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Back from GUADEC

June 1, 2005 on 11:13 am | In Hacking, GNOME, planetGnome |

Yesterday I came back from the GUADEC 2005 in Stuttgart.

It has been freakin’ awesome! The talks, the people, the organization… Simply amazing.

I enjoyed every talk I attended: the Cairo talk by Owen Taylor; the Keith Packard’s talk on improving X; Davyd Madeley’s talk on the future of panel applets; Seth Nickell’s talk on usability.

I found the keynotes by Miguel de Icaza and Mark Shuttleworth very entertaining, and aggressive; I think that the Gnome community as a whole should be much more aggressive, in terms of market acquisition, if we want to achieve the “10×10″ (10% of market share within 2010) objective. As for what I’ve seen in these two days, we can make it - with a little help from our competitors, obviously.

I met Federico Mena Quintero, and we talked about implementing a bookmarks/recently used files manager in Gtk - basically, shifting my Gnome Desktop Bookmarks project down into the dependency stack. This should get rid of the recent-files stuff in libegg, and should provide the correct API for others to use (especially Nautilus). At the hackfest I put up a mockup (actually, it’s an almost complete program in Perl using my development trunk of the recent-files Perl bindings) of what should become the GtkFileChooserDialog for recently used items.

Here’s an obligatory snapshot:

As I sayed, it already works; you might want to download it from here; you need the latest CVS snapshot of the Gtk2::Recent module from the Gtk2-Perl’s CVS.

What I plan to do is to rewrite the entire recently used management (using the desktop bookmark specification for the items storage), create a dialog like the one above and a widget. The recently used objects would be stored by the GtkFileChooser class, so no interaction of the developer should be needed; applications might decide to implement a “Open Recently Used…” menu item which creates the GtkRecentChooserDialog dialog instead of filling a (sub)menu.

Also, an applet/viewer/nautilus extension should be available, in order to always have the recently used items on the desktop.