Day 2 I was mostly to be found at the developement tracks since is the most amazing for the geek inside me althought as a community manager I felt entitled to go to other tracks just to be aware of how the community is doing in such areas. However I really enjoyed this day and the talks that went around.The first meeting was on the community council which was well… a bit odd. Basically is intimidating that most of the council is really Sunpeople and reflecting on the recent computerworld fiasco well, it doesn’t really help as an image of what the community is all about.The questions were previously submitted by email althought there were live questions thrown at them from the crowd. Myself asked the question regarding another question that asked for the decision making process on what features should be implemented. The response is that this decision are based on conversations that take place at the Hanburg building which is defintetly is not the most open, transparent and dedicated process. However my suggestion was to blog, record or just handle this talks through IRC and publish them so they can be translated and at least we get some knowledge on what has a higher priority.My suggest was recieved but it wasn’t really thought about. At least that is the impression I got. Hope I am wrong and they were mostly playing for the crowd.There were other question regarding the Dell attempt to carry OOo and how Sun and OOo really trip on themselves for this and this was a big challenge. Also Dell concern for support and patent indenmenity and what lessons can we learn from that experience to approach the next 1-tier manufacturer.Another question was regarding assistance on the writting on documentation to elevate the quality of the technical documentation which seems to be stalled since writers don’t get the development and developers don’t have time for documentation.After the consil I went to “Benefits of Extensions” from Daniel Darabos, his talk was amazing which are the modifications they did to OOo to make EuroOffice. They mainly did this in Python which is great and having them support the Python bridge I think is key to get hackers involved into OOo. And extensions really is the way to go, but there should be some motion moving into improving the speed. What interest me out of this implementation is the way the project was worked out. A merging between business, colleges and funding of the EU made this implementation possible and I think this is the framework that we should at least imitate for Latin America. This is definetly a ToDo list after the talk.Next impressive talk was the one of the Mobile Office which is a ODF viewer on the symbian OS. This is an amazing piece of software so I am definetly try to get it running. Unfortunately my main phone is not Symbian but is a blackberry which might set me off reading ODF. However I found this product very advanced with multilingual support, thumbnail creation and even a whole complete GUI provided by the OS. For a small price of 15 euros is pretty affordable althought there was a big sentiment of making this open source. Also that it didnt support OOXML but I actually was happy that this guy expressed his feeling that he don’t care about OOXML.One of the things from Mobile Office is the parsing of the ODF is basically done in C++ as opposed to XSLT or UNO DOM for parsing XML. Also that there is no binary abstraction of the file so the editing is being done on the ODF’s XML. I just wonder how good it did on the ODF camp which seemed to be doing better than most.My next talk was a success story from the Google summer of code, as opposed of day one which was a failed case of GSC for the SVG import and export handling. However the end result of this one was a great and succesful implementation of OpenGL on Impress creating really great effects on having a ‘Keynote-like’ effect of slide transition. I particuraly was excited about the helix effect but also was more excited about the learning curve on learning UNO was really ironed out by the Sun Mentors.”Beyond Microsoft” was an interesting talk but I was busy messaging my gf. However I got an awesome pre-talk about the future of office document collaboration. The OOoForum guy was very into 2nd life and also give examples on how do group documents are pulled out in hours like contract submittion and real time editing on wiki formats as the platform for the future of office editing. I was specially interested in the transport layer for XML what would be the technology such as XForms.After this talk I went to a talk given by Thorsten Behrens given one of the largest titles out of all OOo “Not the parrot sketch: Implementing an OOo config browser using Python“. As a punishment for him, the project refused to work and end up in a very delayed talk which end up giving just enough time for the demo. However the configuration browser sounds interesting since it push the idea that the gui of OOo just carry 10% of the actual configuration it can be done to OpenOffice.org. I would want to run this and examine the different parameters that you can configure.The last presentation was “OpenOffice.org Extension Development with Java and NetBeans in practice” which was a nightmare for me because I was really shutting down and I was afraid of giving the casual snoring while the session was going on. However the NetBean tutorial seemed to be good except I completly lost track of it. This was the last talk of the day so I guess I felt good that after this we just went out for dinner which actually went back to the hotel so I could take a real nap.
Ideas, thoughts and Free Software 