Summer is over

The other day I realized that the summer is over. And I realized that only one month late.

This was a really busy summer, so I will try to summarize it as it was busy but without too many posts.

Joanmarie is coming!

This was one of the last news of the summer, but it was the most important one. Although I announced the hiring some time ago, this week became effective. Last week (week 42) was the first week of Joanmarie as a igalian. Welcome to the Jungle!

Desktop summit

Again a Desktop Summit, not “just” a GUADEC. And as usual some people expressed their concerns about how effective is having two communities organizing this kind of events (example here).

In my personal case it was useful. In theory, one of the advantages to port at-spi from CORBA to DBUS (at-spi2) was that in that way at-spi could became a freedesktop technology. And finally this is starting to be true. Qt at-spi2 bridge has improved a lot during the last year. This means that more people will be looking and testing at-spi2. I was able to talk again with Frederik Gladhorn, and also met Simon developer.

GNOME 3.2 is here

Well, nothing new to add to what we all already know. Just saying that this my first GNOME release as ATK maintainer (again, thanks Li Yuan).

Unity accessibiltiy

During this summer I was also working on improving the accessibility support for Unity3D. Unfortunately all the branches with the last additions on the ATK support were not ready before the feature freeze, so Ubuntu Oneiric was released without them. For anyone interested, I created a extra-a11y ppa with a modified version of Unity with those branches integrated.

F123 & Mais Diferenças

During this summer Igalia was contacted by F123. F123 is a Brazilian project which purpose is allow the access to the education and employment opportunities using free software accessibility technologies. They are willing to help on improving the GNOME accessibility stack, and we started to define some first projects in collaboration with them during the summer (as the code already shows). I will like to thanks F123 for this effort, and I hope that this could be the starting point of several accessibility collaborations.

Joining a new band

In addition to my rock band SiVE and my participation as a student on the Jazz Ensemble from Coruña Municipal School (and playing with a GNOME T-Shirt 😉), this summer I joined a new band, “Los Wattsons”. In this case pop/rock band. Not really complex but really funny. More that 6 concerts now, and a little EP, that you can listen on Jamendo.