The last week I was allowed to spend in Pineda de Mar for the Workspace sprint. As others have already pointed out it was quite a different sprint with not much hacking going on and not so much technical discussions into the details. For this we will have a Tokamak sprint in Randa later this year.
Our sprint was mostly focused on community building and getting everyone on the same knowledge level. The weeks leading to the sprint showed that this was needed and I myself – although being involved in Plasma for quite some time – had to catch up on many things I was not aware of. The sprint helped us to identify for example weak spots in our internal documentation and getting this fixed is now one of the highest priorities.
The games Kevin played with us really helped us to identify where we want to go and what that means for our future development. This will also influence KWin’s development as we finally understand how Activities and Desktops go together and that helps us in KWin to properly focus development effort on it. Over the last cycles we did not really work on activities support in KWin as we were very unsure on how the window manager is involved in the process. This is now much clearer to me – I just need to document it and luckily Aurélien already started that process.
Luckily I was able to also get some hacking done. As Mr Gwenview was sitting next to me, I started to add some OpenGL magic to the image viewer. Sometimes I just need to work on a different piece of code and to get away from the daily work on KWin. The result is a much smoother zooming experience. At the moment the feature set is not yet identical to the existing implementation, but it’s on a very promising way. Very pleasing is also that at least on my system it works also well with llvmpipe, which could be a very nice solution for the case that a user does not have a decent OpenGL graphics card. For users who like to experiment, feel free to give a try to graesslin/opengl branch in the gwenview repository.
Overall it was a very nice sprint, but also very exhausting. I’m glad that I have one day to relax before going back to work. And I am really glad to see everyone again at this years Akademy where I will give a talk about KWin scripting.
Please thank the Frankfurt Airport for this blog post. Thanks to needing more than forty minutes to get my luggage from the plane to the belt I missed one train by two minutes (it went > 1h after landing) with the next train only after one hour instead of the normal half hourly service.