The beginning of March is always a remarkably nasty period in Oslo. It's no longer really winter but spring hasn't arrived either. The snow is melting and leaves a gray and sluggish mess on streets and sidewalks that tends to freeze over during the night only to melt again during the following day. So its no big surprise that the idea to escape to a sunnier and more enjoyable part of the world grew upon us.
And so we did.
Espen, Leo, Alexis, Marius and myself packed our bags and went en route towards Brazil -- or more precisely Manaus in the middle of the Amazonas. We brought slidedecks and a flip cam along to make our bosses happy and exchanged down jackets with t-shirts. And bathing gear but that happened later.
Every year in early March the Nokia Institute of Technology organizes the Bossa Conference. This year it took place in Manaus where it saw it's 4th iteration. It's a conference dedicated to open source mobile and embedded development and an event we highly recommend -- mostly because of it's great networking opportunities and relevant presentations but trust me, the location isn't too bad either.
All in all Qt technologies had a strong presence in the schedule.
Leo talked about Qt Quick and tricked us into believing he was handling slideware but instead wrote the whole presentation in QML. You can check it out from his repository as soon as he has actually uploaded it.
Espen explained how to ship mobile applications with Qt for Symbian in front of a full audience and shared quite some insights into the details of how to actually publish applications on the Ovi store -- useful knowledge to a large part of the attendees.
Marius presented the possible future of Qt Widgets. It included reading tea leafs and elephants and a lot of details about look & feel and data & logic. To keep it short: the idea is to separate interface and underlying logic for smoother development of refurbished UIs.
Since his return from Nuremberg, Alexis has been all excited about the fact that he and Artur managed to get KDE's desktop shell Plasma running on the N900. Admittedly, it is pretty neat. He presented the current state of the art and explained the path ahead -- and wowed the audience with smooth animations projected straight from the device.
But they were not the only ones presenting Qt things. The INdT sent Kenneth to talk about QML and WebKit topics, Marcelo to present the current state of PySide and Eduardo to show how to construct multi-view. Ariya returned from the land of spreadsheets to once again play his role as graphics chef and Till showed Akonadi on mobile devices.
I had the pleasure to give the mandatory meta presentation in the afternoon slot of the second day. I presented my view on community building in open source projects and all the dos and don'ts I have come across.
After the conference, the four of us continued our travels while Espen went home to his team. Leo and Alexis returned to Brisbane both via Oslo taking more or less short breaks from flying. Marius and myself extended our trip to Recife to the local INdT office where we have to wear sweaters inside but that's a totally different story.
