There is still time to register for ad-hoc sessions, and we will have two dedicated “hacker rooms” where you can sit down with like-minded people and work on what you like!

See the webpage for more information.

Short excerpt from the news entry on the webpage:

All forms of hands-on activities that aim to further the Free Desktop are welcomed. Examples of such sessions include BoF, project and cross-project meetings, workshops, hacking sessions and training/teaching sessions. Each session is self-organized and it is up to the hosts and participants to decide if the session is to be loosely oriented around a set of topics, or have a well-defined agenda.

The organisation committee would like to schedule as many of these sessions beforehand as possible. We expect over 1000 visitors and scheduling helps to ensure minimal overlap with other sessions and allows us to provide a clear timetable for the visitors.
The remainder of the rooms will be scheduled via the wiki but we urge you to pre-register and get a proposal in before the deadline, July 3rd!

I will be proposing a session or two of my own very soon, I suggest you do the same! Use this link

I gave a talk about MyPaint at Libre Graphics Meeting 2011 in Montreal, Canada: MyPaint – the past, the present and the future.

Download in Ogg/Theora

I will also be giving a lighting talk at the DesktopSummit in Berlin about OpenRaster. It looks like this will be on August 7th at 14.00, but you should of course come for the whole week. Just look at the awesome program!

If you are interested in free and open source graphics software, or the production of freely licensed graphical works, you should go too! See the press release for more information, or go straight to submit a talk proposal. If you cannot be there but still want to show your support, please consider donating.

I guess this means I should order the tickets soon…

Friday I attended a planning meeting for this years Desktop Summit. Several things were on the agenda, the most pressing being the website and the call for papers which both should be finished in the coming month. I was tasked with organizing the call for BoF/meetings/devrooms. In a broader scope, I see my role as making sure relevant non-KDE and GNOME projects know they are welcome. People involved in such projects are welcomed to submit talk proposals, or apply for space for a BoF/meeting just like a KDE/GNOME project, but for anything to come out of it we need to communicate this properly.

Didn’t go to a lot of talks, but I had plenty of good discussions in the “hallway track” and in the evening events. Especially good was meeting up with Claudio Saavedra to discuss Meego Input Methods and the Gtk+ integration he is working on. I hope I was able to help him a bit in getting started.

Attended the Libre Graphics Meeting planning dinner sunday evening. I don’t know if I’m able to make it to the conference yet, so I did not have that much to contribute, but I let them that Libre Graphics projects are welcome to the Desktop Summit. And that I might try to organize a MyPaint workshop at LGM.

The conference was held at the Aviva stadium, a huge sports stadium just outside Dublin center. Untraditional venue choice, but it was quite nice and the organization was very good.

The conference schedule was packed; 2 days with 5 parallel tracks and the third day done unconference style with some 7 parallel sessions (btw, all the talks are available online). Many of the technical talks I went to were a bit on the light side in my opinion, which is forgivable considering how new the whole Meego thing is (or maybe I just chose badly). However, the keynotes and some less-technical talks (and some discussions in the “hallway track”) gave me much better understanding of what Meego actually is and aims to be.  Which is arguably just as important.

The schedule was fairly packed in the evenings as well, with opening reception and  “Openismus conference dinner” at the closest pub the first day, party at the Guinness Storehouse the second and a Ireland-Norway friendly in football (which Norway won!) the third. In addition, the official conference hotel had a “hacking area” available 24-7, which was pretty popular.

To give Meego a little boost,  all the participants were given a Lenovo Ideapad S10-t3 tablet netbook/laptop. In exchange we had to install Meego Netbook Edition 1.1 on and promise to develop cool applications for. Lucky me also got a Nokia N900 so I can do development for that form-factor as well.

What is Meego? (my interpretation and some musing)

At least Intel seems to have a very clear vision of  Meego as an open operating system and software platform that will make it easy for people to deliver new and innovative products in the embedded/mobile/space.

Meego explicitly targets a broad range of device classes, from set-top boxes to in-vehicle-infotainment to handsets to netbooks, a very bold move. Personally, I think the key to succeeding in that aspect is to attract the vendors with expertise in each device class and have them drive development. The project has done a decent job at that so far with Intel, Linpus, et.c. for netbook, Nokia for handset, the GENIVI consortium for IVI and so on.

Another thing the Meego project explicitly supports is for vendors shipping devices to do customization. This is basically a prerequisite to be able to attract them at all (as they naturally want to differentiate their products), but brings additional challenges in delivering a consistent platform and brand. The compliance specification work presented at the conference leads me to believe that the project is on the right path here though.

As an application platform Meego is based around Qt (with Qt Quick). This is a decent platform, but what is most lacking in order to attract application developers is probably shiny, attractive devices, and people using them. Hopefully they will be here soon…

All in all, I like what I see. Time will show how well the project succeeds, there are certainly exciting times ahead!

In the per-conference day with training sessions I attended the Qt Essentials track, which was more or less as expected. Glad I read a full Qt book beforehand, it would have been challenging to keep up with the shear amount of information without it.
The keynotes I attended on the second day were not particularly exciting: no major announcements nor insights were given. The technical talks on the other hand were filled with goodies. The talks by Jens Bache-Wiig and Roberto Raggi on Qt Quick were especially good.*

The talks definitely made me want to try Qt Quick for doing user interfaces for small-form factor devices, especially because it allows for very rapid prototyping and iterations when developing. The current lack of widgets and traditional layouts probably limits its usefulness for typical desktop application with more complex user interfaces though. There is nothing that helps you achieve a native look and feel either, but the Qt Components project is aiming to bridge those gaps.
I also suspect that the declarative and dynamic nature of QML poses several new challenges for developers, especially for those that are mostly used to traditional Qt programming with C++. I’m especially concerned that there was no way to visualize or do static checking on the property-bindings that are so central in QML. Very curious as to how that plays out in practice.

*I’m told the talks will be online after the Qt Developer Days event in San Fransisco is over.

Qt projects you said?

Going forward I’ll be doing some projects with Qt, in the same way I have done with GTK. My first project has already started: implementing viewer-class OpenRaster support for Qt. This means that applications using Qt and QImage will soon be able to display fully-rendered OpenRaster images!
Development of the Qt integration happens in the repository on gitorious, and the libora modifications currently lives in my personal clone. It will be pushed to mainline as soon as I have more-or-less settled on the API, and done a basic implementation. Using libora for all the OpenRaster specific stuff is being a bit more painful than expected, but it is the right thing to do as it means that other consumers benefits as well. Like a potential GdkPixbuf plugin or applications not using Qt or GTK. I’ll write more once it reaches a useful state.

After that is done I will probably do something with more UI, like a proper application. Hopefully I will get to toss Qt Quick into the mix as well. I’ve got an idea that I think would be a nice fit, so we’ll see.

In related news, I’m also involved as part of the local team for Desktop Summit 2011, along with several of my co-workers. The initial announcements have just been made public; the conference will be held in Berlin August 6th-12th, at Humboldt University. Mark your calendars See for instance the story by the GNOME Foundation, the official website or the original announcement for more information.

Hopefully I will also be going to the Meego conference in Dublin in November. Fingers crossed!

• 22.09.2010 – This Will Destroy You
• 02.10.2010 – Anathema
• 06.10.2010 – Porcupine Tree + Oceansize
• 05.11.2010 – Alter Bridge
• 02.12.2010 – Irepress & Constants
• 08.12.2010 – Caspian

I might squeeze in Dark Tranquillity or Tarot or Apocalyptica on the 24th of October, and Ludovico Einaudi on the 16th of November too. Maybe even Sabaton, depending on how good their new album is. I was also hoping to be able to see Epica while they are on tour, but they are not playing in Berlin (!), and the Oslo date does not fit with when I want to go back to Norway. I guess Poznan is only 3 hours away…
In any case, I think I know one or two people that are mighty jealous of me right now. And they ought to be.

The entire conference was very professionally executed, no technical or organizational problems, yet they were able to maintain a nice cosy atmosphere. The only thing I didn’t quite like was the food, but thats mostly a matter of personal preference (they only served vegetarian, and I’m a quite dedicated carnivore).

There were plenty of good talks, and if you’re interested in them you should check out the video recordings done by River Valleys. I also attended some workshop/BoF sessions, here is my take on them:

OpenRaster BoF

The OpenRaster BoF turned out to be quite different from what I expected. I expected only a couple of people from Krita, GIMP and MyPaint to show up. But no, we had lots of people attending, even professional standards people from Adobe, w3c and Opera! I also somewhat suprised myself (ok, I know that I like to talk and am not afraid to do so, but still), by taking an active role. We did get useful things done, like consensus on that we want to define a minimal baseline standard, and to have fallbacks for things extending upon the baseline. The concrete specs have not been settled, but hopefully we (MyPaint+Krita people mainly) can take care of that pretty soon.

I hope to try out some implementation ideas for fallbacks soon, and to improve the GIMP implementation, but school is keeping me very busy now a days. In fact, the first evening in Brussels was spent finishing my bachelors thesis report, and sunday was spent on my final report in my english class. And its far from over yet…

A Libre Graphics Foundation?

There was a birds-of-a-feather session for a potential “foundation” to support and promote libre graphics projects. Apparently these ideas have come up before, but this year it seems to be gathering some traction so it might actually happen. Different people have different views on what exactly it should be about of course; some are looking in the direction of Blender Foundation/Institute, doing open projects, funding developers, and having official teaching; others are more interested in having common documentation about libre graphics software for users. In any case, a common resource and face for libre graphics projects would be good. But in the end it will boil down to what people step up and make happen, I suspect. Discussions are ongoing on the create @ freedesktop.org mailinglist, so jump in if this tickles your fancies.

LGM2011

In the discussion during the last day, Montreal and Vietnam were proposed as locations for the next LGM. I’d love to go either way, haven’t been to Asia nor North-America. Perhaps even do a talk of my own? Still, it’s much further away, so it might require a very interesting program, depending what I’m doing at that time and how busy I am. We’ll see. If if turns out to be more of an end-user conference, and less of a developer/contributor meeting I’d love to have David Revoy and/or Ramon Miranda do MyPaint workshops. That would be beyond awesome.

In the meantime, it looks like GUADEC will be my next conference, only 8 weeks away. I’m already excited!