Got back from Guadec last week, which I enjoyed. I had more fun last year, but I think this was a combination of it being in Spain (nice weather is a luxury for us British folk!) and also being a bit burnt out from uni. A lot of interesting things are going on at the moment. Most surprising to me was the Gecko work for maemo. For anyone that has an N800 and hasn’t tried it, I’d highly recommend they do so; for me at least, it’s better than Opera! Among highlights are a much, much faster and more complete JavaScript interpreter (which makes Google Reader usable, btw), native-looking widgets without a special theme, and just in general, better rendering performance. Also worth mentioning, java-gnome (exciting work, and a really excellent presentation to highlight that) and OpenMoko, the latter of which I’m currently working on. Hopefully they’ll be some news regarding that soon.
What stole the show though, in my opinion (and I’m sure many others), was Clutter. A GTK-like, easy-to-use, OpenGL(ES) canvas is a very cool thing indeed. Although I work at OpenedHand, I unfortunately had no hand in this, but it’s definitely one of the many things that make me feel proud to work there. Matthew did a great talk, which deservedly resulted in spontaneous outbursts of applause and guffaws alike. Hopefully this week-end I’ll finish up and commit my own Pong implementation (unrelated to Rob’s already existing code) and I look forward to seeing what other people use Clutter for.
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