Date: 	Thu, 06 May 1999 11:34:33 +0100
From: Richard Moore <rich@ipso-facto.freeserve.co.uk>
To: "KDE Development (ML)" <kde-devel@alpha.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de>
Subject: Report on SIMPLINUX conference

SIMPLINUX
1-3 May 1999
University de Algarve, Faro Portugal

I am writing this on my way home from the SIMPLINUX conference held in
Faro at the university of the Algarve in Portugal. I was there to
present a paper on the evolution of the design of KDE from the initial
design goals through to the goals that are being set for KDE 2.0.

The conference was well attended with between two and three hundred
Portuguese Linux users present. KDE was much in evidence at the
conference as the university is currently installing KDE on all of
it's computers. This included the machine being used for the
presentations themselves.

Before describing the conference in detail, I must warn you that as I
cannot speak Portuguese I only attended a small number of the
presentations - this did however give me plenty of opportunity to talk
with the other attendees and hear their views on KDE.

The first day of the conference included papers on the use of Linux in
Portugal, the use of open source software in universities, using Linux
with Novel and network clustering. The papers that day concluded with
Alan Cox giving a talk on the features in the 2.2 kernel.

Day two of the conference included talks on using TCL to create
multi-platform applications, Oracle on Linux, Alan Cox discussing
Video4Linux, and my own KDE talk.

It was quickly obvious that Linux is becoming well established in
Portugal, and that the attendees were both enthusiastic and well
informed. They ranged from students and teachers using Linux for
education through to business users using Linux because it allowed
them to undercut their competition. The use of KDE seemed to be pretty
much universal, though there was also a small community of Gnome
enthusiasts.

Alan Cox's talks both went down very well, to the extent that he was
almost mobbed by fans at the end of both presentations. He ended up
autographing everything from books to someone's laptop computer :-) I
myself really enjoyed both presentations - I'm going to buy myself a
TV card when I get home as video4linux seems to be very cool.

My KDE talk seemed to go down well, and the audience had some
interesting questions. They also had some good suggestions which I
will mention below. There was a lot of interest in the CORBA
facilities of KDE 2, and screenshots of themed KDE went down very
well. Interestingly, no one asked about licensing during the talk, and
discussions afterwards seemed to indicated that almost everyone was
happy with the situation of QPL + FreeQt agreement. This meant that
the discussions were able to focus on technical issues rather than
wasting tine worrying about licenses.

Interesting issues that were raised:

* We need to support unicode in config files, have we started 
thinking about this yet?

* We ought to get some feedback from Robert's mate about using Qt 
styles to help add accessibility support. This will probably need
something along the lines of a chain of command pattern in the theming
code. We will also need to be able to associate user visible names
with arbitrary components so screenreaders can give useful feedback.

* We need to work on the resizing behavior of our dialogs as some of 
them are still crappy when resized.

* We need QTabDialog to be less shit. IMHO this is one of the weakest 
of the Qt components.

* A few people were asking about the possibility of a Tcl style canvas
widget. It might bbe possible to produce something like this using the
killustrator view code. It would be especially cool if this was
integrated with the WMF file
handling code.

* KDE currently has problems if you log in on several machines at once
and have a shared home dir on them. We should add a display name
prefix to any run time files.

* It would be nice to support different configurations for different
screen sizes. Apparently this is handled nicely on SGI at the moment.

* Invoking kfind from kfiledlg should set the directory for the search
based on the currently viewed directory. KFind should also allow the
use of full regexps as well as simply shell globbing.

* I've been told that ODBC had some major performance problems when
the data set is large. We need to evaluate this carefully when looking
at the ODBC config files ideas.

* Lots of people love KDevelop! Congrats to the kdevelop team. :-)

* A suggestion for the disk navigator was that it should be extended
to allow the files to be dragged from the menu into applications. I
think this is a very good idea.

* Why not use CORBA to network enable some of our games?

* Alan and Carlos both suggested that the session management should be
separated from kwm to allow it to be used when KDE is being run with a
difference WM. I'm not 100% convinced, but the idea has it's merits.

* Why not add a link to the wish list to the standard about dialog?

[As I am writing this I have been watching a child of about 10 playing
with a win95 system with a touch screen that is some sort of data
terminal. Within a minute or two he had managed to crash the app that
was supposed to be running and got to the desktop. He then played mine
sweeper for a while before he got bored. He's just shut it down, and
when it came back up the file system was buggered and it ran scandisk,
then crashed and it is now sitting at the dos prompt :-) I'll take a
photo before I go. ]

Thanks to everyone who organised and attended the conference - it was
a lot of fun.

Enjoy

Rich.
-- 
     Richard Moore		rich@ipso-facto.freeserve.co.uk
http://www.robocast.com/	richard@robocast.com
http://developer.kde.org/	rich@kde.org