Michael Wood

Hello from Guadec !

For those of you who don’t know, GUADEC is the annual GNOME User and Developer Conference. It’s about meeting up with all the wonderful people who are involved in GNOME, From Tomboy notes, Avhai, nautlius to inkscape and other really great applications that people use every single day.

It’s also about bringing together all the different GNOME projects from countries all over the world; with everyone together lots of hacking has been going on and many ideas, bugs and features have been floated.

We’ve also been graced with some excellent talks about the future of gnome and the IT industry at large as well as the exciting things that are happening within the current projects.
I also went to some very informative talks on accessiblity in GNOME and ways to make sure applications are accesible and one especially interesting to me “concept to concrete” which described the process of taking an electronic device from the specifications to the end product - the two guys who present this Vincent and Daniel (?) made it very enjoyable.

Here are a couple of things I think will really be infulencing the next GNOME desktop:

• Integration between web services (like mugshot, flickr, google services etc) and the GNOME desktop being developed mainly by redhat
• Integrating Avahi to more applications to allow them to talk to each other over the network for example; Fspot might be able to share photos in the same way as you can do in rhythmbox (or other music player) with DAPP and your music collection.
• Collaboration there are many applications which are developing collaboration into.their applications; for example Inkscape will allow you to share a document and collaborate with it in real time, the same idea with Abi Word, not just this, you can setup the collaboration currently by using a server client model or by using the jabba protocol, others to come i’m sure. Avahi will be involved in this too by letting people find each other on the network without having to input any details (ip address/port etc)
• Giver - this is another tool to seemlessly share information, one application of this has been to allow a user to effectively drag a tomboy note across to another computer/user which is an excellent way of sharing notes.
• Gstreamer applications seem to be coming on really well; Programs like Elisa the gstreamer based media center, pitivi the much needed video editing application and Istanbul screencast / screen recorder.
• Bluetooth stuff is also getting better and better with new gui’s that allow you to actually use the functionality that is already in the Linux kernel and GNOME

Other cool things at GUADEC this year were the OpenedHand and Collabora’s party which was held at “Walkabout” and featured a lot of free beer. Lugradio also did simular on Thursday and a good time was had by all.

Lots of Swag was given out too, we had 2 GB USB stick with GUADEC stuff on as well as being bootable Mandriva which was a great idea as it let people try out things like Elisa on their laptops. We also had 3 t-shirts to give away - Meamo, Access linux and the very cool GUADEC offical tshirt. In with that were stickers for GNOME and Mandriva, Mandriva pen, Ubuntu Feisty CD, Ubuntu pen,Fedora 7 DVD, Google paper notebook, Linux Magazine and the special GUADEC bag that it all came in. I ended up with 5 Free tshirts !
Overall GUADEC was a great success and I would like to thank My brother (thos), Paul Cooper especially for all their hardwork as well as all the excellent speakers and all my other co-volenteers