Saturday, is the first official day of the conference. I was tired of the trip, and disappointed about missing the pre-aKademy meeting in the local pub. But at least, it was nice to see friendly faces for breakfast in the morning. Anne-Marie and Alexis showed up, proving the taxi plan worked… even if they apparently had to complain to get it.
This year, the opening was a talk by Lars Knoll, and a very good one in my opinion. I think it was important for the community that Lars gave us more insight on how the things are working inside Trolltech, and to call for more cooperation in both way. It’s so nice to see the Qt developers so committed to the KDE platform.
The talk about Sonnet was interesting, but I was a bit frustrated about the lack of in depth information. That said it’s completely understandable, Zack being back on business on this library only recently.
The second keynote by Mark Shuttleworth was interesting, but obviously raised some controversy about release processes. Apparently he’d like to see all free software projects release in sync every six months. That looks very optimistic to think it could be even done. And even if we suppose for a second we could apply this to the whole community (good luck!), I’m not impressed at all. Doing this to such a scale looks like the best way to kill innovation in my humble opinion.
The talk about Akonadi was pretty informative, and that’s nice to see code running. In particular, demoing a plasmoid giving the state of your mailbox in real time was a very good example. If you add to that the fact that’ll be an unified and semantic rich way to get all your PIM information… nice features are coming.
Then I attended Zack talk on graphics, and his new framework named Quasar… well, it was a talk made by Zack, enough said. It rocked, and it even gave me some motivation to do crazy graphics stuff.
The KDEGames panel was a very very good idea. It gave a pretty good overview of the kdegames maintainer team, on the state of the module, where it’s going on, etc. I’d love to see more of such panels, for other modules too.
Lars Knoll had another talk, but this time about Webkit and KDE. I think he gave a pretty good picture of the current situation and of the advantages to use Webkit now. And the best of it, is that it’s not science-fiction, we already have a kpart for konqueror which use Webkit (it’s in playground right now, and completely working).
Then we got the “beautiful features” talk by our renowned serial-hugger: Aaron Seigo. As usual, great talk, he’s speaking really well… a real born speaker. He gave quite some clues on the direction we should follow to make our UIs more appealing.
And last but not least I attended Inge talk about large installation and thin client settings. That’s nice to see KDE works quite well overall in such setups, but I have to admit I share his concerns about Kiosktool. It could become one of our best asset, but right now it’s really suboptimal and probably needs rethinking.
On the evening we got our first social event. We went to a bar, got nice food and drinks. The place was really nice, and I’ve been able to chat with many people. Very good stuff… except for the music. It was overall too loud for my taste, in particular when one of the DJ played us some experimental music\^Hnoise. It was extremely loud, and unfortunately it made quite some people leave. That’s really unfortunate, the place was very well choosen otherwise, but you can’t control everything.