Today I went to Den Haag, NL, where the Guadec conference takes place this week. They laughed a bit at the registration desk when they saw KDE on my badge, but let me in anyhow.

The first talk was about Evolution. They gave an overview of the last year which seemed to me like regular bug fixes and implementing some new features. They’ve rewritten some parts, and rewritten an IMAP library, called IMAPX. It supports IDLE, multiple connections and that kind of stuff. Which made me a bit depressed, because we have written something similar the past year or so too. With a simple mail we might have joined forces, maybe making something better than the two implementations we have now.

Anyhow chatted a bit with them about the past after the presentation and exchanged some business cards ( luckily i still had my Akonadi-cards, yay). I really hope we can do better – communication wise – in the future (from both sides).

Gnome Shell is basically a bit of window management, the interface around alt-tab and their activities interface. It looked nice and easy to use. Although we discovered quite a few inconsistencies in the new interface and some weird design decisions, like no good fallback for unsupported video cards and no connections at all with the gnome theming, Anyhow, I was impressed and think many of the gnome users will be happy with it.

The state of the union was a fun show, without much concrete content. It was just a pleasant break in the middle of the day and a very good laugh.

I’ve also been to some kind of a BOF like presentation where they were discussing the current state of the gnome. I managed to take a picture of a slide that says it all:

So, while KDE is just getting started with making a desktop, Gnome is Done :). Anyhow, the context is that he thinks a bit more should be invested in the Platform part of Gnome. He made some valid points about for example the fact that new developers are somewhat more attracted to develop for the mobile platform and it is hard to find devels for desktop, due the somewhat high entry level regarding setting up a devel system and learning the tools.

He wants to tackle that by working towards a simple SDK which can get new devels up and running quickly. That kind of opened up my eyes regarding the work that Aaron Seigo does for plasma. Probably with the somewhat same motivation. I should check it out.

Finally I went to a presentation from Jake Edge from lwn.net. Although a bit boring in regard of the presentation skills, he gave a nice, good and – in my eyes – complete overview of the things which you have to deal with regarding the promotion of your Open Source Project. Ranging from looking at what the minimal requirements for your website to how to write a press release which will have a good chance to get published. Maybe no surprising items, like they are all logical an we all know them, but still a good reminder about what I did wrong in the past and what some projects are still doing wrong.

Had a nice day there in Den Haag. Nice presentations and nice venue!