No, this is not HTML5 topic, I mean fruits of Calligra Suite Sprint #2 ;)

My plan is to post series of logs from the Calligra Sprint on the following days. Each covering one topic. Today about branding.

The story started when our logo has been delivered by our (KDE's) designer Eugene Trounev. I have looked over his shoulder not once on various occasions and I know his attention to detail.

Today is the second and last day of the Calligra Words mini-sprint. After spending yesterdays first day on planing and implementation of decisions made we spent today on solving all kind of problems that showed up since then.

In particular today we land;
* Fix wrong placement of anchored object if the object is anchored in a paragraph that spans two pages, and the anchor is in the part of the paragraph that is on the first page.
* Be sure to only try position an anchor once per layout-run.
* Implement anchor stacking.

A slight delay of my flight from Düsseldorf to Graz gives me time to recap the awesome time at the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Having been part of the programme committee I was looking forward to see at least a small subset of the talks live, though I hope I will have the opportunity to see many more once the videos have been processed and are available online.

Selecting talks hadn't been easy, both because of the huge amount of proposals we've received and because deciding on suitable topics for such a wide range of attendees is no piece of cake either.

I think the session I liked most was the lightning talk style collection of presentations of our communities' GSOC students and GNOME's women outreach program interns. Not only did they often take on difficult challenges, they all showed amazingly sophisticated solutions.

I also found it extremely encouraging that these programs seem to strengthen and even expand the diversity of our communities. I mean, sure, GNOME, KDE and other Free Software projects are international by design, with contributors from many countries. But due to various reasons the bulk of people are usual from North America or Europe.
So seeing so many students/interns from Asian, Latin American and Eastern European countries was one of my personal highlights of these summit. I hope that the incredibly high percentage of women in this group of presenters indicates that we are on the right path to improving our rather embarrassing track record in making our female peers feel welcome in our midst.

In addition to usual chatting about whether and how is Kexi utilised under KDE I would like to hear about others, what in the context of the Desktop Summit means GNOME users.

Another year, my first Desktop Summit, plenty of things to do, gstreamer training, help organization, even be a referee in a geek football match.
Crazy days ahead.
Leaving sunny Florianópolis right now !!

I'm back now (since two weeks already) from the KDE Platform sprint in Randa and I have to say it was great.

Randa is located very nice in the Swiss mountains, next to Matterhorn, and very well suited not only for KDE sprints, but also for cycling (I had my bike with me there) :-)

I'm everytime impressed by the exceptional passion and extraordinary talent of the people in our community.
Probably this is because our community is "self-filtered": you don't get in for the money,
but because of personal motivation. ... and so only people who are highly motivated and
"obsessed" by software find their way to us.
David, Stephen, Milian, Sune, Aaron, Volker, Kevin (to name just a few) -- what an amazing list of people.

Flat things are good. I'm at Tokamak 5 in Nijmegen, the KDE sprint where we plough a deep furrow into the future of the Free Desktop and sow KDE seeds that will grow into exciting, novel interfaces and make the stuff we already have even faster and more reliable.

So what about the flat things I mentioned? We've just guzzled our way through a stack of pancakes of geological proportions, produced for us by pancake-flipper and KDE allrounder par excellence Adriaan de Groot. Other good flat things are tablets (I won't call them 'tablet computers' in case I sound old fashioned), which are in evidence here in a variety of makes and models. We're working on several things that will make KDE on tablets as easy and fun to consume as Adriaan's pancakes.

I'm here for a few days to make KConfigXT, KDE's proven automatic configuration persistence layer, work with user interfaces programmed in Qt Quick, and to support the Plasma Active work going on in the openSUSE Build Service with my geeko skills.

Transition to KDE 5, whatever it means, is a process not just one atomic step. Today a follow up of the previous entry about fruits of the Calligra Sprint: Modern "File" menu merged with start-up view.

The need

The ideas were much older but it all started to take shape in January 2011. First, some analysis and mockups born.

Last week was big for Calligra:

• March 30: The first three months of the Calligra Suite is a report showing activity in all possible areas related to Calligra, and creation of new areas like the new Braindump application, new maintainers for applications, refreshed application names, project home page, project git repositories, and finally Kexi Mobile, Calligra Mobile. More to come.
  
  

  
  
  

• April 1: The first Calligra sprint started, the biggest technical event in the history of KDE Office technologies to date:
  
  

  
  
  
  

I'm feeling very lucky today. Why? Because in a few hours I'll be getting on a plane to Bengaluru, India and attending conf.kde.in. Pradeepto has been asking me for years to look outside the cosy confines of the US-Europe Axis of KDE, and thanks to my role in the openSUSE Boosters team, this has finally become possible.

I'll be giving a talk on contributing to KDE in the openSUSE project and a long talk/practical workshop on using the openSUSE Build Service as used by openSUSE, Novell, Dell, Intel, Nokia, Broadcom and Cray, to spread free software: your own, update existing software on openSUSE, or package for it and for many other distros at one go. But mainly I'm looking forward to meeting the people who make up a whole side of KDE. So if you haven't made up your mind what you're doing next week, how about coming to the RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru?

Like many others,

PS: I'm bringing a load of openSUSE loot to give away, so just look for the guy staggering under the huge carton!