It’s about time for me to write a short report on the
GUADEC… I’m probably the last one to do it.
I am glad that I decided to go to the GUADEC even if that
was a last-minute decision, because otherwise I
would
have missed a great event and many opportunities to talk to
some
very cool guys. The discussions in the corridors, in the
hacking room
and around some restaurant tables were as important as the
scheduled talks (if not more). I talked to some hackers
that I had
met before (Sven and Mitch) and
many others that I met for the first time: Tigert (he got
many requests for creating new icons and did some amazing
things), Lauri Alanko
(he reminded me of my Quake days), Raph Levien (he
was very busy but he had some nice examples of his new
printing stuff), Tim Janik and
Owen Taylor (the GTK+ guys), Keith Packard, Ville Pätsi, David
Monniaux and many others who will hopefully forgive me
for not mentioning their names here.
Some random notes about what happened while I was
there:
- I had my camera with me but since it is not a digital
one,
it will take a few days before I can scan the photos and put
them
on some web site. I wonder if Larry Ewing
will be
happy to see a picture of himself sleeping in the hacking
room. I also wonder what others will think of Miguel de
Icaza after seeing
his various facial expressions. I hope that the photos will
be OK – the film is not developed yet.
- On Thursday evening, we went to a small restaurant for
dinner. There was an interesting discussion between Owen
Taylor and Keith Packard about the way X Window handles
scrolling and backing store (Owen: it sucks; Keith: it’s not
my fault, and you should not use it like that anyway).
- On Friday and Saturday morning, the agenda said that the
hacking room would be open from 8am until noon. I was not
really
surprised to see that the room was almost empty in the early
morning (people started to come after 10am). Around noon,
the room was filled with hackers glued to their laptops.
- It was funny to see tigert and drc arguing about who
should get the pen and/or the mouse for drawing some icons
and other stuff. There were not enough computers in the
room.
- While tigert was using the GIMP, I wrote down all the
bugs and other undocumented features that we discovered. I
will try to fix some of them before 1.2 is released.
- I liked the presentation of Evolution. I even won a
small plush bonobo for guessing that Matt Loper (one of the
authors) was using Outlook as his e-mail client. Despite
the boos and bahs that came from the audience, I think that
it is important to have a groupware tool that can be used
easily by non-hackers. There is still some work to be done,
but Evolution seems to be a good answer to that problem.
- The presentation of Nautilus was also great. If they
manage to
include all of the features that were demoed as well as the
ones that are planned into something that is stable and
reasonably small and fast, then GNOME will have a very good
file manager. Andy surprised some people with some quick
hacks (i.e. being able to drag some colors into the window
resulting in a nice gradient for the background) but there
were many more important things that do not always look cool
but are helpful for the user. For example, I liked the zoom
levels giving more and more information about the files
(similar to what EPOC does on the Psion 5). I also like the
fact that the icons are trying to show (a part of) the
contents of the files, and that the users can customize many
display options. The different modes were also a good idea,
so that the novice users are not lost in the menus and
options. Oh, and of course the “view as music” option was
very cool.
- After seeing the demos, it looks like the GNOME
applications such as dia and gnumeric have evolved a lot
since I had a look at them. I think that I will grab a
recent version and install them on my PC.
- The HelixCode party on Saturday night was nice, except
that the music was a bit too loud (for some reason, many
hackers prefered to talk outside instead of going on the
dance floor). This is also the first time that I go to a
party in which the bar presents a selection of appetizers,
drinks, CD-ROMs and plush bonobos. I didn’t try to eat the
CDs.
Well, what else can I say, except that I am looking
forward to GUADEC 2…
