Stuff about Steph

First day of the GUADEC main track, and we already have some great news about the future of GNOME. Below is my version, which means that it presents only the conferences I've attented. Lot of cool stuff is also happening in the other rooms!

Luis Villa started this morning, with a very nice conference about what is GNOME made of, the people behind it, and the way it's going. To keep GNOME the best great platform it is, he suggested to move toward the web technologies, and embrace the web as much as we can, demonstrating the capabilities of Javascript to execute the same app in a browser and on the desktop. So the whole point I got was that wild idea that we should develop toward the web and focus a lot more on that. It is definitely a good idea IMHO, but that also suggests that we should drop our "traditionnal" tookits to develop new applications, which is scary, but makes sense since HTML + CSS + Javascript are also capable of great things, as long as you know how to use them. Whatever I got wrong or right, Luis is open to criticism and questions, feel free to contact him if you have constructive feedback about that.

Then came the GNOME 3 Shell talk lead by Owen Taylor, demonstrating the progress made by the Shell since last year since he initially introduced it at GCDS. So we really realized how many improvements landed in just a year, with the new dialogs, app menu, looking glass, and the overall greatly improved appearence. They still have some nice items left on their roadmaps (some work on the tray is expected), but it's already pretty usable and has some cool features in (the inline Empathy integration is changing my life).

I attented right after the "Shell Yes!" talk by William Jon McCann, with some very nice, philosophical introduction, and he had chosen some very nice quotes to explain how we must focus on the beauty of our software, and bringing better applications the world. Then he gos us by surprise, and revealed a terrific roadmap :

Yep, you can read too, they're thinking about making GNOME 4.0 a GNOME OS. And now I'm getting +3000 visistors cause I both mentionned "GNOME 4.0" and "GNOME OS" (and twice more now). Note that this is just their personnal vision, and it not approved anywhere else, and I believe the idea hasn't spread yet. Anyway, we got some cool mockups after, which I believe are maintainted up here : http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/, make sure to check it out, it looks very nice and keeps being improved.

This afternoon I attented the "GNOME State of the Union" talk by Fernando Herrera and Xan Lopez, which was an excellent, hilarious presentation about what happenned to GNOME in the past 10 years, from the death of CORBA, Bonobo, GNOME Panel, to the new dconf, Clutter and all the shiny stuff. Make sure to check the videos when available, you're going to have a great time.

The "Clutter : State of the Union" by Emmanuele Bassi was very instructive, introducing new features for Clutter 1.4, constraints, actions, effects, plus COGL and performance improvements, which means that Clutter is going to get even more awesome by the end of the year, definitely an excellent toolkit.

The last talk was by some more Intel folks who demonstrated their pet projects : Dax, a Clutter-based SVG library, Mash, a library to use 3D models right inside Clutter (3D models + 3D lightning + animation = ❤), and finally another smart guy from Intel taught us the basics (and great rules) of real-time small game programming.

That was an excellent day at GUADEC, make sure to watch the live VP8 stream by Fluendo, and maybe follow me on identi.ca, which is the compressed, real-time version of my daily GUADEC reports. Tomorrow, we're doing the Summer of Code projects talk, don't miss me us!