[dot] Closing Day at the Release Event

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1200936055/

From: Jonathan Riddell <>
Dept: flocking-together
Date: Monday 21/Jan/2008, @09:20

Closing Day at the Release Event
================================

   After the star studded talks of the main event day, the final day of
the KDE 4.0 Release Event returned to the un-conference format of small
group talks, demos and discussions.  Dot News listened in to some of the
sessions, read on for brief summaries.
    Discussing KDE 4 over some Irn Bru
     Benjamin Reed (RangerRick) started the day with a Q&A session on
the Mac port of KDE.  The Mac builds of KDE
[http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/KDE_on_Mac_OS_X] are
available and work reasonably but there are a number of issues to be
sorted yet as well as some bugs that have appeared with Qt using the
latest version of OS X so it is not recommended for everyday use.  Some
unresolved issues include the duplication of Strigi against Apple's
Spotlight and lack of a Solid backend.  He hopes to have stable builds
available for KDE 4.1.

     Later in the day Holger Schröder demonstrated KDE on Windows
[http://windows.kde.org/].  Currently the underlying libraries are not
stable enough for everyday use and as with the Mac port, the Windows
team expect to have a stable release along with KDE 4.1.

     A session was held with the plan to turn this event into an annual
conference of KDE in the Americas.  Locations being looked at include
Mexico and Jamaica.  Following the success of this event, there seems to
be a good level of confidence that KDE could support a second annual
large conference.

     Jason Harris demonstrated KStars, the professional quality
astronomy application.  He uses it in his job as an astronomer to map
his way around the milky-way from his university's telescope in Chile. 
KStars has this week proved itself as an excellent demonstration app, in
a few movements it is possible to show complex physics in a way
understandable to all.

     KNetworkManager is currently undergoing some re-development with
ports needed to both KDE 4 and the work-in-development NetworkManager
0.7.  A session was held on the usability of the application since there
will soon be many more network options supported than currently and the
existing user interface will not scale.  A design was mapped out which
should be able to make sense of the new functionality.

     The technical preview of Amarok 2 was demonstrated to excited
masses.  The user interface has been entirely redesigned from the stable
release with context view set centre screen and the playlist turned from
a grid layout to a more space efficient custom list with album headers. 
When asked how the demo went, developer Leo said, "the audience was
wowed into submission by Amarok's coolness".
   Continuing the OpenDocument Discussion out of Hours
     Alexander from OpenOffice talked about some of the possibilities of
OpenDocument including dedicated C libraries to process the format which
could be shared between apps.  KOffice developers discussed plans for an
OpenDocument API in kdelibs to make use of the format available
throughout KDE.

     At the KPilot BoF developers Ade (being afraid to touch code at his
advanced years) and Jason started discussing the architecture and
integration layers between kernel, USB and underlying libraries.  They
attracted the attention of two likely new developers in the progress.

     A developer from the VLC (VideoLan) project gave us their
experience of porting their cross-platform video application to Qt. 
They are considering making a Phonon backend of VLC which would allow
for using the same multimedia framework on all platforms.

     When the day drew to a close we celebrated with KDE 4 wine
[http://franz.keferboeck.info/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=525] and
enjoyed some entertainment at the karaoke bar, if you are brave there
are photos and videos
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Release+Event] available.

     There were also big name visitors from the Linux community
including Andrew Mortan and developers with NVidia and AMD as well as
many from within our hosts, Google.  This event has not only been a
successful celebration of the start of our KDE 4 series, it has also
been an excellent opportunity to meet and talk with a section of our
community who have been unable to get to our European conferences.  Many
thanks to Jeff, Troy, Wade and the other organisers.