Utah Open Source Conference 2009 day one

Today was the first day. Setup went fairly smoothly. I set up wired network with the switch and two boxes Ian Geiser sent me to use, but the wired network was not working (I later connected their wired network just into one machine and it worked fine, so dunno). Luckily they had wireless in those little boxen, so that got them online to demo kde 4.3 kubuntu. I realized how important web access is to kde during that time though, the microblogging, comic, weather, etc. applets all need web access obviously. But so did ghns to get providers of comics for the plasmoid, etc. etc. I think I take web access for granted most of the time.

There was some good feedback at the conference. I heard lots of people saying they used to love kde but haven't used it since 4.0 came out. I left all those people with hope in 4.3 that they hadn't tried besides there on the demo boxen. I met a few kde fans which was pretty cool. Showed amarok, kde-edu apps (kstars, kig, kgeography, klettres to some guys that mentioned they had kids), kmahjongg, and plasma of course. I also showed kwin present windows and it's ability to filter by typing, so many people don't know about that useful feature! I can definitely see where promotion can get us many many more users testing, using, playing with and enjoying the wonderful stuff we contribute our efforts to. Tomorrow should be fun, will give more report tomorrow probably.

I think the only downer about the day was that there was a huge window right behind our row of tables, which gave so much glare the screens were barely visible. That and irc was blocked, hehe.

ghns meeting

Yesterday morning we had another meeting in #ghns on freenode. It went very well, there was a much better turn out than last week, and since we had been hacking on things this week a lot more thought was brought into it I think. The plan on techbase got some ui features added to it based on feedback from users, and some developers. Josef was at the meeting and will be adding some things to HotStuff (the implementation of dxs running on newstuff.kde.org) to support paging which will be good. Especially since Eugene and some others thought of a way to do paging that's transparent to the user. We'll load two pages of data, show it in the list, and when the user scrolls to the second page of data, we'll load the third page and so on. Hope that will turn out feeling natural and cool =) We've also decided to leave the filter box in for local filtering (but rename it to Filter) and make server-side search available via a search button. Some complaints about the current method of "sorting" were raised also, since it doesn't really sort anything, just grabs 3 different feeds from the server (highest rated, latest, and most downloads). I'm thinking of making those tabs, but that's not optimal either. If anyone has a good idea how to represent that with the ui we have, that would be cool. Anyway, all in all it was a great meeting, and though there's lots more to do, we are all optimistic.

Hopefully in the next couple days I'll have some real stuff to show, so stay tuned.