Today is the first day of the developers conference, I had hard time to wake up at 7am since I stayed awake discussing with a bunch of hacker until 1:30am… Aaron was there, which is good news, I was wondering if he was trying to join the ocean swimming with migrating turtles or some other weirdness. Well, anyway I managed to wake up and attend lot of talks…
Trolltech Keynote
Just like last year the speaker was Eirik Chambe-Eng. He covered what happened within Trolltech since last year, and in particular the fact that Qt4 is out, and GPL on Windows. I’m still thinking that he’s a quite good speaker! It’s informative, but he has really good ideas to make his talks entertaining which is a very good thing. Thanks to him, we’ve seen some great photos of Matthias Ettrich. :-)
Multimedia API for KDE 4
Nice talk about the new KDEMM, which needs a new name obviously. I liked this talk, it was well structured, and has really good ideas, in particular the fact to have several backends available (aRTs, gstreamer, NMM, etc.). It’s clearly not targetting pro-audio, which surely requires a tight coupling to a particular framework for performances anyway. Here it’s more about having a nice API, easy to use for multimedia applications (jukebox, video players, etc.). Moreover it’s really planned to hide the tedious work to the user, and autodetect or auto-configure for him as much as possible. Finally, it seems that the NMM backend will have a separate GUI application to allow using it’s more advanced feature (since it’s a fully network enabled multimedia framework, I’ve been really impressed last year by the NMM guys talk!).
Asynchronous Programming with Qt - Pitfalls and Techniques
This talk was very interesting, and obviously very technical. It gives some insight on how to design asynchronous API, and which points are proven to be difficult while building this kind of API. Liked it, Till and David really master their subject.
Multithreading in Desktop Applications
It was nice, to have this one grouped with the asynchronous programming one. It gives another aspect on how responsiveness can be achieved, but through the use of thread. Mirko even introduced the ThreadWeaver API, which looks like something very convenient to use.
Beauty and magic for KDE developers (to be continued)
We can’t go to eat to the cafeteria anymore it seems, so we have to walk outside the University to find a restaurant… walking under the sun. I teamed up with Kalle, Till, David and Peter for lunch. We basically followed Kalle who knows the general direction to find restaurants… and we found one. It was nice, not very costly but we waited a looooot before being able to eat. Then, I was a bit in a hurry to go back to the university to attend the talk. We arrived very late, but unfortunately (or fortunately, depends on the point of view) this talk didn’t happen because Zack had some issues with his laptop, which really sucks. But on the bright side it has been reschedule, so hopefully it’ll take place! I’m prepared to attend!
Aaron’s School of Designer
It was basically a tutorial about Qt Designer 4. It was nice to have some insight about some of the changes. Looks like it improved a lot, I’m looking forward to using it… which might not happen soon since I’m currently not heading at GUI development. =)
M.2, a generic management / deployment / monitoring framework
I admit that I’ve been a bit disappointed by this one. But, to be fair, I guess that the timing was bad, the project is really too young. The presentation by itself surely lacked a state of the art part, since it wasn’t referring to any other similar framework. I was hoping for some demo of the communication layer… too bad.
Since it was extremely short, I ran to another talk that was taking place in parallel…
Scribe
Not much to say about this one, since I missed the beginning, but this looks like a nice and flexible API to handle text. As David pointed out it might miss some features for style handling though…
That’s all for today, I’ll surely try to go to sleep “early” today, since I don’t want to be sleepy at tomorrow talks. I have to hunt for food first though! ;-)