Guadec
Jul 22 2007
Phew. Back from Guadec. Now that I finally have a reliable connection, time to wrap up. I obviously enjoyed meeting everybody and loved most of the talks I went to. I wish I’d see younger faces too though. Perhaps the UK being too expensive was the reason. I’m also happy about the decision to not bring my camera this year.
Maybe having all the old farts in the audience was the reason for the rather lukewarm reception of Alex new pet project, Pyro desktop. If nothing else, this thing is going to rock for our UI prototypes to test on people. Having real apps running in the environment is a great plus.
Apart from Pyro, I’m hyped up to look at Clutter (Opened Hand has the best visual identity among everyone on Guadec btw). Nokia guys rolled out the new gecko based browser on the n800, hotness.
M??ir?n presented a nice talk on interaction design. Perhaps getting designers interested in free software is harder than educating hackers about design? The interest was there, examples why top down approach to software design ends up in better products too (some iphones were admired on site ;).
Demo
Things went really bad during my demo. I made the mistake of running a semi-recent opensuse Factory with Compiz on an aging thinkpad x40. Lesson learned. The talk wasn’t a disaster, I’m just sad I couldn’t have shown F-Spot and GIMP in perfect spotlight they deserve. Thanks Larry, Gabriel and Stephane for the cool things to demo.
Frederic asked about some cheat sheet for the things I did during the demo, I’ll put something together soon.