This is some notes I took when attending the aKademy 2008 in St-Katelijne Waver, Belgium.

KDE vision about integration with webservices, document sharing, and other web 2.0 thingy reminds me similar theme from the 2007 GUADEC, however the KDE idea is more wide and integrated in all applications (connecting friends in a printing dialog, developers' photos in the about dialog etc)

I quite enjoyed the FOSS story in Asia by Praeepto, which some parts of the story I can see it very true as I also experienced the same, like how the culture affects the behaviour of the people.

More collaboration and cooperation between projects in the desktop area is always an interesting topic, and Vincent Untz of GNOME spoke about that in his Talk. However the agreed level of collaboration is sometimes quite hard to resolve, like in what languages and libraries those projects should talk and use etc.

Two distros talk about deploying KDE as their main desktop, but the openSUSE talk is more interesting as they're installing both KDE 4 and KDE 3.5 with the same prefix and make sure both work nicely.

GCF is quite interesting, but it seems too complex for me.

Marble the fast map viewer, providing a globe/map view, similar to GoogleEarth, was very impressive. Some other projects in different talks mentioning ideas that they want to integrate with Marble.

A dedicated presentation about integration was quiet impressing. Inge Wallin embraced the developers to make their applications to integrate with each other. A nice example was the digiKam integrating the Marble components to set the geotag of the photos. It seems that the integration is one of this year's aKademy theme.

Step, the physics simulator was quite nice even I couldn't catch the presenter's most of the times as the people behind and beside me kept talking all the time during presentation :( It's part of the KDE.edu and really useful for students to learn physics. It seems that they have their own physics engine.

Park Shinjo talked about Transcript, a sophisticated translation system used in KDE4, making some case changing and proposition word changing in some languages can be done automatically. Basically the translator must provide a translation file and a translation script. It involves a quite complex structure and mechanism using Javascript, making the translation team in some languages to have skill to program with Javascript. Wow...

Andreas of Qt demoed a QGraphicsView test application run both with Qt 4.4 and 4.5 and he showed that there are many performance improvements in 4.5. Very nice.

Zack Rusin's presentation about Gallium3D was fun and informative, showed a promising situation in the Graphics driver world that nowadays it's easier to create a Graphics driver by using Gallium3D.

I also spent some time to dig the KDE documentation and found out that it has a quite good support regarding internationalisation, superior to GNOME. For example: KDE has it's own locale and non-gregorian calendar implementation to support more extended and customisable locale. Last time I use KDE full-time was KDE 1.0 beta (when was that? 1998?) then later on switch to BlackBox and then GNOME in 2002.

This is my first aKademy and I found out that the conference was nice and quite short (comparing eg. to GUADEC). Had a chat with some KDE developers, and they are nice and welcoming the non-KDE people warmly. Everything looks OK to me, except that the projector in room 1 is not strong enough. The Wifi is very well prepared, but the food was late in the second day. Anyway, the overall is very good. Big thanks to KDE!

Side note:
No I'm not converting to KDE.

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This is the route we took during the cruise as drawn by GPS Visualizer. The GPX data were recorded with Maemo Mapper with my wife's N810. The data then extracted and used to populate the location information in my pictures' EXIF with gpscorrelate-gui, so you can see in the map where exactly the photos were taken.

See the whole set here: www.flickr.com/photos/mdamt/sets/72157605400225787/
You can also see them here: everytrail.com/view_trip.php?trip_id=23889

Viva Free Software!

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http://maemo.org/news/announcements/view/1192708879.html

"The call is addressed not only to open source programmers, but also to designers, documentation writers, community supporters, maemo evangelists, bloggers…"

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So what's new?

Word prediction bar for the hardware keyboard

• most of cool features we have in N800
• improved UI
• sliding hardware keyboard
• Mozilla based browser
• optimized Flash video
• Maps (yes it's equipped with a GPS)
• and loads more...

A happy user

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And here is more than a screenshot (visit my website to see if your planet doesn't show the video):

Sorry for the video quality :-)
And the bottom part of the browser is clipped, well that text on the browser are typed using hardware keyboard. HIM is not yet working there. Feel free to make Firefox to work with HIM :-)

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The components released are:
* Hildon Input Method Framework: This is the glue to the GUI framework, consists of the protocol and the HildonIMContext
* Hildon Input Method UI: This is the main UI which hosts all the plugins.
* Hildon Input Method Plugins Example: This is already released in Maemo Bora but now we also moved the source code repository outside.

Just like other Hildon projects, it also runs not only in Maemo platforms. Sorry my Ubuntu Mobile environment is a bit broken so no screenshot for today :-) But packages for UME are here,

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No no no this is not a marketing move against the iPhone price :-)

I borrowed an iPhone a couple of days ago and play a bit with the thing. Well let's call it iPod Touch instead as the phone didn't work :-) And because it is only for one day and I was also pretty busy that day so I couldn't explore much.

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