Anyway, enough of my rant comment, back to BeGeistert...
Saturday
On Saturday we were awoken by the Youth Hostel blasting us with music at 8:00 AM. They didn't do that last time I was there, and a little annoying after going to bed only 4 hours previously. That said it was useful as it woke me up enough to get up in time for breakfast.
Saturday was a beautiful day with the a good hot sun shining. Of course the sun chooses a day when everyone was inside to shine. There were several presentations throughout the day including Squeezer, Zeta, WonderBrush and generating PDFs in Python.
Squeezer
This is a very clever app for handling archives (Zip etc) written by a Italian guy called Massimiliano Origgi.
You may think archiving is about Zipping and unzipping files but Massimiliano has taken it to a whole new level with Squeezer which allows you to arbitrarily add/remove individual or groups of files to/from archives.
It also allows filtering so you could if you wished extract only files of a certain type.
The example given was that of HTML files, If you only wanted the documentation you could set a filter and only the html files would be extracted. Of course you can also do the reverse so if you had packed a software product and had a last minute documentation update you could add it without re-archiving everything.
Massimiliano also seems to be working on 10 other projects simultaneously (including OpenBeOS) and somehow getting them all done: NewsSniffer reads and displays RSS feeds on your desktop so you don't have to keep checking web pages for the latest news. MultiClip gives you multiple clipboards accessible via the function keys, this lead to quite a discussion on how the contents of each clipboard should be displayed. NetMonitor is a small tool for monitoring your network activity like the one in Windows for monitoring modem traffic. A new FTP client is also in development which will allow you to use the normal window interface to upload and download files. I think he's working on other stuff as well, quite how he manages it all I don't know!
Zeta
Bernd Korz gave us a demo of some of the recent changes in Zeta,
There is a lot of work going into Zeta that goes well beyond fancy looking windows. The USB stack is being improved to access a wider range of devices than the current stack which is apparently quite limited, this is proving to be a challenge as the number of devices which actually implement the USB spec properly is quite low.
The preferences system is being completely revamped with preferences displayed in a single window and many new ones being added. There is a lot of work going on under the hood so to speak and the basic applications supplied are also being enhanced or in some cases replaced with better tools - Squeezer being one example.
YellowTab also seem to be answering their critics, the so called "Linux-isation" comments seem to have been listened to and some things are being simplified, i.e. some options have been removed from the installer and even the number of border options have been lowered.
The talk was interrupted by lunch so I missed the second part. There was also a talk on the encryption system being put into Zeta on Sunday but it was in German so I didn't attend.
Wonderbrush.
Stephan Assmus showed us the advancements he made in the development of WonderBrush. It was very basic last time I seen it a year ago and has clearly came on a long way since then. It did some pretty smart stuff then but now it's even smarter with tricks like the clone tool being added. This allows you to clone an action so if you drew a red circle it would clone it and you can move it elsewhere. If you then decided you'd prefer it blue you can then of course colour it blue, the power is when you have a selection of clones on screen and you want them all blue - you just colour the parent and all the others will copy the behaviour and also change to blue.
This doesn't just apply to primitives, you can also do this with tools, so you can clone a blur effect. What's more since everything is done as layers you can pick up the blur/s and move them around independent of the original image.
Stephan has also added a text tool complete with anti-aliasing, it not complete yet but you can do a lot of tricks with it as well.
Stephan also showed us a clever scaling algorithm which he'd implemented in eXposer. It outputs animations and you may wish to scale them when generating a final film. However normal image scaling algorithms tend to blur everything slightly thus reducing the quality. In order to address this Stephan added a scaling algorithm which looks for edges in the image and makes sure they are not blurred across pixel boundaries. The results of this were plain to see with the new algorithm generating much better images.
PDFs in Python
Charlie Clark gave another talk on Python, this time about how he used Python to generate PDFs which were used to produce the badges everyone wears. These were previously done in Gobe but because the main logo was an image they never came out very well due to Gobe's insistence on printing everything at 72dpi (you should print images at 300dpi or better).
This time Charlie generated the badges in PDF using a short script and some PDF generation libraries. PDF is a compiled version of Postscript which is a language for describing pages. Generating Postscript can be a very complex operation due to the number of calculations you have to do but the libraries simplify this process and then creates the PDF.
The end result was a page of code and name badges which look a lot better, though of course nobody noticed this until it was pointed out!
On Saturday night we did a copy of last year's visit to Lupo's Pizza restaurant in the centre of Dusseldorf. The atmosphere was very good and as last year the pizza was made quickly and was absolutely delicious. At the end we all had a small cake to celebrate Eddy's 18th birthday. Afterwards we were treated to a glass of Killepitsch by Eddy and Charlie, quite amusing seeing everyone's reaction after taking a sip - it's potent stuff!
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