After spending an extra week after GCDS hiking around on La Gomera (another one of the Canarian islands), I finally got home and had time to process some of the photos I took during the desktop summit, so you can go ahead and take a look at them in my gcds gallery on my smugmug page (so if anyone needs a smugmug referral code you can also ping me).
At conferences like the GCDS there is so much going on, and you get bombarded with information from all the talks one after that other, and that means that sometimes it takes a while for the meaning of it all to sink in. For me the two biggest themes of the conference were firstly the emerging Semantic Desktop, and secondly the increasing importance of visual design. We actually are in the process of inventing new ways of visual communication, and it was very exciting to be right there in the middle of it happening.
One presentation which didn't have a subtle, delayed effect on me at all, was Nick Richards' Moblin talk. The Moblin graphic design is really very good - nice clean icons and tasteful use of 3D for stuff like 'zones' (virtual desktops). The main screen reminded me a lot of the presentation of Plamsa for netbooks on the Akademy Beauty track.
He included a parody of how Microsoft would redesign and re-market the Apple iPod, which was actually made by some guys at Microsoft. It was really funny the way the 'iPod Human Ear Professional Edition' ended up with a complicated box plastered in text. Microsoft just don't have 'beauty and aesthetics' in their DNA for some reason, and if we want to compete with them we have to be in the Apple league, and move on from trying to imitate their ugly badly designed UIs.
The phrase in Nick's talk that really hit me immediately, was the one in the title of this blog: "We don't have menus, we think they're useless..". I certainly don't like the look of KDE's or Gnome's menus much - they look like copies of Windows or Mac OS 9 respectively, and seem very dated. My pet hate is the underlines in the menu item names to denote keyboard accelerators which I personally never ever use. It has got to be one of the most ugly graphic design 'crimes' that Microsoft has ever commited, and I think it is sad that both desktops have copied it. Even though Gnome is trying to look like an old Mac, they still have those ghastly underlines.
If we can use Plasma for a beautiful customized Netbook workspace, how do we customize the actual KDE applications to look more 2010 than 1990? Most KDE applications like Kate/KWrite or Konqueror are built of KParts, and so it should be possible to wrap these KParts in modern QGraphicsView based shells with animation and a higher level of design (the shells could be written in Python or Ruby to make it easier to experiment). Also KDE applications have their menus and toolbars defined as XML files, and so it might also be possible to produced a different set of KActions that are more 'Plasma-like'. Either way I really hope we can produce something as impressive as Moblin over the next year.
The GCDS, and particularly the Akademy ended. Mostly everyone is still already back home, so all I can say is: Thanks to Agustín, Rodrigo, Miki and the rest of the local organization team for the great conference. Everyone I've talked with agreed that they were having a very good time, and I can only reassure that. The only "problem" I can find is (and I thought I would never say this) there were too many parties 
. So, congratulations for a very successful event!
This past week has been quite interesting to say the least. Being at GCDS has been very interesting and educational. I got to know quite a few KDE(and some OSS) people, to chat and work with. It was pretty hard to start taking to people (most people are really shy in person), but after you get to know some people you know everything is for real(and they like to party too!).
I am by now used to being around a lot of geeks (pretty much everyone at school is a geek). However being around so many people that share the same ideas about freedom and OSS feels quite... different. At first I felt like an outsider looking at a 'k'ult. But by the end of it I felt that I was truly a part of it.
So cheers to everyone! active members, and lurkers alike!
The Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria is very enjoyable. The conference center is very
luxurious. It comes with uniformed assistants in every presentation room helping by changing the name signs and refreshing the water. The main conference hall has a wonderful view on the ocean. There are people from KDE, GNOME and many other projects here, so there are many interesting people that I have not met before. The conference is located near the ocean, so attendees can go swimming for lunch. The talks are all recorded with the slides as insets, so if you are not here or cannot attend two talks at the same time, you can view the talks later.
My presentation (odf) about libstreamanalyzer went well. The announcement that Tracker 0.7 will use libstreams and libstreamanalyzer was received with a round of applause. The audience was an equal mix if KDE and GNOME developers and the many questions after the talk indicated that people get what the libraries are about and are interested in using it.
Strigi 0.7 will come with a new set of ontologies as a default. Previously we used the ontologies from xesam.org. From 0.7 we will be using the ontologies from semanticdesktop.org. These ontologies are also used by Tracker. So we will have one set of ontologies for both KDE and GNOME. Expect Strigi 0.7 in the next weeks.
For me there are only two more days here. I will be busy with semantic desktop and koffice meetings before I fly home on Thursday morning.
A small status report about the Python bindings and support in the almost arrived, KDE 4.3. All of the APIs have been updated of course and I've added support for polkit-qt. This makes it possible to write applications and configuration tools which feature the much needed (and working) "Administrator" button.
Yes, I'm down here in Gran Canaria with the rest of the geeks. It's shorts and T-shirt weather 24/7, even when it is cloudy and "bad" like it is now. (Actually this is better. The full on sun is a bit too much.) There are a lot of old familiar faces around and a lot of new ones. Speaking of which if you are at GCDS and are working with Python on KDE then please come and find me and introduce yourself. (I'm the geeky one with glasses with the Kubuntu T-shirt on.) I'm curious to know what you are developing, what is working well in Python bindings, what is not and what you would like to see in the future. Help me help you.
I'm currently sitting at a table in the still empty Qt Software / KDAB booth, listening to the awesome KDE Linuxtag team get the KDE / Amarok / Kubuntu presence behind me ready for another day. Throughout all of Linuxtag they have been, and will continue to be, proudly showcasing what we have collectively already achieved and helping new contributors make their way into our community so we can do even greater things in the future, with their help. Today the conference program features a KDE track, full of diverse and interesting presentations for a wide range of audiences. Claudia, Luca and their team have done an amazing job getting this conference presence and the many talks lined up. KDE is again making a very good impression, I think. Yeah, us!
The joking and chatter behind me has reminded me how much I'm looking forward to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. It will be great to catch up with everyone, like every year, but unlike every year, this time I'll also be able to catch up with friends from outside the usual KDE circles, since many friends from Gnome and related projects will be there. I'm sure this co-located event will be awesome and will bring our two communities, which share so many of their core goals and ideals, even closer together. I'm going there a few days early to do some hanging out on the beach, diving and general R&R. Good times.
But now I need to get going, the KDE track starts in a few minutes and my presentation on transitioning from Qt/KDE 3 to 4 as a developer is the second one.
Things are always exciting.
Within three weeks, I will be in Gran Canaria for the Desktop Summit, specifically for Akademy 2009. The summit is also sponsored by Nokia, via Qt Software and Maemo.
My talk, Special F/X with Graphics View will be on Tuesday afternoon. There will be some graphics demo which will be shown for time there, so show up if you are interested in. Check also an array of other fabulous presentations.
I can't wait to finally meet many fellow KDE hackers face to face. And yes, this will be my first Akademy. Afterall, there is always a first time for everything...
The Akademy program is almost done. Speaker notification deadline was yesterday, but we are still busy sorting out some last details and haven't sent notifications yet. Please bear with us and have a bit more patience. We have a lot of great proposals, more than we can fit into the schedule. So it's not easy to decide what we can take, and the co-hosting with GUADEC adds another dimension of complexity to this task. But we are on a good track, and we will have a fantastic program. Stay tuned...
There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now!
Personally I'm particularly interested three kinds of presentations:
I'm looking forward to a special Akademy in a beautiful surrounding with lots of exciting content. Be part of it, submit a talk.
2008 has been a great year for me Free Software wise.
Not only did I get the opportunity to attend three awesome KDE developer meetings/sprints, I also got invited and attended the Linux Collaboration Summit.
However, personally the most important aspect of 2008 is me returning to serious KDE development. Hmm, probably not returning since my contributions in the early years more or less where heling other developers, doing a couple of fixes and enhancements, mainly in the KDE Games and KDE Edu areas.
Due to time being available to me only in small chunks of a couple of minutes but all over the day, I moved on to doing support. Both end user support as well as developer mentoring, the latter mostly on web forums such as mrunix (German), qt-forum and I am actually one of the initial guys behind QtCentre.
That was a great time as well as I find helping and receiving many people's thanks extremely gratifying more so when I discovered that people within the KDE community where actually aware of my work there, something I discovered after I did a talk on user support at Akademy 2006.
Special thanks to people like Anne" to whom I can trust our help seeking followers.
Anyway, back to topic. Doing only proprietary software development grew boring pretty fast, so I really longed for doing real team work again, working on a vision rather than stupidetly implementing dull specifications.
Some years back I had started to work on a command line client for KDE's address book so I used it as a starting point for searching for new challenges quickly found all I could have dreamed of in Akonadi.
I thought that if I were a third party developer using KDE's address book API in my application, I would quite likely be angry if that API would become useless from one day to the other. So I investigated whether it would be possible to make this API work together or on top of Akonadi. The rest is history
Hopefully the coming year will allow me to continue working on that and probably other bridges, e.g. for libebook/libecal or Mozilla based products.
I've been enjoying the time (bikes!), meetings (absolute record # of attendees) and technology (n810!) at Akademy since 9th August. And a young student from Poland, Micha? Bartecki has been invited to come, what adds one to the number of the gfx individials around and made the KDE ping-pong team stronger. Kudos for the Team for such an unique event, for their time, sweat and tears
As the recent KDE Commit-Digest unveiled, it's visible that I've delivered Qt3-only incarnation of KexiDB to branches/kexi/kexidb-qt3/ in the KDE Subversion. KexiDB is a high-level database connectivity and creation library with database backend drivers for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Its development within the Kexi project started in 2003.
The rationale behind porting such quite an ancient code to equally ancient Qt version is that people, including me, use it in in-house projects, what also includes commercial developments. So, if you have Qt license, KexiDB is LGPL, so also perfectly available for you.
API docs for this version. What differs in KexiDB-Qt3, is only how plugins are loaded (QLibrary::resolve() instead of KParts::ComponentFactory::createInstanceFromService(), so the the public API remains unchanged.
PS1: Note that the build of MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers is disabled in drivers/driver.pro for now in SVN.
PS2: In related news, at Akademy I've finally created a KDE Subversion branches/work/predicate/ branch for Predicate library. It is what previously was called KexiDB v2, developed with KOffice/Kexi v 2.0, and now is becoming Qt4-only general purpose library (the buildsystem is cmake). Apart from the technology, interesting thing is that the Predicate name was proposed by Aaron in Dublin Akademy and I've been keeping such a transition plan in my secret TODO notepad...
This year was just my second Akademy. And as my first one,
two years ago in Dublin, it was a really great experience again.
Actually I don't know where to start.
To put it in one sentence, it almost feels like a huge family. Hundreds of people from all over the world come together and meet, they know each other, they work towards the same goal, they appreciate each other.
Where else do you have that (for such a big number of people) ?
But when I arrived back in K-Town (to some people also known as Kaiserslautern) I had the same strange feeling again as two years ago coming back from Dublin. It felt like being back from a parallel world or something. "Post Akademy blues" ? Suddenly there were not everywhere you go, KDE people around. Do you know that feeling ?
One thing I noticed is that it seems in the meantime I'm one of the older guys in KDE. Oh well, that's ok. And it's nice to see the young guys coming into KDE. Well, usually I feel somewhat depressed (not sure that's the best word)
when I see how good they already are with let's say 18 years. I think I started learning C/C++ with 20 (Pascal with 16 or so). But, that's great !
And, it's always so astonishing to see such a big group of highly motivated and talented people in one place.
I think this must be far above average. Well, I guess for somebody to start working on free software in his spare time without being payed, being highly motivated and talented is a prerequisite. That's probably the reason why we get so much done with so few resources and nevertheless top results.
I guess you just can't get this in a company where people apply for a job because they need money for their daily lives (as everybody does). There's a difference between going to work to a job you like but which you do because you get paid, and working on a free project because you feel the urge to do it from within.
This doesn't apply only to our developers, but of course also to our artists, promo team, usability specialists, writers etc.
You all rock !
What did I do at Akademy ?
I met a lot of people, a lot I already knew and as always a lot of new faces (at least for me). This is always a lot of fun and I hope (well, I'm sure) we'll see us again soon !
Did I mention that Belgian fries are great (and also huge) ? And I recommend to add mayonaise, so you get your daily share of fat 
I had planned a few things to work on, but didn't get around to finish all of them. Instead I spent a lot of time talking to people, helping them (you know, CMake stuff) and discussing. I think this is even more valuable to do
at Akademy than coding. I can do the coding also from home, but at Akademy I can talk to people and explain things.
This should pay off more.
Actually I can't remember any bad comments about CMake at Akademy, from many people I heard e.g. that they started to introduce CMake at their workplace, or that they really like that the buildsystem has become so much easier to grasp with CMake than before with autotools.
I also planned to get a full nightly build for KDE working: building qt-copy, building kdesupport, submitting a dashboard for it, if that succeeded, building kdelibs and submit to a dashboard, and if that succeeds, finally building kdepimlibs, as the first module which uses kdelibs, and, of course, submit a dashboard for it. Unfortunately I didn't find the time to get this done. So we will get this later. Then we should run this on the more "exotic" platforms we support, as e.g. Windows, OSX, Solaris and FreeBSD nightly. It would be cool if we would have a big fat box with virtual machines for the different operating systems to do that. Maybe this would have to be an Apple server, or are there any virtual machines which can run OSX ?
Monday was the general assembly of the KDE eV. It was a long meeting, and not very exciting. But the decisions we made are important for the project as a whole (dealing with donations, legal stuff, etc.). So the eV has an important, if maybe not really exciting role for KDE.
We released 4.0 in January, which was important for us as a project to mark the point in time from which we will stay compatible and stable. That's what it was. It wasn't intended for actual everyday use by normal users, but that was kind of hard to communicate. Before releasing it we had long discussion whether it should be named 4.0 or 3.90 or KDE4 0.1 or KDE 4.0 Preview or something. Maybe the message that it's not for everyday use would have come across clearer with a differrent name, but we decided for "4.0", so it doesn't matter now anymore.
In the meantime we released 4.1, and this is really taking off. Many people at Akademy were using it for their everyday work. I saw it working on Linux, Solaris, Windows, OSX, not sure I saw a FreeBSD box. So we are really getting there. But as others have said, this is just the beginning.
We, as KDE, are in unique position.
We have a complete software stack, ranging from hardware abstraction, multimedia, file managers, editors to IDEs, web browsers, multimedia applications and of course Marble - which works on all major operating systems. And which is IMO the most integrated set of software in existance.
Second to none.
Give this let's say 2 years, then everything is rock stable, on all platforms, and the applications will use the full power of the new underlying frameworks (the "Pillars").
We may be up to something big !
Alex
After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards 
To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently being available, out of 939 in my local album, which I still think is rather much (This means it's also rather much bandwith that this will suck, so please be kind to my webhost )
If you really don't want to be in one of the pics I put online, give me a sign and I'll try to fix it (to make sure it's not being indexed by the web archive and then you start complaining your pic is being archived over there, I put up a robots.txt over this, which is very very sad, but I really don't want people complaining afterwards). Similarly, if you really like a certain picture of you and want the original-sized one, also don't hesitate to ask for it.
So, after all that, here are my photos of Akademy 2008
PS: The weird ordering of the pictures (seemingly not chronological or alphabetically sorted by filename) is not my fault: I blame digiKam
Since, at the time of writing, I have another six hours of train journey before me on my way back from Akademy 2008 I decided to spend my remaining battery power on writing a blog about the event.
As an executive summary let it be said that the conference and all activitied during the week were really well organized and I think that every attendee will agree that it was lots of fun.
Both conference days saw Akonadi related sessions. On Saturday Till and Volker did a talk on the current state of Akonadi as released with KDE 4.1.
On Sunday we had the Akonadi Rumble, bascially a series of lightning talks about various aspects of Akonadi integration like aggregating PIM contacts and IM (instant messaging) contacts, showing PIM data in Plasmoids, etc.
As far as I know both sessions will be available as video download once the material has been properly processed.
On Wednesday we, the KDE PIM people and distinguished guests, had a BoF about the KDE 4.2 road map for KDE PIM and Akonadi.
Since all developers currently involved will be having less time than they would like to have for working on KDE, we needed to find a suitable procedure which would allow us to work on migration to Akonadi but still enable us just enhance the Akonadi eco system and keep the exiting applications at the traditional data access frameworks.
After discussing a couple of options we came to then conclusion that the "emergency stop" requirement basically dictates that application can still access the KResource based data handling framework, i.e. doing what they do right now in KDE 4.1
So the current plan is to concentrate on the data migration first, i.e. making at least the user's contact and calendar data accessible through Akonadi.
This requires a tool which takes the user's KResource configuration and creates respective Akonadi resources and then modifies the KResource configuration to point to Akonadi so that applications using the traditional framework will continue to work as intended.
When I last talked to Volker he was close to finish coding it.
Since the resulting changes have quite some impact, a considerable amount of testing is still needed to ensure it works with kinds of user setups.
My responsibility over the next few months will be to enhance and subsequently stabilize the Akonadi<->KResouce bridges I wrote about in a couple of previous blogs entries (or links see end of blog).
This will allow our application developers to concentrate on refactoring their respective applications to ease an Akonadi port later on or help on porting KResource based data sources to Akonadi.
While speaking about resource porting: improving existing Akonadi resources and, to a somewhat lesser extent, porting KResource plugins to Akonadi are almost ideal entry points into KDE PIM because resources are relatively small programs (often only a handfull of files/classes) and independent from each other.
See our Akonadi Resource Tutorial on an implementation "walk-through".
If you are interested, find us on IRC channel #akonadi, on the kde-pim mailing list (freedesktop.org project creation still pending) or send me a private mail
Older blog entries related to migration facilities
