An interesting application popped up by Dan Winship in the Evolution blog where you are able to access the blogs of people in your address book. The application was initially used to show off how to code and use plugins in Evolution. It's still incomplete however, and probably should not be used seriously.
BrainRead adds another button to the list of components (eg. Mail, Calendar etc) and allows you to add a blog by adding the contact address name. If you've specified a blog address in the address book, then it should show up.
BrainRead should be considered alpha quality. For instance, it doesn't have a way to delete a blog. :-) There are probably better UI designs as well. For instance, one could add a blog from the address book and include an option to display it in BrainRead or perhaps integrate it with one of the existing components like calendar.
BrainRead has a lot of potential. If you find BrainRead interesting, feel free to check out 'evolution-brainread' from GNOME CVS and send patches to evolution-patches@ximian.com.
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000233.html
After the Solutions LINUX show in February, the GNOME French-speaking team has organized a GNOME booth at the LIBR'EAST from April 23th to the 25th... This new event in France, an open source programmers event, has been organized by a non-profit association called IDILE. This year was the first edition for them and they did an excellent job.
During this event, the GNOME team gave talks about The GIMP (David Neary), Abiword (Hubert Figuiere), Ruby-gnome2 (Laurent Sansonetti), Gnomemeeting (Damien Sandras) and Libcroco (Dodji Seketeli).
Big thanks to Mandrakesoft and Shuttle who lent shuttle boxes with flat-screens for the GNOME booth.
http://www.gnome.org/~strider/photos/libreast2004/
http://idile.org/libreast/index.php
Written by Thomas Wood:
At this years Linux Users and Developers Expo in London, UK, GNOME was represented by no less than six intrepid GNOME users and developers. Present at the event were Maria Blackmore, Telsa Gwynne, Dafydd Harries, and myself from the UK. Also, Michael Aubertin and Gael Chamoulaud from France were there as well.
The GNOME stand itself was in the ¿.org village¿, and was not so much a stand as a bench and stools. However, we had five laptops with us, running a variety of different platforms, including Debian, Fedora, Mandrake and even Mac OS X. All except one were running or displaying GNOME 2.6 in some shape or form. Because of the age of one of the laptops, we ran a gnome-session remotely from another laptop, and the performance was generally good, even when demonstrating Xnest and multiple logins with GDM. This was also nice because people were impressed when we could say: "Look, you can run GNOME over a network!".
We got questions from experienced GNOME users (¿Why can't I edit the Application menu?¿), as well as those who had not heard of GNOME before (¿How much is it going for?¿). There were also quite a few questions about development with GNOME and the inevitable ¿So what's going on with Mono/Java/.Net?¿. As well as questions, we were able to talk to users about their experience with GNOME and any difficulties they had. A lot of passers by mentioned they used GNOME: "Oh. GNOME. I use that." At this stage, you'd normally wait for the "But.." and then prompt. "Yes...?", but all they had to say was "It's nice". In the case of one person, he had even forgotten he even used GNOME since he had no troubles with it, which is a credit to all those who worked so hard on usability and bug squashing.
However, we were able to show off to everyone the new features of GNOME 2.6, such as the new spatial Nautilus, the new file selectors, Epiphany, and the excellent SVG capabilities (Telsa was most enthusiastic about demonstrating the SVG support in the Mahjongg game!). I even managed to show off the new crash window in GNOME 2.6 on one occasion thanks to Nautilus. A little embarrassing, but not disastrous!
The overall impression at the end of the expo was that it had been a great success. We managed to raise GNOME's profile in a very positive way. Many thanks to our fearless leader Maria, who made it all happen, including dragging a lot of kit to and around London. It was a great opportunity to talk to both users and prospective users, and to get excited about all things GNOME!
Jeff Waugh has posted the development schedules for GNOME 2.7, as most of the modules have branched. May 10th will be the start of the initial tarballs for 2.7 and discussions of inclusion of new modules. Application owners, if you have something you want to include in GNOME that is the time to speak up!
We should start seeing GNOME 2.8 come around the end of August. So lets get cracking. :-)
http://www.gnome.org/start/2.7/
webcal://www.gnome.org/start/2.7/schedule.ics
Two new versions of Rhythmbox are out. The first one is a bug fix release with a number of bugs squashed. The second one is a rollback of a gnome-vfs authentication feature that was implemented. Rhythmbox is now based on 0.8.1 of Gstreamer.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2004-May/msg00000.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/rhythmbox-devel/2004-May/msg00026.html
GNOME was well represented during the Penguicon 2.0 show in Novi, Michigan a few weeks ago as Sean Harshbarger dropped by to chair a few panels. The first panel was a tour of the GNOME desktop, which was well attended. Sean spent a good amount of time going over the new features in Nautilus, as well as answering questions from the crowd.
Chris Hertel from samba.org was interested in GNOME 2.6's improved SMB support, luckily for the crowd there were plenty of open SMB shares during the Con which provided ample examples of the SMB method at work.
Sean also chaired the Rhythmbox panel on Sunday, which had a solid turnout of about ten people. Sean discussed the GStreamer platform in excruciating detail, going so far as to assemble a pipeline for the audience in gst-editor. Sean also showcased the integration between sound-juicer and Rhythmbox, and explained the Smart Playlist feature to the audience.
Penguicon is an annual event and is quickly becoming a large event in the Mid-western United States Linux community. If you are interested in speaking at next year's event, please contact Jorge Castro at jorge@arslinux.com.
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