I’ll not talk about GCDS on this post: others said everything one could tell about the conference! 🙂 It was really awesome: meeting KDE people is just an awesome experience. It was good also to see more brazilians in the conference (after FISL, the brazilian kde community seems to have started to grow or at least organize more itself) . Ah, during GCDS I joined for the first time the e.V. assembly and it’s really good the feeling that I’m helping the KDE community a little bit more. KDE is all about it’s community and it’s community is great! Well, enough with the sentimental part. Let’s talk about the theory behind the code of plasma-netbook.

Newspaper Activity ready for the presentation

During GCDS I did a presentation about this project, explaining a little bit our ideas and why we had them. I also used the time to definetely fix the name of the project to plasma-netbook (instead of plasma-mid). This was done to reflect the objective of the project. We created the project to avoid the idea of putting a full desktop inside a netbook (using concepts that don’t fit well on the device), and we can’t fall into the same problem trying to have something for MID devices also.

It was good to see the interest of the community around the project and also to see that some vendors are already contacting us to ship their devices with our netbook shell. Great also to see that the Kubuntu team will have a “Kubuntu Netbook Remix” project and if we can deliver in time our stuff, they want to use it on their project.

One thing that is also really important about the project is the fact that we want to create a new user experience on these devices. KDE is not about a specific project anymore, it’s all about the user experience: starting on the desktop shell and going far away on social interaction, media, etc. Thinking about this we want to improve this experience by delivering great features such as the open Social plasmoid, the new wikipedia runner and others that will come with the time. This way, when some random user buys his brand new netbook, running KDE he will enter our world, he’ll start to fell part of something more and that was the strategy that saved a fruit company that makes computers and devices (they create a new experience around their devices). I really hope that the community and also vendors can see the potential that we have in our hands and start helping us on this journey and to believe that it’s possible.

If you want to read the paper that I wrote about this, download it here and also my presentation here. You can also check Marco’s last post about the current status of the project.

During my presentation I announced the Qt Labs America project and I hope to give more news for you really soon….ah, and the talk about Qt layouts (including live demos of anchor layouts and animated layouts) by my fellows Caio and Eduardo was also great. If you couldn’t watch it, stay tuned to the videos that the conference will publish (I hope so 😛 ).

Now I’m really looking forward Tokamak3. I hope I can go but I have a lot of “ifs”. Let’s see what happens next weeks.