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…