This post is long overdue, but still deserves posting: I went to GCDS earlier this month and I cannot deny the fact that I had a great time. Some remarks:

• The whole conference appeared to be nicely organized, kudos to the organizers for that.
• Having GUADEC and Akademy at the same location was quite interesting. What struck me the most was how differently both communities experience their conference. I was under the impression that KDE hackers prefer to hack at the conferences, while we GNOME people prefer to talk.
• Related to that point: GNOME people tend to spend longer hours at the parties. KDE people are nice chaps, but they go home awfully early. Other GNOME hackers observed this fact as well.
• The amount of friendship and open-minded unconstrained communication between everybody in our community is amazing, especially given the fact that most of the people there worked at competing companies. This is something that might be very hard to find in any other corporate environment
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• Spending time in the presence of all this people is extremely motivating. We should especially invite summer of code students to come to GUADEC.
• Massive thanks to all the sponsors organizing the parties, Codethink sponsoring the pre-SMASHED dinner and OpenSuse (and Guy Lunardi in particular) to sponsor the big dinner at the beach on Thursday.
• And an enormous thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of my travel and stay.

Am already looking forward to the next edition, be it with or without Akademy.

Last week at GCDS, we rented a minivan and road-tripped around the island. One Banshee hacker (Bertrand), one F-Spot hacker (me) and six guys from the GNOME art team (Garrett, jimmac, Benjamin, Andreasn, Vinicius and mpt). From a risk management point of view, this was suicide, who whould do our artwork if we drove into a ravine? Fortunately, that did't happen, we had a great day and I can write this blogpost, a tale about design.

We were already aware of it, but hadn't fixed it yet: the F-Spot preferences dialog is totally netbook unsuited. And it is extremely ugly. Behold:

During GCDS, I was approached by Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt). He wanted to redesign our preferences dialog and fix it. We had a good chat and ran over the current preferences dialog, what it does and why. Two or three hours of sketching and drawing later, he presented this:



It's a simple paper mockup, describing the current dialog, what's wrong and how we can improve it. This was then followed by a proposal for a new design. For a hacker, this is gold. We generally aren't the best user interfaces designers (let's just admit it), but we do like good design. When given a spec, we can make things happen quickly. This mockup made sense and it was sound: it follows the HIG.

I handed it over to Stephane Delcroix and an hour of hacking later, we had a new preferences dialog:



Much nicer!

The moral of the story
The moral of this story is twofold:

• For hackers it's important to realize that our artwork team isn't just a bunch of guys with an obsession for pretty icons. They also do our visual styling and help us design great interfaces (one of the things that made GNOME to be a success). If your interface sucks, turn to them.
• For designers: we love you and even if you don't feel like coding, a simpel well thought-out mockup can have a huge effect. If you feel stuff is suboptimal, go to the maintainers and talk to them, usually it's not a big change, but with a large result. And generally maintainers love UI suggestions, if they make sense. And as a shameless plug: we at F-Spot really love UI designers, we know it isn't what it should be and if anyone wants to help with these kind of things, do get in touch.

It's this kind of cooperation that makes the GNOME community such a nice place to be in.

Officially a computer scientist
As of today, I have graduated and I am now officially a master of computer science, with a specialization in software engineering. Awesome! I graduated magna cum laude (with an average of 81.52%) and scored 18.5/20 on my masters thesis. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with this.

What's next? After much indecision as to whether I'd like to find a job in the open-source (GNOME) world or do something else, I've accepted a PhD offer at the Distrinet Research Group of K.U.Leuven. GNOME hacking will stay a spare-time activity for now, though I might change that decision in a few years. Exciting times ahead!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
Tomorrow I'll be flying out to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I'll be spending 11 days in Gran Canaria. I will be arriving in the late afternoon, so that shouldn't stop me from dropping by at the Canonical hosted opening party. Really looking forward to another GUADEC, Istanbul 2008 was really great. Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip, without them, this would not have been possible.



I won't be giving a talk, but if anyone wants to have a chat about F-Spot (or any other subject), come and find me!

Often being the subject of rants and critics (often undeserved), Pulseaudio hasn't won the hearts of everybody yet. But today it has won mine:

Getting Pulseaudio to work over Bluetooth was simply a matter of connecting and moving the stream. Trivial you might say.

A big congratulations to Lennart Poettering and Bastien Nocera for getting the two to work together (and probably others involved as well, credits to them as well). Guys, remind me to buy you a drink at GUADEC!

Am currently flying back from Istanbul to Brussels, with an in-between stop in München. Looking over the fluffy clouds beneath me, I wrote down some of my thoughts on the latest GUADEC:

• It was my first GUADEC, so I cannot compare, but this one was awesome!
• Kudos to the local team, very friendly and helpful people.
• Kudos to Baris for organizing it all, must have been an insane task, but it was executed well.
• Istanbul is a wonderful city, that never sleeps. Jackhammering at night is the most normal thing in the world.
• Meeting all these wonderful people is an enormous source of motivation and inspiration
• Oh btw, did somebody mention we hired Stormy Peters as our new CEO? Stand up Stormy! *applause* Meeting Stormy and talking to her was very pleasant and gave me great confidence on her suitability for the task, as well as the future of GNOME.
• Parties on boats rock. Totally.
• Lots of people stayed for a few days of tourism after the conference, leading to pleasant meetups in the evenings
• Swimming near ferry terminals is a good way to lose your sandals. These boats, even from a large distance, create huge waves. Good thing I managed to recover them, saving us from a barefoot walk home
• Turkish people are very friendly, apart from some crooked taxi drivers (which you recognize quite easily).

In all, I'm very satisfied, hope to see all of you back soon.

A really great GUADEC just ended. I will post my thoughts later, when I get back home. For now however, I have some images to start dreaming. Posted while drinking a nice cup of tea on top of our hotel.

Spending a few more days in Istanbul for tourism. Anyone who feels like joining, let me know.