OH at OSCON

OSCON is the largest conference containing the broad open source community, so it’s good to see plentiful OpenedHand appearances at this huge event.

First up at the Open Mobile Exchange was Jenny Minor on Handwave to Hardware: A Product Story Bit by Bit, the story of how Vernier created the LabQuest from product concept to shipping product (24,000 units and counting!) in 18 months - all based on Poky Linux. Later that afternoon Dave Neary and I gave a impromptu 10 minute brief on GNOME Mobile - what it is, who’s using it and how to get involved.

On Thursday, Ted Gould was kind enough to mention Clutter in his talk, ‘Ubuntu Desktop Technologies’, which, despite the title, was about all the cool technologies you can use to build apps for any upto date GNOME based distro, so it was lovely to have Clutter included in that mix! Slides here - Clutter is on slide 14.

On Friday Tomas and I gave our presentation on ‘Clutter: Breathing Life into User Interfaces’ (slides, example code). The talk was well attended and there were plenty of questions before and after, so it will be interesting to see if some more Clutter based projects start appearing over the next 12 months.

At some point Ken Gilmer was cornered by Shaun Powers of Linux Journal for a video interview about the BUG and Poky. Nice one Ken - we love Xeyes too

Like any big conference at least half the value of OSCON is the hallway conversations, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. The Redmonk gatherings were great to meet friends old and new, as well as the always weird Sun party - this year in a (carpeted) hotel car park, featuring outsize trike racing, and inter-project sumo wrestling. It was fun to be part of, and we look forward to taking part again next year.