The GNOME Core Apps Hackfest just finished, I’m happy to say that it was a success!

Many people from different backgrounds were able to come, either from the community or from companies like Red Hat, Endless, Kinvolk, etc. all of us involved in different parts of the GNOME project.

The first we did was to write down what points must be discussed during the 3 days, along with identifying the people involved in those topics. This was the trick to be productive in the hackfest, and all of us agreed it worked.

Since it’s hard to see what’s written:

Tracker System vs apps (containerisation) Performance Removable devices

Maps

Usage app (one is being created)

Control center redesign Network panel Details panel

Calendar Week view Recurring events Location checks/sugestions

Books

Software Categories Offline experience Rollback Shell extensions Performance Flatpaks installation System vs user installs EULA/Licenses

Sharing portal

Content selection portal

Libgd Flowbox view Tagged entry

Background apps

Files Action bar Bookmarks / XDG folders External devices

Opening files with content apps

Extras Music Videos (series view) Newcomers initiative, new revamp planning



Quite a lot! From that list we identified the most important items and the optional ones that are short enough to allocate some time for. We also identified which items require the most amount of people from different backgrounds to be together so they can be handled as best as possible.

Some topics were very well covered. GNOME Software is now important for a few companies and distributions, so it took quite a lot of discussion during the hackfest . Another topic that was discussed extensively was opening files with content applications, basically using Music, Photos, etc. to open files from Files.

But we also discussed more technical items, thanks to having gtk+ maintainers in the hackfest we were able to talk about gtk4, it’s new OpenGL based drawing model, containers API, GtkListBo, GtkFlowBox and essentially all what we need for our applications and 3rd party developers in the upcoming months.

Some of us will write about the specific items in the upcoming days with blog posts, so keep an eye on planet.gnome.org to see all the discussion we had and what solutions and decisions we came up with for those.

I want to say a big thank you for the excellent organisation of Joaquim Rocha, and for hosting us to Kinvolk, especially to Chris Kühl

and Collabora for sponsoring an excellent dinner on the first day of the hackfest

We had a great one!

Also to Red Hat and Endless for sending quite a few employees, and last but not least, to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring the community members, who were essential in our discussions.

Hope you had fun!