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Jeff Waugh - Gnome

One of the great things about Gnome is we release every 6 months to the day. It's a blistering pace, tough to keep up with, Ubuntu is even more so. For developers every 6 months you get to work on cool stuff and only 2 months for boring responsible bug fixing.

Leading up to Gnome 2 they released freedom is not just for geeks, they want it to be usable for everyone. Most people out there don't quite like computers as much as the people in this room do, everyone else is not so interested. So they want to make sure the software is not for them. Part of the problem is that the community that builds software has techinical people, even out to slashdot is still very technical people, you have to go to other places to find people who use IM but aren't technical. Universal access, i18n, usability, accessibility.

Shows screenshot of the panel preferences in gnome 1.4, settings for everything including speed of animation. Open for "make button flush with panel edge", translators found that hard. Option for "automatically check for newly installed software" no reason not to choose that. "Miscellaneous" tab and inside that is "Miscellaneous" box. So for 2.0 they fixes a of these problems and here is it for 2.0: blank screen. Shows a nasty dialogue text from Windows, compares to an equivalent one in Gnome which has half the text and verbs on the buttons. He puts on his "normal user" glasses, dialogue box now shows only buttons with text blurred out.

Would you like Tea of Coffee? Yes, No, Cancel. Should be Tea, Coffee, Cancel.

At a conference in Norway Nat demonstrated beagle search tools. Everyone was depressed because Apple announced spotlight on that day, Nat said that's great because we're 6 hours ahead of the competition. Unforunatly Apple release an OS with search before anyone could ship Beagle but it's cool promo.

Tomboy is your sticky friend. It's like a wiki for notes tools. It becomes very addictive.

Shows f-spot photo management app, use case was take 100s of thousands of photos and handle them so it scales well. He shows lots of photos of people. You can export to flickr and other places.

Beagle indexes everything on your hard drive, which has necessetated an option for "please don't index my porn". Mail, files, instant messenges.

Galago builds presence into the desktop experience. Links lots of things together. Telepathy does cool instant messenging stuff like SIP.

WIMP is dead, it's what we have but it's not the most interesting concept of where the desktop lies. People, events, documents and getting laid. Because when it comes down to it people have different priorities for computers. A lot of these things is about getting past the WIMP experience.

Shows VMWare as an example of a third party Gnome app.

Sabayon locks down stuff.

Top to bottom integration with desktop down to kernel. USB everyone has seen. Moving on to networking stuff, shows network-manager which is in universe. Diagram shows stuff running as user and as root. Works sweet.