Public Announcements

GNOME 3 in Paris

Thanks to YoBoY, there will be a GNOME 3 release party in Paris. It will happen on Friday, April 8th, registration is mandatory, and the number of available seats is limited, so register now for the party! There will be some GNOME 3 goodies ;)


Summer of Code

If you are a student, you can now apply for this year Google Summer of Code! GNOME is a mentoring organization this year again, this means you can be paid to hack on GNOME for a whole summer. Just browse our list of ideas for potential projects, or you can just write a proposal for any idea that you care about and would make GNOME even cooler!


Personal Life

I'm really happy to announce that I've started working at Red Hat last week. I have joined the Spice team and I'm looking forward to do great stuff (take over the world, this kind of things ;) with the people working there. Hopefully I'll get my own red hat soon!

Transferring contacts to an iDevice

Recently, I wanted to transfer my addressbook from my good old but dying Sony Ericsson W910i phone to one of Apple iOS devices (aka iPhone 4).

Reading the contacts out of the old phone was a bit hackish but pretty straightforward using gammu/wammu and a bit of hacking. I didn't manage to import 100% of the data in GMail/evolution-data-server (had to retype a few addresses/phone numbers by hand), but I decided I could live with that.

Then I looked at the computer to iDevice writing, thinking it would be a pretty similar process, ie grab an existing tool, do a bit of fiddling and be done with it. Alas not :) I quickly realized that there was no tool on linux to send contacts to an iDevice. The alternatives involved booting into OS X, or sending a vcf file by mail and opening it on the iDevice. I didn't want to do the former, and the latter didn't work for some reason (and it's cheating anyway ;)

After talking with the nice people on #libimobiledevice, I realized the low-level building blocks were there in libimobiledevice, so I decided to go ahead and write the missing code (which involved parsing and writing XML plists from the device after figuring out their format). After a few days of hacking, eds-to-idevice was born! This C program can read contacts from evolution-data-server and writes them to an iDevice.
Be aware that this does not try to handle contact synchronization: when I use it, I tell it to erase all contacts from the iDevice and to unconditionnally write all contacts from evolution-data-server to the iDevice. If it's called multiple times, it will create duplicate contacts on the device.
However, I tried to make the code as generic and reusable as possible, with the hope that someone would pick up the ball and improve it to write a synchronization plugin for one of the linux synchronization framework. Volunteers :) ?

You can find the code on gitorious and I made a tarball. Enjoy!

GNOME and GSoC 2011

We just got the great news that GNOME got accepted to be part of Google Summer of Code 2011. This is a great opportunity for GNOME, thanks again to Google for organizing this!

The bad news is that the work is just starting for everyone :) We are looking for cool ideas for students to work on during the summer, so if you are working on a GNOME project and have ideas that would make a nice 3 months coding project for a student, please add it to our idea page.

We'll also need mentors for all the students that will have fun hacking on GNOME during the summer, you can already register to be a mentor for GNOME on melange, don't wait, register now :)

Last but not least, if you are a student, be sure to check our ideas list and our information page for students. For now it's preliminary, the ideas will be sorted in the coming week. And you don't have to limit yourself to these ideas, you can also come up with your own cool idea and describe it in your application on Google website. The application period for students hasn't opened yet, it will open in about 10 days for now. However, you can already start thinking about what project you'd like to work on, start playing with the code of the project you'd like to work on during the summer, start discussing about your idea and your application with people involved in the project, ... Remember that in the previous years, we required candidates to show us a patch they had written for a free software project, and it's really likely that we'll do the same this year. You can also drop by on #soc on irc.gnome.org if you have specific questions!

All in all, it should be a fun summer! :)