milano tokamak concludes, the show moves to frankfurt

Tokamak::Mark(1)

Tokamak over and now I'm sitting in the KDE offices in Frankfurt. It was awesome meeting everyone, several for the first time in spite of having worked with them continuously, in same cases nearly daily, for the last 6-24 months (depending on the individual), for 4.5 days of intense meetings and hacking.

Tokamakaos - Danger, Will Robinson!

The success of the event lays on the shoulders of several people:

* a huge thanks to Riccardo and his family for providing a truly great location for the event and being awesome hosts
* Alexis for leading the charge towards finally getting WoC in svn, and Sebas for being his wingman (not to mention those following along on irc and getting things in great order)
* to Kevin and Richard for taking charge of the API review and putting in long, hard days to make sure we dragged ourselves through it (we're talking about spending 16 hours at a stretch pouring meticulously line by line through headers)
* to Richard for coming through on the scripting side (despite my grumpiness on the first day); to Marco (go-go panel toolbox!)
* to David, Chani, Andre, and Riccardo for working on various and sundry useful and important features and bug fixes; Nuno for rocking the Inkscape;
* to Franz for showing up in his KDE car (it has awesome KDE decals on both sides and the back, along with our URL) with great Austrian beer
* to Andreas for coming down from Oslo to share both the present and the future of QGraphicsView (holy crap are we going to blow people's mind in the next couple years on the graphics and animations front)
* Luka to making it out for a day to hang out, hack and share
* to the JOLIE people for their excellent presentation and groundwork for future collaboration (they've already started in on things, exciting!) ...

That's what it takes: lots of people Doing Their Thing(tm).

The Tokamakers ROCKED!

And the results?

• Widges on canvas: improved layouts (to say the least), QProxyWidget usage (so the device notifier shows its full interface when not in a Vertical/Horizontal containment (e.g. on the desktop, in dashboard, etc) and hundreds of lines of code removed from libplasma


• A significant number of nasty beasties tamed and expelled from the codebase


• The new krunner UI at long last well underway!


• Panel toolbox plan worked out and partly implemented


• A killer set of replacements for our current widgets that are tailored for script access and which will allow us to provide a simple but safe API, for even untrusted widgets


• Way too much pizza being eaten (34 boxes towered in a stack on the kitched table when we left ... no stack overflow, however ;)


• hundreds of API improvements to be made


• a better understanding of core concepts, user targets and future goals


• new and improved personal bonds between those who attended. Go community!

Yes, we were also serious from time to time ;)

It was pretty amazing how we completely ripped Plasma into pieces and got it mostly back together in just a couple days, with a much much better foundation to build on.

Moving fast at Tokamak

Also part of the fall out of Tokamak is that I have a new development tool ... gwenview! ;)

Those are some of the photos we took of the white board used during the API review sessions. As you can see, there are a few (*ahem*) changes to be affected. We're going to be keeping track of progress using the wiki. While the whiteboard is (almost) perfect for doing the API reviews on, the wiki is (almost) perfect for coordinating the implementation of the resulting fix recommendations. If you'd like to help us out, you can see all the Tokamak whiteboards (at readable resolutions!) yourself in this photo album and transcribe them onto the Tokamak wiki page. (Hint: The class being reviewed is written in top right corner of each board.)

While at Tokamak, I finally got compositing working flawlessly on my laptop. I've already made some small improvements to a couple of the effects due to using them. I (and probably Sebas) will blog about that stuff later, though. The effects are fairly easy to hack on, make really nice sized projects and offer immediate response/reward.

Anyways, I need to head out to the hotel now and get cleaned up for dinner. Two days of board and business meetings await.

The P-man, aka The Youngest Tokamaker, charts the future

In completely unrelated news, it seems the KDE team rocked the house at Lug Radio Live USA with an impressive looking booth and a great team behind it! =)