Report from the GNOME & Mono Festival of Love 2012

["gnomeuser gmail com" <gnomeuser gmail com>]

The past week we had the pleasure of hosting a week long GNOME & Mono
hackfest event at the lovely Microsoft NERD center in Boston. I have
collected all the blog posts, photos and media mentions but to
summarize we have made a lot of progress.

* We are nearly ready to unveil a new Tomboy UX which is heavily
inspired by the GNOME3 Notes application mockups, this will initially
ship on OS X but once we get WebKit-gtk# bindings on Linux it is
likely to land in GNOME3 as well. To deliver this Jared and Robert
have been rewriting Tomboy to provide a proper library and separate
UX, which will allow us to deploy on multiple platforms. Jared
Jennings is expected to share more information on this shortly,
additionally if Jeremie failed to sleep on the flight back to Ireland
I have been promised an initial Tomboy client for iOS.
* We also managed to push out not one but two releases of Taglib#
fixing a number of issues and adding support for one new format.
* Andreia Gaita demoed a gir2gapi translator which will allow us to
generate GObject-Introspection based bindings, however there are still
areas where doing so requires guesswork rather than relying on
information which gir could provide for us, regardless this is a big
step forward.
* Banshee has seen a number of improvements, biggest is probably being
moved to the Last.fm Scrobbling 2.0 API.
* Dbus# has seen a lot of work, having 2 years worth of work merged
and we are now passing all of the unit tests. There is still a bit of
work left to do in terms of API improvements but Jeremie demoed
Banshee using it with all the old ndesk-dbus/dbus-sharp workarounds
removed running flawlessly. Getting this deployed should greatly
improve stability and allow a wealth of applications to remove old
workarounds.
* MonoDevelop gain support for the Plastic Distributed Version Control
System and more importantly as a result of this we have established
good relations with Codice Software which we expect to lead to the
Open Sourcing of some of their code, as well as a greater involvement
with our community.
* Two of our GSoC students attended and had very productive meetings
with their mentors, meaning we are on track to deliver the Tasque
(Todo application with Remember the Milk integration) revitalization
and voice controls for Banshee. This was Antonius's (Tasque) first
involvement with Open Source so we are pleased to have given him a
pleasant welcoming and lots of good memories.
.. and much much more.

We had a fantastic time for which we naturally want to thank our
generous sponsors Fluendo, Xamarin, Microsoft, Plural Sight and of
course GNOME. Planning for next years event has already started and we
are looking forward to building on what worked well this year and what
needs improvements.

A gigantic thank you on behalf of all the attendees,
David Nielsen

Full list of blog posts, photos etc. can be found here:

https://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/GNOMEandMonoFestivalofLove2012/Blogging
(List is expected to grow still as some attendees still owe me blog posts)