oslo was, zurich is

I was in Oslo for a few days last week to meet with various people in the Qt offices there. The main purpose was to collaborate a bit on the design of QtComponents, which is a framework that provides a modern widget abstraction for users of QML. The problem to solve is simple to state: create a way to have "MeeGo widgets", "Symbian widgets", "Plasma Desktp widgets", etc. that developers using QML can easily hook into and use so they are both native looking as well as don't have to re-implement buttons and other basics themselves over and over. It's not a very easy problem to solve given the various constraints we face. I'm increasingly happy with the direction QtComponents is going, however, and think the combination of "a reusable core" with "enabling easily rewritable components for a given platform", while perhaps non-conventional, is very compelling.

I also met with Gunnar to talk about the new scene graph he's working on, as well as with Thiago to discuss MeeGo / KDE strategy and Aron Kozak to discuss community integration and how to ramp up KDE and mobile success. Not bad for 2.5 days, even if it left me a little tired at the end of it all.

The scene graph thing is particularly interesting, though, as it allows full and proper hardware acceleration for Qt interfaces. Think "gaming style performance and graphics capabilities" for Qt applications. To really take full advantage of this, the UI will need to either use the scene graph directly (unlikely and undesirable) or else be written with QML which will use the scene graph internally.

Combine this with QtComponents and the ramifications for Plasma workspaces (or any other application that decides to go this route) is absolutely profound. But that's something for my next blog entry. This one is about my traipsing about the European sphere this month. ;)

Which brings me to Zurich, my future home. I received my first piece of mail addressed to Herr Aaron Seigo, which was rather exciting and a little surreal all at once. We went to see the new apartment, which is well on its way to being finished. Between all the "yes, this is really happening" reinforcement, we also took time out to wander about Zurich a bit, stopping in at a book store (where I picked up a cool book for P. about Zurich for young people), cafes and generally enjoying the city. This includes biking about everywhere (Zurich is, despite protestations otherwise by some of its locals, very biking friendly) and wandering the streets with bags of heisse maroni (hot, fresh roasted chestnuts) in hand, which is such a lovely pre-winter time thing to do.

Today I am hanging out at ETH (where S. works), the same university that Albert Einstein (one of my personal heroes) attended, catching up on communication and getting down to some work for the week. I'll probably do similarly tomorrow.

It's feeling more and more natural, home-ish, to be here. :)