André Somers

yesterday André Somers, the author of Cumulus and one of the active KFlog project developers, flew into Calgary from Amsterdam. if you're not familiar with KFlog, it's an amazing set of programs. it's primarily of interest to glider pilots, but it certainly showcases KDE's flexibility and power in the hands of application developers. some features of note are the complex mapping functions, interoperability with handhelds via a custom data acquisition application and waypoint calculations. even if you aren't a glider pilot, but want to see an example of what KDE-the-development-platform can do, you should look at KFlog.

KFlog - More screenshots here

André had emailed me before his flight out of Amsterdam, and we managed to meet up in the early evening. after exchanging GPG signatures (tres geek!), we strolled down Calgary's 17th Avenue taking in the sights, such as they are. Peyton rode his bike alongside and we ended up having a nice dinner at the Coup, a cool little vegetarian restaurant with a modern interior and live DJs mixing the audio mood on the turntables. after a quick pit stop at home we sat on a deck and had some beverages:

for the record, Peyton was drinking chocolate milk

i asked André what he thought we were doing right and what we needed to improve upon as a project. from the perspective of an application developer, he said that he loved the KDE framework. he couldn't say enough about it, though i think he tried pretty well to do so. =) on the improvement side, he noted that our documentation needs work. the API docs are great, but our tutorial style documentation which composes that critical body of information that teaches you how to use all those bits of wonderful APIs to create applications that take advantage of what's available, is sorely lacking. of course, Lyceum is aiming to address that and André was upbeat about it.

interestingly, at one point André lived across the street from Waldo, as they went to the same University. they didn't know each other at the time, however. what a crazy little world this is. =)

and yeah, André is a great guy. i wish him all the best on his trip across western Canada, particularly Yellowknife. ;) he's even going to be passing through my birthplace on his trip through the inside passage. bon voyage!