Cleaning the dust

Time for some update in this blog. I've been trying to do this for quite some time, but I've been too busy and lazy to do it.

• Carman
  
  Last month I spent most of my time fixing a bunch of those small and annoying bugs in Carman that sooner or later block us from implementing new features and releasing our software. We released some release candidates and thanks to the feedback received from our users, we could release the final 0.6 version. Check the home page for installation instructions and links.
  
  This new version is a complete rewrite, at least in the Hildon/GTK+ UI, in which we dropped all the use of Glade. Glade is a great tool when you're developing static windows, which is not the case of Carman. The resulting code was an huge mess. We now implement (a sort of) the Model View Controller design pattern which make things a lot easier to maintain. Of course there are many other improvements in the current code, specially in the performance. I'll keep blogging about it as soon as I get interesting things done.
  
  
• GUADEC
  
  It was not only the development on Carman that was keeping me away. I also had to prepare everything for my trip to Birmingham, UK to attend GUADEC this year. It was the very first time I participated and I regret I had not been in any other edition before.
  
  At first I felt a little bit unease as I didn't know almost anyone personally, except for some guys that attended the Bossa Conference earlier this year. I found myself many times trying to associate the hackergotchis to the person and the work in the GNOME project. I still think some people should update their so they can be identified easier in those cases. Big thanks to Lucas for introducing me to most of the guys there. The GNOME people really rock!
  
  We had seven intense days, loads of great talks, meetings and discussions about what is GNOME now and paths to follow towards a 3.0/4.0/Online/whatever version. I won't talk about this here as there are already lots of blog posts about it in planet GNOME.
  
  In a point of view more focused on the Maemo platform, the conference was very productive as well. Some great news were announced there such as the first alpha version of Chinook, the new version of the communication software with SIP support and improved UI and the mozilla engine for the web browser. We also had many interesting talks about Maemo development and discussions on the GMAE subject. I had great chats with Nokia guys, specially Lucas and Quim about what can be done to improve the platform and open it more to the community.
  
  My talk was quite good. The audience was small but we had a very interesting discussion in the end. During those crazy hack sessions at Etap Hotel I was able to build some dependency packages for GNOME applications that are coming soon.

I think it's enough for one single post. That's what happen when you don't blog for a while... I still have more to talk about, but lets just leave this for other posts.