Blog

I spent the last week in Boston for the GNOME UI hackfest and summit. It went pretty well and it was great to see so many enthusiastic hackers from all over the world working together.

The highlight for me was a talk by David Richards about the user experience in the City of Largo project. He is a sysadmin for a large city-wide installation of Linux and GNOME which uses NoMachine to access a remote shared server. He had many surprising insights into how GNOME is perceived by regular people. For example he reported that most people just don't understand files and folders and have no idea how to move content from one application to another. And somethingty percent of his users don't know how to right-click. The upside of his talk was that he is successfully using Compiz for a full composited desktop even over a remote session and it is very well received by his users. This bodes will for a Clutter-based desktop.

We also had a session in the summit about canvases. It was entitled 'Canvas Deathmatch' but it turned into almost unanimous agreement that we should use Clutter as the standard GNOME canvas. There was surprising support for just requiring a working OpenGL implementation for GNOME 3.0 to facilitate the fancy new panel and WM discussed during the hackfest.

There was another talk by some of the Novell employees about Linux on netbooks and they were specifically trying to rally people to support the Moblin project.

I was also able to use a lot of the time to make a Clutter version of Aisleriot (which is a collection of card games in GNOME games). It replaces the custom Cairo-based canvas with Clutter and has some animations for flipping over cards. I got a chance to talk to Jason Clinton who maintains GNOME games and he seemed pretty keen to get more of the games using Clutter. He had already started work on Clutterizing Gnometris and he had no objection to just dropping support for the non-GL versions of the games. Here is a screencast of my progress so far. It still has some glitches to work out and I'd like to make the animations more fancy.