Hackfests (between Oct 1, 2015 and Sept 30, 2016)

Content Apps 2015, Madrid, Spain – December 2 to 4, 2015

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/ContentApps2015

The Content Apps hackfest brought together about 13 designers and developers of GNOME content applications, responsible for managing and displaying user data, to plan development of what became the GNOME 3.20 release and beyond.

In addition to defining roadmaps for new features, and reviewing the UX of existing applications, plans for a new desktop-wide Sharing framework were discussed, and the relationship between content applications such as Documents or Photos with their traditional counterparts such as Evince and Eye of GNOME. Designs were also delivered to improve how TV series are grouped in Videos. Work started to re-architect the icon and list view typical of these applications to use more modern GTK widgets and interaction patterns, Music was ported to the new version of Grilo, and taking advantage of the event being co-located with the LibreOffice hackfest, patches were written to natively support LibreOffice files in Documents.

Attention was also paid to ensuring a good first experience for new contributors, and several of the project pages on the GNOME website were redesigned.

Thanks to the Medialab Prado for hosting the Content Apps hackfest.

User Experience Design, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – January 18 to 22, 2016

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/UxDesign2016

The User Experience Design hackfest gathered designers and user experience experts from the GNOME and Endless teams, with the goals of establishing a closer relationship between the two teams, and to learn more about the Endless user base as a window into the world of a GNOME user profile.

The group of about 15 people spent the first two days in the field, visiting users in their environments, observing how they use computers, and asking them questions about their lives and how they experience technology.

For the rest of the week, the group sat down and compared the different experiences offered by stock GNOME and Endless OS, identifying opportunities for collaboration and convergence. Among others, these areas include window management and the way applications are launched, user accounts, the lock screen, and the Software app. The teams also shared their work flows, with the goal of a closer collaboration for the future, and examined some of the challenges faced by the Endless team, such as working with old CRT televisions and designing for slow or no internet connectivity.

Thanks to Endless for hosting and organizing the User Experience Design hackfest.

Developer Experience, Brussels, Belgium – January 27 to 29, 2016

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/DeveloperExperience2016

The 2016 edition of the Developer Experience hackfest, organized right before FOSDEM, saw several GNOME hackers from many parts of the globe come together to work on the next iteration of our developer platform.

A lot of attention was given to Flatpak with the first bundles for GNOME core applications produced by the end of the event. Nightly automated builds were also created, ironing out bugs in the process. Geoclue also gained support to identify sandboxed applications.

GNOME Builder gained a new feature to easily create new projects from templates. The Glade UI editor gained support for widgets that do not specify an ID in the XML file, and a new project was started to visualize events and sources dispatched by the GLib main loop, which resulted in a number of fixes to GLib itself.

The documentation team worked on improvements to the developer.gnome.org website, and furthered the plans to use GObject introspection data to generate docs compatible with different language bindings.

Thanks to Betacowork for hosting the Developer Experience hackfest.

GNOME Software 2016, London, UK – April 4 to 8, 2016

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/GnomeSoftware2016

Developers working on GNOME Software and application distribution technologies got together in London with the goal of laying out plans to make the application more flexible to the needs of the various distributions using it, and to integrate better with new frameworks such as Flatpak and Snap.

The AppStream spec received a lot of attention and gained support for translated screenshots and “kudos”, an indication of the application integration with the system. The foundation of GNOME’s multi-architecture build infrastructure for Flatpak runtimes was also laid out during the event. Finally, an initial version of the Chromium browser running inside Flatpak was created.

GStreamer Spring, Thessaloniki, Greece – May 13 to 15, 2016

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/GstSpringHackfest2016

In this edition of the GStreamer hackfest, the team made a lot of progress with video acceleration, and merged a number of improvements to the VA-API and kmssink plugins to properly support the dma-buf kernel API under Intel and ARM hardware.

GStreamer’s demuxer was improved to add support for adaptive streaming, and a preview for decodebin3, the next generation decoder element, was given. Progress was made towards support for spherical videos playback, a requirement for VR hardware. Finally, an initial implementation of an API to write GStreamer element in Rust was written.

Thanks to Coho for hosting the GStreamer Spring hackfest.

GTK+, Toronto, Canada – June 13 to 16, 2016

https://wiki.gnome.org/Hackfests/GTK2016

The 2016 GTK+ hackfest brought together more than 15 contributors to talk about the future of the toolkit and plan for GTK+ 4, the next major version.

During the event, the team formulated a proposal to the community for a new versioning scheme allowing for long-term stable releases to co-exist with faster-paced development branches. Flatpak portals and their interactions with GTK+ applications were topics of extensive discussion, and a consensus was reached for a secure design that does not compromise the user experience.

The team also talked about bringing responsive design techniques from the web world to the toolkit, discussed new widgets such as GtkImageView and architected a new solution for widget hierarchy that does not require GtkContainer.

Finally, more progress was made in the port of the developer.gnome.org website to use HotDoc, and some developers from the Eclipse team joined a few sessions to try and resolve issues they had encountered around the use of theming APIs from third party toolkits.

Reviewer comments

Comments by Rosanna

• In the Developer Experience section: A lot of attention was given to Flatpak with the first bundles for GNOME core applications produced by the end of the event. Nightly automated builds were also created, ironing out bugs in the process.
  • Does the "… in the process" refer to the process of creating nightly automated builds? Or does it refer to the process they went through?