Fading Memories

Saturday

Of course, I'd also wanted to blog on the second day of the Calligra sprint, but we were way too busy... In the morning we had the usual plenary meeting. Among other topics, we discussed an extension to the 2.4 release schedule. In view of the current state of the Quality Dashboard, we decided to have at least one more beta release, which probably will move the release into 2012. At the same time, our release manager Cyrille Berger, who couldn't join us, had come to the same conclusion.

Then SKF gave a remote presentation to everyone present on how they use Calligra Words in their application. They are developing a modelling and calculation application and using Calligra Words as the report writing component. The main application creates tables, images and plots which inserted in a document in the embedded Words component. The engineer then addes the explaining text. Those generated items are tagged using RDF, which means that if the input data changes, it become trivial to update just those items while the text the user has created remains intact. We got a remote, life demo of their application, event. It's immensely encouraging for everyone in the community to see Calligra being used in real life!

Then Nokia presented every attendee who didn't have a Harmattan device yet with one; an N9 or N950! This once again showed everyone how far along we have come, since it contains the Documents application with is built on the Calligra core office engine.

Despite giving many people new toys to play with, the commits never stopped coming in, and also from a coding perspective, the weekend was very succesful.

An extremely nice dinner in , which the seven Indians acknowledged present acknowledged tasted very authentic rounded off the day, or would have, had we not congregated in the lobby of the Radisson Seaside hotel for some more hacking. And playing with the new devices.

Sunday

On Sunday, I spent most of my time in a separate room with Pierre, Pierre, Boemann, Thorsten and Leinir, taking a step back to look at the purpose and problems of a text editing component with a goal of identifying where there are conceptual problems in the current design in Calligra's text component. And then there was a group photo (by Dmitry).

Lunch (the lunches provided by Nokia were awesome!) We also got a presentation by Nokia's Abishek on Sunday showing us how well Calligra does as the core engine for Harmattan Office -- and what could be improved still. It's amazing that in some areas, like showing embedded charts in spreadsheets, we're better than Micrsoft's mobile office on Windows Phone.

Many thanks to Nokia for hosting the sprint in their office building, providing us with lunch and dinner, and to Nokia and KO for sponsoring travel and accomodation!

Pierre Stirnweiss, Dimitrios Tanis and I arrived together this afternoon in the Nokia office in Helsinki. By coincidence, we're actually using the same room that we occupied when we first discussed putting Calligra (back then, still KOffice) inside Nokia phones! Kind of historic ground!

The usual suspects are here, but also many new faces, like Smit Patel and Brijesh Patel, who hack on Words and Dimitrios Tanis who is doing documentation and is now turning into a Kexi hacker!

We've come a long way since then... We have created at least three different applications based on the Calligra engine. It started with FreOffice, a QWidget-based office application for the FreMantle release of Maemo. The code for this application lives right inside the Calligra source repository. Then came Harmattan Office, which will also be released under GPL. Harmattan Office uses QGraphicsView and MeegoTouch. Having Harmattan Office installed by default on the N9 means that Calligra suddenly has hundreds of thousands of users, since the N9 turns out to be an extremely popular device. And then Nokia sponsored Shantanu to create Calligra Active, a Qt Quick-based document viewer based on Calligra that's part of Plasma Active.

But now it's time to go full-tilt for the 2.4 release of the Desktop applications! There's plenty of cool stuff going on, from discussions about the difference between pre-, post- and ambilactarianism, to new comboboxes for the style dockers, to attempts to get Thorsten to commit his line endings. (We're in freeze, but those arrows are smooth...) The room is already full, more people have to arrive, it's noisy, everyone is active -- this is going to be a great weekend!

Thanks go to Nokia and KO GmbH for sponsoring travel, accommodation and dinner!

This was one busy weekend! We had the Krita bug day, of course. But that wasn't the only thing happening: finally the printed comics were delivered! Consquently, Animtim took the train to Deventer and spent the weekend drawing dedications in the pre-ordered comics.

Meanwhile, Irina was busy preparing the list of addresses and printing the address tickers. Then it was time to start stuffing the jiffy bags:

Sort the jiffy bags

And stack them

With a huge stack as result:

Now all that is needed is to get the stamps and send them off, and everyone who pre-ordered a comic-book + dvd pack will get to see the result

If in the coming week or two you do not receive your order, or your order is not correct, please mail me! It's the first time we've done something like this...

And if you haven't ordered your copy, there are still a few left, so don't hesitate, and go to the Krita website and press the order button!

And I'm coming to Berlin for the Desktop Summit, with lots of colleagues and friends from KO GmbH and from the Calligra community.

And I have been given the opportunity to give two presentations. On Sunday morning (as usual...).

First, I will speak about Calligra Everywhere. Without wanting to put in spoilers, I can say that there are two parts to this presentation.

The Calligra suite of applications has been expanding in the past year in several direction: there are now more applications than ever part of the project, Calligra applications are available on more platforms, both desktop and mobile than ever, Calligra has joined the Active project, Calligra functionality is used in more applications and finally, some of our applications are being used more and more. So what I want to do in the first place is to review these developments, and make clear why they were possible, both technically and socially.

In the second place, the Calligra community has benefited from a long relationship with Nokia. Together with Nokia's Thorsten Zachmann we will discuss not just what this has resulted in for Calligra and Nokia, but also the lessons we can learn from the collaboration of several commercial partners with the volunteer project that Calligra still emphatically is.

Next it's Michael Meeks's turn, who will speak about LibreOffice. It's a bit like Fosdem all over -- where KO colleague Jos van den Oever first presented WebOdf, then Michael talked about LibreOffice, and I finally gave my presentation on Calligra's technical underpinnings. This time, I won't put quite so much C++ in my slides!

So... When Michael is done, it's my turn again. This time I will talk about Krita -- in the first place not about Krita the application, not a list of features we created since last year's aKademy presentation, but rather about Krita the project.

Krita is now more than ten years old, and it has started coming into its own only this year. What I hope you will be interested is in are answers to the questions "Why did it take so long?", "What went wrong?", "What went right?". I'll use the evolution of the application as a guide to discuss what it takes to create a large application with a diverse team that actually makes artists have fun.

Yesterday the page where you can pre-order the Krita DVD + Comic book went life! Animtim is actually nearly done with the content for the DVD, while his brother is working on the soundtrack. And in October, with the first beta's for Krita 2.4 (and hopefully also the first Windows release of Krita), the DVD's will be pressed, the comic printed and sent out.

People who have already donated receive a hefty discount, but even pre-ordering already gets you a discount. Read all about it and enjoyu the trailer on krita.org:

Comics in Krita Training DVD Now Open For Pre-Orders! (Inc. Trailer)

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