Ok, here we go again… I woke up early to attend talks, but didn’t manage to go to sleep early. =)
I ended up in a local restaurant with a gang of fellow hackers, including coolo, David, and Peter. The food was quite nice… except maybe one dish, it seems I was the only one able to eat it, but since I didn’t like it I ended up quickly. We got back to the computer labs and stayed here until the aKademy team asked us to go back to the residence because well… they wanted to go back home and have some sleep. ;-)
Marketing For Geeks
The first t\^Hshow was about marketing as the text implies. The speakers were Waldo Bastian, and Aaron “ola!” Seigo. It covered some simple things we can do at our level and with the available tools. It was really an awesome talk! I hope that it’ll make some of us think more about our own behavior when we communicate with people. That’s really a shame that we make such great software, but that nobody knows about it. Yes, you’ve read it : nobody. Mostly, only geeks know about it, that’s a fact, we’re really a tiny percentage of the desktop market. But if we think about it, talk about what we do to people, it’ll spread!
The State of KDE Bindings
I had a nice insight about the KDE Bindings thanks to Richard Dale. It was really interesting and exposed some misconceptions we could have about binding development. There’s still some points where you have to be careful like instance ownership (in order to get memory management right) or the differences on features between the source and target languages. He gave some examples based on Ruby… it’s really temptin for me to learn this language.
Collaborative content for the masses
This one was about Wikipedia, it was really interesting to know how the project has been created, how it is evolving, which are their future challenges, etc. Nice talk, I’m really looking forward for widespread Wikipedia use in KDE.
Novell Desktop Migration Study
I found this talk far more interesting than the previous one on the topic. We had a real explanation about the methodology used to evaluate the product. It gave some hints on how to build your own portable lab to make such studies. We would really need small local teams with portable labs like this one to collect usability data about our software. That’s would be really interesting.
Too bad that this study is a bit old now, it was using a now outdated Suse distro with only KDE 3.2 on it, but well we’ve made some important changes concerning usability since then.
Oxygen
That’s the last talk I attended, and it’s the last talk of the Developers Conference. It really looks like a great icon project it has a really refreshing and professional look, without looking boring! But well, I’d prefer to not explain this with too many details since it’s surely better to be sure that it’ll still be fresh when it’ll be released (hopefully with KDE 4).
After all those talks I attended the kdelibs/kdebase structure BoF. As Danimo already explained, we’ll surely have a new foundation stack, which basically means that we’ll have an even better framework. One of the goals being to make it easier for people to grasp the API for contributing or ISV developments. Of course a transition strategy has also been discussed in order to make all of this work as smooth as possible.
Of course… I’m still planning to go to sleep early today, but I still need to go for dinner! That’s all folks.