Sebastian Kügler, The Finishing Touch
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KDE, while being technically integrated and rather complete isn't so in terms of being a product. KDE, and Free Software components in general are to be considered a raw product, which augmented with a device, installation, support and possibly a handbook makes for a whole product, i.e. something that a consumer would buy, something that covers a complete need ("I want to be able to surf the web") rather than being just one component needed.
While the software side of the Free Desktop has come a long way, there are still very little products using these technologies in the real world. And to be perfectly honest, most of these offering are way below of the potential a software package like KDE can deliver.
So what is going wrong here, what is the true potential of a finished product based on KDE? What are the steps necessary to be taken to bring KDE to the consumer / customer? The presentation outlines answers to the question how state of the art desktop technology such as KDE can be made into a finished product suitable for end users.
2009-07-06 16:15-16:45
Albert Astals Cid, Poppler
Albert Astals Cid, PopplerThis conference will touch all aspects of the poppler library. Ranging from a explanation about the origin of the name, to how poppler got created as a freedesktop project passing by why it was decided to use xpdf 3.0 code as the base for it. Other interesting topics will be why it was necessary to create it and all the features poppler has over xpdf and the plans of future.2009-07-05 12:30-13:00
Aleix Pol, KDevelop 4
Aleix Pol, KDevelop 4 Soon we will hopefully get a new KDevelop 4 and we would like to present it directly to the KDE developers and the community overall on the Akademy. Since our last version, lots of changes have happened, we think we are creating a useful tool for C++ developers and we want to present it to the KDE community so that we can all take advantage of that. KDevelop has been redesigned from scratch and we even have some features that are unique among all the IDE solutions on the market. and we strongly think they can be very useful to the developer because of its integration to the whole core development stack to make the development even more acessible (language, vcs, buildtool, documentation, etc.) without repeating the earlier versions mistakes. KDevelop has got a new language architecture that is capable to abstract many language features, and not only provide a very powerful code completion, but to get the IDE to understand the code the user is working on, and assist him in many ways. An important aim is to assist the user on the level of programming that makes it hard (Language semantics, inter-file relationships, etc.), which is especially helpful when exploring new code-bases, or when searching for errors. Since the developer can't work with the language alone, KDevelop provides a full integration with different build tools like CMake (Including code-completion and semantics) or Custom Makefiles. That way the user is not only comfortable when developing using his language but by managing his project. There are many other components that KDevelop integrates, like in VCS software, where we can work with many different VCS tools transparently from our solution making it easy to the developer to do some easy tasks. We can integrate as well many different documentation systems to make it easy to the developer to know about what he is developing on and of course we can integrate different debuggers to work with the whole environment in a user friendly way. As a KDE project we would be proud to be able to present it to the rest of KDE developers on this summer's Akademy, we think they would take advantage of KDevelop and we want it to be embraced by the developers. For all these reasons, we are really looking forward to present it on the Akademy. 2009-07-05 15:45-16:15
Alexandra Leisse, Managing the Unmanageable, or: Community Building 101
Alexandra Leisse, Managing the Unmanageable, or: Community Building 101 Nearly every software project relies on its community for feedback, bug reports and word-of-mouth advertising. Unfortunately, having a strong user base does not automatically lead to a strong and successful community. How can you turn users into contributors? How can you avoid negative publicity? How can you deal with controversial opinions? How can you build a strong team from people spread over various timezones? How can you ensure that diversity is beneficial instead of harmful? How can you turn your project into a welcoming place? These are the questions nearly every project runs into when it starts growing. It becomes more complex when smaller projects integrate into a larger community like Gnome and KDE or those around Linux distributions: they will have to compete for contributions against the bigger and maybe more appealing sub-projects and tie new members to their base. This presentation will give an introduction to the basic rules of community building, look at internal processes of communities, show you tools that help you manage your project's perception and provide you with resources on the subject. 2009-07-05 10:30-11:00
Andreas Aardal Hanssen, The evolution of Widgets in Qt
Andreas Aardal Hanssen, The evolution of Widgets in Qt Qt's widgets are the basic building blocks for any type of GUI application, and through many major releases the basic model is still the same as it was 10 years ago. In parallel to QWidget's stable development, there have been several experiments with a different widget model: the light-weight Canvas model, known since Qt 4.2 as Graphics View. In this presentation, Andreas will present the evolution of each widget model, comparing QWidget to QGraphicsItem. He will then talk about the future plans Qt Software has for each of the two, and how widgets are likely to be constructed in the future. 2009-07-06 10:00-10:30
Ariya Hidayat, Special FX with Graphics View
Ariya Hidayat, Special FX with Graphics View Graphics View becomes one of the prominent features of Qt these days, not only because it powers KDE's Plasma, but also because it serves as the backbone for next-generation user-interface developments. Several additional features for Graphics View, targeted for next Qt release, are being researched inside Qt Software. One of them is the ability to apply a set of special effects to any graphics items. Coupled with the animation framework, this allows a Graphics View-based application to have much more exciting and interesting user interactions, for example so that the view gets blurred to make an item stand out, or for the items to cast show a shadow, or even a tinting effect to get the attention of the user. This talk will highlight the idea, the background, the implementation prototype, and future directions of the graphics effect features for the upcoming Qt release. 2009-07-06 10:30-11:00
Artur de Souza, What's up about Plasma-MID
Artur de Souza, What's up about Plasma-MID Today we have a lot of different netbooks out there but all of them fail to deliver a good user experience because the people behind netbooks tend to think as it being a small desktop or a big 'pocket computer'. Plasma-MID is all about this: deliver the desktop shell of the future (Plasma) and a custom experience without losing identity with the 'full version' of KDE. During my talk I'll show different concepts and ideas taken from various existing MID devices and where their interfaces failed to give the user an ideal experience. I'll also go through the most common use cases and show the results of research regarding linux, netbooks and what really matters to the end user. The current status of linux based netbooks and the current status of the Plasma-MID project will also be shown, with a live demo and explanations about the solutions for the problems we found during our research. 2009-07-06 11:30-12:00
Bastien Nocera, Bluetooth on Linux
Bastien Nocera, Bluetooth on Linux Bluetooth, the king, the technology, the novel and the T-shirts. We're getting better, and better integrated than before, and nothing can stop us. Introducing the new technologies associated with Bluetooth, and what we're doing about it. 2009-07-05 12:00-12:30
Daniel G. Siegel, Andre Klapper, GSoC
Daniel G. Siegel, Andre Klapper, GSoC For several years now, GNOME has participated in Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) contest, providing university students an opportunity to work on open source projects during the summer and to get some experience with culture and processes of the open source world (and some money of course). GNOME also participated in Google's first Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) in 2007/2008 for highschool students with much smaller tasks compared to GSoC. Many members of the GNOME community offered their time and knowledge to empower the students to successfully finish their projects. Lots of code has been written, but how successful has this been? How much work was actually included in GNOME and shipped by default? What are the reasons why code was not used in the end? Was the GNOME project successful in embracing these students and keep them interested in continuing to work and contribute in our community, or were most students only interested in experience and/or money and disappeared after the project was done? How can we improve the situation and keep participants in our community? In their talk, André C. Klapper and Daniel G. Siegel will try to answer these questions, analyze the cause why projects succeeded or not and if they were included into GNOME. 2009-07-05 17:00-17:45
Daniel Molkentin - Qt Creator
Daniel Molkentin - Qt Creator As developers we are all used to a certain set of tools that helps us with the burden of keeping track of a lot of source code as well as with extending complex applications or hunting bugs quicker. Unfortunatly, C++ developers had no stable, native IDE to do Qt-based cross-platform development. Instead, most people were working on Qt projects with their favorite editor, supplimented by a hand full of custom scripts. So while the C++ language got bearable thanks to Qt, the actual development process was still cumbersome, making it particulary hard to enter the world of Qt development. To remedy this, Nokia Qt Software released Qt Creator, the easy to use tool dedicated to cross-platform C++ development with Qt. With recent improvements to the CMake build system and support for Subversion and Git, Qt Creator is a natural fit also for KDE application development. The debugger integration makes using GDB fun again, featuring introspection of Qt types and widget hierachies. It also comes with a comfortable and reliable realtime code completion which just works for all libraries involved, making library indexing obsolete. As Qt Creator development follows the "release early, release often" paradigm, this talk will not only show how to leverage these features to develop KDE-related applications, but will also present new features of Qt Creator 1.2 and beyond. Besides sharing how to get involved with Qt Creator development, the speaker also looks forward to interesting discussions on sharing efforts with other development related projects in KDE. 2009-07-05 16:15-16:45
