Desktop Summit 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
I gave a talk about webkit-clutter in place of Kov, because he had personal business to attend to. This talk was part of the WebKit talk. First, Martin explained the new features of WebKitGtk+ 1.4.0 and the upcoming features 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. That explains why we need the multiple-process model in web browsing. Finally, I introduced the webkit-clutter port: why it is needed, what we have done, and what features are coming. I will share 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 GNOME 3. He said, "80% of the time people use the web, so 80% of GNOME's effort should go to the web." I agree with him; we need to focus more on web integration with GNOME. Anyway, Xan seemed like a web evangelist during his talk.
Other interesting talks:
- GStreamer 1.0: Wim introduced the main changes in GStreamer 1.0, such as memory management, buffer metadata, and dynamic pipelines. You can get more information from the GStreamer conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
- GTK 4 - the future of your favorite toolkit: Actually, nobody has started working on GTK+ 4 yet, but the speakers showed a big picture of GTK+ 4, which will improve in the areas of animations, effects, and transformations. To realize this plan, Clutter will be used as a graphics backend, which will allow GTK+ applications to use animation effects easily.
- GNOME Shell version π: Owen Taylor introduced GNOME Shell 3.2 with some demos, such as Google Account integration, a soft keyboard, and more extensions.
- GNOME a continent, starting from Asia: There was an introduction of how the GNOME Asia Summit started, what it has done, and what it will do. I hope to attend the next GNOME Asia Summit, held in Hong Kong.
- Towards a multitouch gnome-shell: Although it will take more time to see whether X.org supports multi-touch officially, Carlos showed a demo of the multi-touch GNOME Shell. This seemed like the first step toward touch-based devices.
NateOn connection manager for Telepathy
NateOn is an instant messenger that is very popular in Korea. As you can see in the picture above, it supports a Linux version, but the project has not been well maintained. The problem is that NateOn was removed from the Debian archive because it was built with KDE3 (ChangWoo's blog article). As a result, Korean users can't download NateOn from the Debian repositories. Although there was a proposal from the GNOME Korean community to develop a NateOn connection manager for Telepathy, 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 could start developing the connection manager. Once 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 did have Currywurst, a 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 to visit 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 Sites of Korea as small gifts, as follows:
You can see them on 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 at an Indian restaurant. Although the British accent was a bit unfamiliar to me, I enjoyed the conversation and the Tandoori chicken. 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.