Random fun/3.0/no-fun thoughts:
- I think it is really cool that peope are talking about hacking on Project Soylent; I hope they hack to their heart’s content and come back with feedback, demoware (or better), and thoughts on where to go next.
- Cool apps are very, very cool, and rightly are where the fun should mostly be.
- It is not coincidence that the coolest apps of the past 12-18 months are on a platform that hides the ugly parts of our platform. Platform makes it easier for people to focus on writing cool apps. It would be interesting for someone to eliminate the core apps (required to be C) from gnome-files, and see what percentage the other apps are in terms of language, and ideally chart it over time. If you wanted to get really crazy, check the user ratings, and use them as a proxy for innovation- I bet you’d show at least mild correlation between !C and better user satisfaction (correcting for project age, at least.)
- If you’re really interested in toolkit/platform mattering to innovation, I recommend reading Democratizing Innovation, available as a CC PDF. Compare and contrast the lead users Von Hippel discusses as the source of innovation with the target users we pursue- sort of scary. I read it on the plane.
Was very cool to see a small project to create videos of using GNOME. I’ve wanted to do something like this for the liveCDs, and someone went off and did it! And anyone can contribute! Will be very nice to see some of these on the 2.12 liveCD.
Speaking of liveCD stuff has been quiet, but not dormant- the greek GNOME team put together their own Greek GNOME LiveCD (screenshot) and gave me pointers to lots of useful things, like how to change the default language and the bootsplash. I used that to whip up a proof of concept GUADEC-ES CD with a guadec-es splash. Sort of buggy splash, unfortunately, and quite a bit of english still, but I’m working on that :) Also, we’ve hit 25K bittorrent downloads, and since I’m guessing (from early stats) that we have about 1 ftp download for every bittorrent download, we’ve probaby hit 50K downloads. That’s not 50M, but considering that our download is roughly 1% of the size of theirs, we’re approaching 10% total bytes downloaded to play with our toy- that’s not bad. Pretty damn awesome, in fact, for the first time we’ve tried this, and basically only publicized it in English (though it sort of works in about ten other languages.)
Besides playing with the liveCDs, I had a really, really productive day today- just lots of stuff done, both short-term gnome-wise and long-term ‘what the hell am I doing next’ stuff. Also, short-term dishes. Yay me.