started last winter.

I am really happy with the result both in terms of the new UI and in the underlying code, which is now written in vala, it is small and clean and makes use of many of the latest GNOME technologies.

Baobab location list

Baobab scan view

Developing small applications is so much fun and so rewarding that it is addictive, so after A Coruna (and after a couple of days getting sunburned enjoying nacho‘s hospitality in the south of Galicia) I decided to help getting gnome-clocks ready: this was even more fun because the work was shared with other current developers and designers, but also with some new contributors.
I just uploaded the first release of Clocks, in time for GNOME 3.5.91.

Mind you, this is a preview release so do not rely on it to wake up for work or to bake your cakes! It has a few know bugs and probably many unknown ones, but it starts to be feature complete and should provide a good starting point to iterate the design process and evolve into a beautiful and enjoyable clock application (well, unless you use the alarm to wake up at 6 AM, not much we can do to make it enjoyable in that case…)

World Clocks

Selecting Alarms

Ringing Alarm

Timer

Does this all mean I am abandoning gedit? No, I still use it daily more than any other application, but it is stable and does what I need it to do… on the other hand I am sure Jesse will come up with some incredible feature and Gustavo has a long secret todo list we reviewed together at GUADEC, so I can relax and just keep complaining about coding style errors while pretending to review patches…