Last week I was in Barcelona to present at the 10th edition of the local Jornades de programari Lliure ("Free Software Conference"). It was well attended for a local technical event and the presentations were good (though I gauge this on the slides, the audience satisfaction and audience interaction).
My two local hosts, Orestes Mas and Aleix Pol, were terrific. I was met at the train station and the travel arrangements went off without a hitch. The local food and sights were wonderful as well as I made my way out in the afternoon after plowing through work and KDE code.
(Side note: Travel by overnight train is a new thing for me, and I find myself rather in love with it. Whether this is purely due to the current novelty of it for me remains to be seen. I can say that I do not miss airports.)
My presentation was the only one in English, and I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. Hopefully I succeeded. :) I presented on a topic we've been talking about for some time but which I haven't done a full presentation on before: the concept of the device spectrum and what that means for F/OSS and KDE in particular. The slides I used, which need much work still before I'm nearly happy with them (as all first time presentations start out), and partial notes to go with them can be found here. The slides are fairly large due to the images in them (some 18MB), but that was probably to be expected.
The presentation is very much my opinionm, rather than "official KDE dogma", and reflects how I see things currently. It has a fair amount of what I'd call philosophical content in it. The essential message is: writing software for one form factor or one modality for data retrieval is phasing into history, and it is software that can successfully span physical form factors and erase data locality as an issue that will have a long term competitive advantage. This idea is based on where we are now with technology and comparing past technological occurrences (and some biological evolutionary systems) under the pretense that the future mimics the past since the systems underlying these kinds of change are largely immutable.
Anyways, I was asked to present on the future of F/OSS and so I did my best. I thoroughly enjoyed having that opportunity and look forward to more great tapas in that Catalan city by the sea.
About Me
Labels
- akademy (3)
- amarok (1)
- appeal (1)
- build system (1)
- community (7)
- crash (2)
- d-bus (1)
- dataengine (1)
- dolphin (2)
- events (1)
- family (1)
- free software (1)
- gnome (2)
- graphics (1)
- guademy (1)
- kde (52)
- kde e.v. (3)
- kde; kdegraphics (1)
- konqueror (1)
- krunner (4)
- libs (5)
- lug radio (1)
- media center (1)
- misc (1)
- openid (1)
- oxygen (2)
- performance (1)
- photos (1)
- plasma (26)
- podcast (1)
- pr (1)
- prose (1)
- release (1)
- social (1)
- solaris (1)
- techbase (6)
- travel (6)
- trolltech (3)
- web2.0 (1)
3 comments:
I enjoyed very much your presentation. You presented some ideas about how desktop will be in the future, and so, what are the next goals software development.
The web browser does not meet the “elegance” metric
More convenient to use local apps for many “web” tasks
I wish I'd been there, reading this sounds like you're making bald assertions of what you would like to be the case, whistling past the graveyard. Nothing I've seen in the KDE desktop delights me like a great web app does; some days the only things I run outside the browser are Kate, Konsole, and VLC. As developers figure out HTML5 client-side storage and offline mode, I look forward to running local web pages and offline web apps out of my browser history and bookmarks instead of launching my desktop's binaries.
@skierpage: you are confusing, as many do, the web _browser_ for web applications. the browser as an application generally sucks, and this is what has motivated many of the more radical changes in recent times to browsers such as Google Chrome.
that people assume that a web app must run within a web browser is one of the things that really holds back a lot of improvements, though mobile is doing something of an end-run around this with the convenience and improved interaction geared for the form factor of "apps".
take a look on the various app stores at many of the apps that are purely front ends for web apps but which are so amazingly more pleasant to use and in many cases more powerful than running the same web service in a generic web browser.
"I look forward to running local web pages and offline web apps out of my browser history and bookmarks instead of launching my desktop's binaries"
that wasn't at all related to the conclusion i worked towards in the presentation. indeed, it would have been nicer to have you there to hear it and form a full and appropriate opinion: one of the things i said during the presentation was that the user cares very little for the implementation language but instead looks for very specific sets of qualities. compare that to what you just said which is fraught with implementation origin and specific mechanism rather than the benefit driven reasons behind that desire.
of course, as we all know though, the web took over and nobody uses anything but a web browser on top of an OS kernel that is used to boot the CPU, GPU and network stack, right? and that happened about 10 years ago. right? so speaking of whistling past graveyards, i'd suggest that instead of a future where "Everything is " that we'll have a wide range of technologies optimized for different purposes (from the developer's POV) that need to fulfill an emerging set of human expectations in a coherent and consistent way across applications and platforms.
this is the lesson learned from the pattern of displacement rather than replacement of technologies in history, both of the human inventiveness and the biological derivation.
Post a Comment