Joone Blog

Desktop Summit 2011

Posted on Aug 27, 2011

It has been a week since I got back home from Cambridge. I had a day trip in London before leaving for Korea, which was very nice because I got the chance to look around the royal places, museums, and parks. In particular, I was so excited to find a TINTIN shop by chance. :-)

Anyway, Desktop Summit 2011 was great: there were many great talks, workshops, BoFs, and parties as usual. It was good to meet my Collabora colleagues, WebKitGtk+ maintainers(Kov, Xan, Martin, Alex, Philippe, Diego), a Korean KDE contributor(peremen), and some new people(Adrián, Debarshi,…). I even gave a talk of webkit-clutter. If I was asked to compare this summit to the last one, I can say two things: first, GNOME and KDE talks were not duplicated so I could attend a KDE talk about a WebKit Browser and there were more common sessions GNOME and KDE folks could share together. Therefore, this conference seemed more like a true Desktop Summit. The next difference was that it’s very hard to find mobile related topics in this conference. I think that It was a big loss for the community that Nokia left MeeGo. Although Intel is trying to maintain the MeeGo Project, it seems like it’s not easy to delivery MeeGo to the mobile market alone.

webkit-clutter talk

Photo by Adrián

I gave a talk about webkit-clutter in place of Kov because he had personal business to attend to. This talk was a part of the WebKit talk: first, Martin explained the new features of WebKitGtk+ 1.4.0 and upcoming feature of the next version. Second, Alex introduced the current status of WebKit2Gtk+ and gave a demo of it, which showed us how to restart a flash plug-in without affecting browsing capability. That explains why we need the multiple process model in web browsing.  Finally. I introduced the webkit-clutter port: why the webkit-clutter port is needed, what we have done, and what features are coming. I will introduce more details about the WebKit talk in the next blog post.

Blending the web and the desktop

Xan showed a demo of installing and running a web application in GNOME3.  He said “80% of the time people use the web so 80% of GNOME effort should go to the web”, I agree with him, we need to focus on web integration with GNOME more. Anyway, Xan seemed like a web evangelist during his talk.

Other interesting talks

  • GTK 4 - the future of your favorite toolkit: Actually, nobody has started working on GTK4+, but the speakers showed a big picture of GTK+4  which will improve in areas of animations, effects, and transformations. For realizing this plan, Clutter will be used as a graphic backend, which allows GTK+ applications to use animation effects easily.
  • GNOME Shell version π: Owen Talyor Introduced GNOME Shell 3.2 with some demos such as Google Account Integration, soft keyboard, and more extensions.
  • GNOME a continent, starting from Asia:  There was a introduction of how the GNOME Asia summit started, what it has done and what it will do. I wish to attend the next GNOME Asia Summit held in Hong Kong.
  • Towards a multitouch gnome-shell: Although it will take more time to see if X.org supports multi-touch officially, Carlos showed a demo of the multi-touch gnome shell. This seemed like the first step to touch based devices.

NateOn connection manager for Telepathy

NateOn is an instant messenger which is very popular in Korea. As you can see the above picture, it supports the Linux version, but the project has not been maintained well. The problem is that NateOn was removed from the Debian archive because it built with KDE3.(ChangWoo’s blog article) As a result, Korean users can’t download NateOn from Debian repositories. Although there was a proposal to develop a NateOn connection manager for Telepathy from the GNOME Korean community, it was just an idea. Fortunately, I met a Telepathy contributor, Debarshi who is interested in this project. I shared all the information about NateOn with him so that he was able to start developing the connection manager. When it starts to work a bit, I will be able to join the project.

Currywurst

I didn’t have a chance to go to any tourist attractions in Berlin this time, but I had Currywurst which is well-known Berlin food. It was good to have it with a beer.

Visiting the Cambridge office

After the Desktop Summit, I moved to Cambridge for visiting the company HQ office. It was very nice to meet people and work at the office. I had brought along some postcards of UNESCO World Heritage of Korea for a small gift as follows:

You can see them from the bulletin board when you visit the office.

There are many tourist attractions near the office, so I went to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden and the Fitzwilliam Museum during my stay. It was very nice, so I have shared some photos here.


On the last evening, we had a team dinner in an Indian restaurant. Although British accent was a bit unfamiliar to me, I enjoyed the talks and the Tandoori chicken. Anyway, I’d like to thank everyone in the office for helping me stay and work well. Thanks!

Finally, I’d also like to thank my employer, Collabora for sponsoring my trip to Berlin for Desktop Summit 2011. I hope to see everyone at the next Guadec in A Coruña, Spain.