Henri Bergius - Kde

GeoClue rises again

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Those that have been following my blog for a longer time know that I’ve been talking a lot about making the Linux desktop and mobile platforms location aware.

Thanks to the amazing advances in adoption of mobile platforms, this dream has more or less become true, especially in the more widespread Apple and Android ecosystems. All these devices know where they are, and developers are coming up with different smart applications to utilize this information.

The free software world has been at risk of getting left behind. GeoClue, the location framework designed for these environments was in a state of flux for a long time with very little happening to it. But now we have GeoClue2, a rewritten implementation of the original idea.

LWN has a good write-up:

Zeeshan Ali spoke about GNOME’s geo-awareness, which is undergoing a rewrite. Geo-awareness consists of four major pieces, he said. The first is geolocation, or the “where am I?” question. The second is the opposite; the user wants to find a different location: a particular address, a nearby restaurant or gas station, or other points of interest. The third issue is routing, finding the best way to get between locations. Finally, there is the user interface topic: locations, points of interest, and routes all need to be presented to the user on a map.

GeoClue2 can determine location from four different sources: coordinates from GPS devices (the most accurate), the location of nearby WiFi access points (which is accurate to just a few hundred meters), the location of 3G cellular towers (which are accurate only to a few kilometers), and IP addresses (which are accurate only down to the city level).

A major shortcoming that the new service addresses is privacy:

GeoClue2 also offers better privacy controls; the previous version of the library would provide the current location to any application; with GeoClue2, GNOME will require the user to confirm location requests from each application.

Kudos to Zeeshan and the others involved for keeping the location-aware dream alive!

I haven’t personally been involved much in the free desktop world lately. This is mainly because I’ve been busy trying to change the worlds of web publishing and software development, but also because I don’t really have a desktop at the moment. Instead, I do my work with an Android tablet and a web browser with an attached keyboard. But despite that, I hope this will be picked up not only by GNOME, but by the other Linux ecosystems as well.

Building a smarter workplace

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the SmarcoS project, we have been investigating how to make workplaces smarter through sensors and context awareness. Here is a video showing what we’ve built:

The idea here is to facilitate collaboration and smoother project communications through various different tools that I’ll describe below. While this already does a lot, it is obviously only the first step on the path to making offices smarter.

Office presence

An important part of collaboration is to know who is where. Maybe some people are having a lunch break, or are working remotely? The Office Presence Display system knows these things, thanks to various sensors:

Bluetooth sensors can see smartphones and other mobile devices in the space
WiFi sensor can see what computers are connected
Google Talk sensor knows who are connected and active on their work accounts

With these, we know pretty well when you arrive to the office, and when you leave. Thanks to the sensor watching the company instant messaging system, we also know when people working remotely are available.

In addition to letting people know where the other members of the team are, this system can help with the perpetual annoyance in many companies: having to fill timesheets. We have a logger process that listens to the sensors, and logs the data into a CouchDB database. From there you can easily visualize working hours and availability trends:

In many situations it is of course not enough to know whether people are present, but also to know what they’re working on. The next component of the system helps with that.

Electronic Kanban wall

Instead of the clumsy waterfall style, more and more companies are managing their projects in tight, recurring iterations. A Kanban wall is a great way to keep track of tasks as they move through the process, and to see who is doing what, and what could be possible to do next. The One day in Kanban Land post explains the concept well.

If everybody working on a project sits in the same room, and that room is also where all decisions about the project are made, then the traditional solution of whiteboards and Post-It notes is probably the best way to visualize Kanban. But for distributed teams and more flexible work, an electronic version is a lot better option. This way everybody can see the Kanban wall in its current state from their computer, a TV in an office room, or a tablet.

Our Kanban wall implementation provides exactly that. The same wall (or, in case of multiple projects or teams, a set of walls) is available through any web browser. You can also display it on a big screen in an office or a meeting room, and control that screen with the Kinect Air Cursor.

Now, for most companies this is not meant to be the master database of projects and tasks, but instead just to be an alternative view and controlling tool to wherever your project information resides. Maybe you’re already using Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp, or OpenPSA? The Kanban wall server has a full REST API available, and so it is easy to integrate with any existing system. If a task is moved on the Kanban wall, it can be updated to the project tracking system, and vice versa.

If you’re using both systems, then the Kanban wall is also aware of the presence information. We show a differently colored border around the “person tokens” depending on the availability state. You can also set different Work-in-Progress limits for different people and states.

Interested yet?

So far we’ve only trialed the system in our own office, but are now looking for some pilot customers to try the system out. If you’re interested in making your workplace smarter, get in touch.

For those who like to tinker with these things, all the sensor software is available as open source at http://github.com/nemein.

Jolla's Sailfish OS

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This week has been a busy one for a hacker-nomad. Weekend in Paris for the JS.everywhere conference, then on Monday a talk at the Hamburg JavaScript meetup. And now I’m in Helsinki. Slush, the conference I’m attending, is the biggest start-up event in Nordic countries. But even at that, it seems the Jolla announcements of today have been able to hijack most of the buzz around the event.

Thanks to the kind invitation from the Jolla team, I will spend today in the conference. This post will include the things I learn about Sailfish, their new mobile OS. I’ve been equipped with a list of questions from the Maemo community, and will try to pry answers to some of those during the day. In the meanwhile, I recommend reading my Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora post before this one to get the background on where Jolla comes from.

What to expect from the day

Unlike with the smartphone giants, relatively little has leaked out on what Jolla will show us today. What we know is that they are working on a new OS for smartphones based on Mer and Qt. During Slush they will show the user interface and the SDK, but there should be no hardware announcements yet.

Jolla Tides has a list of various gossip about the event. We’ll see how much of that holds true.

Before the opening session

I arrived at Slush right around when the doors opened. Quite a few members of the Jolla team were there already to set up their booth and prepare for the keynote. Looking at all the familiar faces makes this feel very much like a Maemo family gathering.

The Jolla booth is right next to the main entrance. And there are stickers:

Before the event started, Jolla’s CEO Marc Dillon shared the stage in the opening press conference with other Finnish start-up notables like Peter Vesterbacka from Rovio.

Jolla has grown very quickly from a start-up to a medium-sized technology company.

I think everybody who plays Angry Birds should get a Jolla phone

The fact that Finland’s prime minister will be opening the actual event shows how important innovative new companies like Jolla are for the nation.

Opening session

Peter Vesterbacka:

This is not California. Most of the year it is cold, dark, and there is slush on the ground. But this is also an advantage. You have time to build amazing things like IRC, Linux, or Angry Birds

In addition to Finnish companies, there are also 100 Russian start-ups attending.

If you look at the markets nearby, there are places like Russia and China practically next door.

Jyrki Katainen, Finnish PM:

I’ve never before been in an event where the prime minister’s nails get painted. Innovation.

But seriously, we as a country have been losing market share in many important markets. The ways to solve this is through research and entrepreneurship. The focus on R&D was what lifted Finland from the recession of the early 90s. We want to become the largest hub of start-ups in Northern Europe. We need to create an atmosphere where new entrepreneurs and venture capitalists can meet in easier ways.

Before the keynote

Jolla’s website is finally up at http://jolla.com/. The website is also showing the event livestream:

There is also a wiki for Sailfish OS now available.

Another exciting pre-keynote announcement is that Finnish operator DNA will sell Jolla phones.

This is also interesting, if true:

Jolla launch keynote

A video of the launch keynote is available on YouTube.

2013 will not be like 2013

The whole company came on stage, and each team was introduced with words like:

Here is the team that designs the most innovative user experience. We have the team that works to put Sailfish on all sorts of hardware. All hardware, whether high or low end, has been performing extremely well with Sailfish. We’ve been responsible for finding the best engineering talent in the world. We take care of systems, tools, and automation – yeah, we build robots

Marc Dillon:

We have the world’s best community behind us. There is such a need for another player in the mobile space. People need change, people need openness

We want to be a company that sells a great user experience, a great operating system. Jolla is not a company. Jolla is a movement

Jolla wants to add more partners to the ecosystem, and to ensure it is an open ecosystem where companies can put Sailfish on different kinds of devices, and create new things on the platform.

It is a lot of fun what we do every day. I work with the greatest people in the world. The UI should also be fun for the users, for the consumers. We’re out there creating friendships and partnerships. It is all about working bilaterally.

We’ve seen a company to build a business out of apps, and another company follow them on their terms. We don’t have to do that.

The governance of Sailfish is about contributing. If a company wants to add a new technology or a standard, we’re open for that.

China is the first market for Jolla. Sami Pienimäki on stage:

We’re taking Finnish design and bringing it to China. Many people around the world have told us that what you’re trying can’t be done, that there is a Red Sea to block you. But China is the most dynamic market in the world. You need to listen carefully and be polite, and always learn. The management team is constantly on the field. You can’t outsource this, you need to feel it yourself

“China is a big country inhabited by many Chinese” - Charles de Gaulle. “No problem” - Chinese saying

Stefano Mosconi:

Our guys are really staying up until 4am to see that we have Sailfish OS booting on the new hardware. This doesn’t happen every day. This is Open Source, it is stubborness, it is great engineering. Open Source is about doing stuff.

What if you could watch the development of the OS out in the open, and adapt your application little by little, instead of having to wait for the big code drop? Sailfish is the first mobile operating system that is really open 24 hours for your contributions, and your enjoyment.

You out there are the interconnected organisms. We want to swim in the Open Source, we want to live and breath it. And when you’re in the ecosystem, you can contribute, you can affect the way things go.

The SDK is based on Qt Creator and will be shown tomorrow.

Antti Saarnio:

There will be Jolla-branded phones, always leading by example. They will be the spearhead of the Sailfish ecosystem. But partners and operators can also sell Sailfish phones on their own branding. Other smartphone vendors can also use Sailfish. We’re talking with several companies about this.

This industry is at the moment looking for change. Jolla and its partners can be the change by disrupting how the industry works. We don’t have an existing business or cost base to defend.

UI demo

Marc back on stage, showing the Jolla UI video. There was an Android logo in one of the screenshots!

Two taps on the screen activate the lockscreen. Scroll up and you’ll see status information, and finally get to the homescreen. Swiping up again goes to the apps listing.

Sailfish has true multitasking, just like N9 or N900 had. When you open an application, the homescreen will have a large widget-like tile showing it. These widgets show status data from the app, and can have controls for the app, like pausing or forwarding music you’re listening to.

This is true multi-tasking. You no longer have to go deep into an application to do something. You can leave your favorite applications open all the time.

Swiping gestures change between views inside an app.

The whole UI takes its ambience, its color scheme out of the picture you choose for the wallpaper.

Swiping down from the homescreen brings you back to the lock screen, and swiping down again locks. So the whole UI is spatial

Interview

I had a chance to sit down and talk briefly with Sami Pienimäki, Harri Hakulinen, and Carsten Munk from the Jolla team. The Maemo community (and commenters of this blog post) had provided me with a set of questions, and here are answers to some of them.

In general, the Jolla team was very happy with the demo and the keynote, stuff worked and people were interested, both on-site and online.

There is much more to the UX than was shown yet

For developers, the interesting part is the platform itself. Mer is the core OS used, with various middleware pieces coming from the Nemo project. Qt Creator is used for building applications, with the Sailfish SDK being shown tomorrow.

Qt/QML story is the main story. And then a set of Linux APIs that make sense

I asked about the Android logo in the demo video. It seems it was an easter egg that most people noticed, probably because the logo is so common nowadays. The answer:

You can run Android applications on Sailfish. But native tools are encouraged. Sailfish can run Android apps but is not Android. More integrated UI needs Qt.

And the application story stretches beyond just Qt and Android APIs. You can also deploy HTML5 apps via PhoneGap, as Qt Cordova runs already on Sailfish.

We don’t like to talk about security frameworks. We talk about user privacy frameworks. The OS will protect user privacy. User privacy framework will be open sourced I also enquired about various things about the form factor that will be relevant to developers, like screen sizes and HW/SW keyboards, but there have been no HW announcements yet – as expected. The first Jolla device will probably be out in the summer, at least for customers in China and Finland. There are ongoing negotiations also with other European channels.

There may be a N900-like developer device program, but this depends on the partners. They want to ensure a program would make sense for both them, the developer community, and the operator partners out there.

Sailfish supports chipsets from ST Ericsson, and can already run also on other chipsets, as well as a VM. ST Ericsson’s Snowball is a developer device that you can buy.

Intermission. On the way to a meeting between the sessions I walked past the former Nokia Research Center building in Ruoholahti. It felt weird to see the place without the familiar logos…

Sailfish UI session

In the evening Jolla’s design team held another session on the Sailfish UI and the design philosophy behind it. The basic ideas behind it are simplicity and playfullness.

Smartphones in general are getting bigger, but the UI has to fit your hand without having to use it with two hands or shift the device around.

Multitasking is important. Normally, the apps take a full screen, but each of them also appears as a widget when either running or pinned to the homescreen. These widgets can present UI elements or data. No chrome where you want to just show content.

The OS tries to be personal and customizable, unlike others.

We decided to abandon classical UI chrome and high-production visuals. Only using plain visuals would be boring. You need ambience. Everyone will bring their unique touch on how their UI looks. To stand in the crowd but stand out

Honesty to the medium, which in case of current smartphones means glass. So, no fake leather or 3D icons.

Vertical swipes take you between the lockscreen on the top, homescreen in middle, and app list in the bottom. Swiping left and right shows various views of an app. There are also gestures to show available actions, like changing between a VoIP or a regular cellular call. The Jolla team called these different views covers, and swiping pushing.

Even the lockscreen has some UI options available via swipes, for example to switch the phone to silent mode.

Continuous integration

Everybody in Jolla team tests their work on actual devices, and gets constant updates on them. This way you can ensure performance stays smooth even on 100$ hardware. QML helps too.

Thursday: Jolla SDK session

Unfortunately I had to fly back to Berlin in the morning, but Jens Wiik agreed to write a report for this blog from the SDK session. The story below is from him:

Today’s major Jolla event was the SDK demo.

Watching the presentation, I felt like I’d already seen the same thing ten times. And I have.

Which is awesome.

Anyone familiar with Qt and Qt Quick should feel right at home. Qt Mobility is available as well. As far as the individual app developer is concerned, Jolla isn’t making any radical departures from the existing frameworks. It remains an excellent way to develop a slick UI, regardless of whether you want to follow platform guidelines or customize everything (more on that later).

The SDK is available in source form now, and we should expect binaries for multiple platforms in the coming weeks (a minor disappointment, but no big deal). Qt Creator lets you deploy your code directly to virtual machines or real devices, and you’ll be seeing stronger integration of Sailfish UI components in the near future.

Jolla also encouraged anyone with questions about the build system to contact them. They want to make it easy to support multiple architectures, and even multiple versions of Qt.

The number one thing to remember from this demo is that Jolla is open to people joining discussions online, and in fact strongly encourages it. They said they’d be very welcoming to people who show up on IRC with a good attitude, and want to release preview code early and often so you can help make it fit your needs before it becomes a more strictly defined finished product.

At the event, anyone could have walked up to the CEO and talked to him:

Android compatibility can be achieved in three ways:

Apps developed using the SDK are Qt apps that can be run on Android.
Many Android apps will already run on Sailfish due to an included VM.
A lot of info will be available about porting apps to get native performance.

The rest of the presentation introduced Qt Quick to those who haven’t seen it before. The following screenshots illustrate how to create a simple gallery app that adapts to the user’s theme (ambience).

A basic window:

QtMobility for finding the pictures, and a gridview for displaying them:

Adding the Sailfish PullDownMenu is also just a few lines of code:

And the final result, with the menu pulled down, now used for changing sorting order in the demo’s gridview:

All in all, getting to that point took about twenty minutes, with Jolla estimating that it should take about an hour without preparation. You even get lots of animations for free by using the provided components.

My personal impressions about Qt Quick are as positive as ever. But seeing this presentation from Jolla instead of Nokia felt different - in a good way.

Thanks, Jens! And also thanks to the Jolla team for the interesting presentations and the discussions in the Supercell party last night.

Kinect Air Cursor: Let your hand be the mouse

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

If today’s Google I/O keynote where they parachuted to the conference center from a Zeppelin while streaming the whole experience on a Hangout via Project Glass wasn’t enough future for you, here is another thing.

As part of the SmarcoS project, we’ve been working on making the Kinect work as an input device for Qt applications. Basically you move your hand in the air, and are able to grab and drop things on the screen.

We call this the Air Cursor. Here is a quick video of manipulating a simple HTML5 application with it:

Now, this may not be the way you want to control the computer you’re working with the whole day. Instead, we see this sort of interface as very useful for large displays in meeting rooms and public spaces.

Instead of a touchscreen that easily gets messy and requires people to stand in front of it, with the air cursor you can use a regular TV or projector, and use your hands to manipulate the information on it. The gestures we use are natural enough that everybody we’ve had trying the tool has figured them out in matter of seconds.

Our Qt Air Cursor is free software under the LGPL license, and is built on top of the OpenNI library, with OpenCV used for recognizing the grab gestures.

I believe this is a great start for using natural interaction to control information software or multimedia applications. Simple gestures like grab-and-drop and swipes work, but there is still a lot of UX territory left to explore.

If you have ideas where this sort of new input techniques could be used, feel free to get in touch. Or simply to integrate the Qt Air Cursor library into your applications.

The Qt Air Cursor was demoed for the first time in this year’s Qt Contributor Summit in Berlin. Our simple “Grab to the Future” example game gathered quite a large audience, with the high score ending up at a respectable 18. You know you’re doing something right when the event catering staff also wants to try your input device demo.

Open Advice

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I seem to have not blogged about this, but Open Advice, our book on Free and Open Source Software: what we wish we had known when we started, was published last month.

The book was edited by Lydia Pintscher and includes essays from 42 authors, many of whom you'll recognize if you tend to go to FOSS conferences. The LWN book review concludes:

Open Advice is a book that will be helpful to those who are new to FOSS, but, because of the individual voices, styles, and tones, it doesn't read like a "how to". It could even be recommended to those who aren't necessarily interested in contributing, but are curious about what this "free software thing" is all about. It is, in short, a great book for a variety of audiences and the (mostly) two or three page essays make it easy to read, while the anecdotes and recollections personalize it. The authors, editor, and everyone else who helped should be very pleased with the result. Readers will be too.

I probably shouldn't give the ending away, but my essay on cross-project collaboration, a subject I've also blogged about, ends with:

Good luck with breaking down the project boundaries! In most cases it works if your ideas are good and presented with an open mind. But even if you do not find a common ground, as long as your implementation solves the use case for you it has not been in vain. After all, delivering software, and delivering great user experience is what counts.

The book is licensed under CC-BY-SA, and is available as free download in ePub, mobi and PDF formats, and as paperback from Lulu. The book sources are available on GitHub, patches welcome!

Open Mobile Linux, this Saturday in FOSDEM

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As mentioned in the earlier call for presentations, we're running a track on Open Mobile Linux in FOSDEM this Saturday. Room AW1.120 at the ULB campus in Brussels. From the CfP:

Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

There are several exciting things happening in this space, including the recently announced Spark tablet, open sourcing of webOS's Enyo framework and continuing interest in the Maemo platform. Saturday's program includes:

Mer ... and what you can do with it (David Greaves, 11:30-12:00)
Openmoko Freerunner - Present and Future (Niels Heyvaert, 12:00-12:30)
Towards Accelerated UI's on Mobile Linux With Power of Qt5 (Saija Eteläniemi, 12:30-13:00)
Intro to Tizen and the Future of the Community (Dawn Foster, 13:00-13:30)
buildroot: flexible building of a custom embedded system (Arnout Vandecappelle, 13:30-14:00)
Deep Dive into KDE Mobile development on N9/N950 (Laszlo Papp, 14:00-14:30)
Community Qt apps repository - way forward (Jukka Eklund, 14:30-15:00)
Maliit - the open mobile text input project (Jon Nordby, 15:00-15:30)
Nemo Mobile - How to contribute to the project (Marko Saukko, 15:30-16:00)
Introduction to the QtOnPi project (Rajiv Ranganath, 16:00-16:30)
An update on PIM storage and sync: SyncEvolution (Patrick Ohly, 16:30-17:00)
OS in the Mobile App Stores (Thomas Bonte, 17:00-17:30)
Rygel: Free and Open Mobile DLNA (Jens Georg, 17:30-18:00)

If there are any last-minute announcements or happenings that people want to discuss, we may be a ble to squeeze in a talk or two. Contact Carsten about this.

Also, if you want to chat other things (like PHPCR or CreateJS), I'll be around the whole weekend including the beer event. Drop me an SMS.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!

Call for presentations: Open Mobile Linux at FOSDEM 2012

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000

At FOSDEM 2012 we will have a devroom related to Open Mobile Linux. Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

We have the room AW1.120 with 74 seats, a video projector (VGA), wireless internet on Saturday 4th February for a total of 8 hours.

The format we will be utilizing is lightning talks of length 15 minutes with 10 minutes of questions, 5 minute changeover to next speaker. Our goal is about 15 talks during the day.

The motivation is that after each talk, you and your project will be visible to the rest of the Open Mobile Linux community and further deeper discussions into your topic with your peers can continue outside the devroom.

Please send a short biography and an abstract for your talk to carsten.munk@gmail.com by Dec 31st 2011, and we'll get back to you at latest January 7th.

We're also grateful for volunteers helping to run the devroom. Contact Carsten if you're interested.

JavaScript in Qt5

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Qt 5 is bringing JS at the same level of support as C++

—

Quim Gil, Nokia

Great news for mobile developers, as with this you can combine declarative user interfaces with the universal runtime

Where is the future for openness in mobile?

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

These are tough times for fans of open mobile environments. Android is less and less open, Symbian was closed again, HP stopped making webOS devices, and now Intel abandoned MeeGo to work with Samsung and operators instead. So, what is the community to do?

One option is to follow the lead of the big companies, hoping that Tizen works, or that Google again sees the benefit of working with others in the open.

The other is to take the matters in our own hands. There is precedent for this. Much of early Linux activity came from the efforts of the community, not on the initiative of corporate interests. And there have been OpenMoko and Mer, the latter an attempt to make a fully open version of Nokia's Maemo environment, suspended when MeeGo promised to bring the same benefits.

Well, now Mer is back.

The goals for Mer align pretty well with what the community would need:

To be openly developed and openly governed as a meritocracy
That primary customers of the platform are device vendors - not end-users.
To provide a device manufacturer oriented structure, processes and tools: make life easy for them
To have a device oriented architecture
To be inclusive of technologies (such as MeeGo/Tizen/Qt/EFL/HTML5)
To innovate in the mobile OS space

There have also been some other invitations to new potential homes for the community, ranging from openSUSE to Debian.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. But whatever we as a community do, we should ensure we look at more than just licensing.

Some notes from Desktop Summit 2011

henri.bergius@iki.fi (Henri Bergius) — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

As usual, Desktop Summit 2011 has been a lot of fun. I’ve been to most of the GUADEC and aKademy free desktop events in the past few years, but this was the first time I didn’t give a talk. Even that way, it was definitely worth spending a week in Berlin.

While much of the corporate involvement around the desktops has evaporated through some recent events, this seems to have given the developers lots more creative freedom. I’ve seen many very promising concepts from both communities.

Here are some things that happened during the week:

The roadmap for Midgard to become closer to the JCR specification solidified, including a reasonably good plan on backwards compatibility
We published the first version of GICR, generic Content Repository interfaces for GObject. Midgard will probably be the first project to implement them, but we hope others will follow. It’d be a great fit for GNOME Documents, among other things
The project to replace our own PHP frameworks with Symfony2 continued by implementing the MidCOM compatibility layer that will allow Midgard1 web applications to be run in the new environment
My work on the NoFlo flow-based programming tool got some positive attention and interest. Still lot of stuff to do
We at Nemein co-sponsored the GObject Introspection hackfest. GIR is important for bringing GNOME libraries to new environments like scripting languages and the web
Lots of ice cream got eaten. I think it will be fair if I stay out of next year’s deathmatch and focus on coaching ;-)

Tomorrow back to Helsinki for a week, then onwards to FrOSCon and Salzburg…