Thorsten's Weblog

Spent an intense last week in Orvieto, Italy. First two days had the 2nd odf plugfest; glad to see so many enthusiastic people from the odf universe again, or for the first time in person – and of course witnessing big corporation representatives like Doug and Rob sitting on the table, striving for better odf interop.

Following that had three days of OpenOffice.org conference, with many interesting talks (including those from my excellent colleagues Petr, Noel, Cedric, Fridrich, Kendy, Rodo and Kohei).
I found the outlined ideas around an "odfkit" (the similarity in name to webkit is not by accident) quite remarkable – if that ends up in more code reuse across the place (and ideally also reusing existing code in their implementation), this is Good ™.

Also great to meet the ever-energetic Chris Noack again; it was mostly due to him that I attended a few UX-related talks – and had at least the occasional feeling that approaches there were a bit by-the-book, maybe leaving a few peculiarities and potential synergies available in software generally and FLOSS specifically out of the equation. Reportedly, there are also students working on UX topics, so it would be really awesome to see them join the education project – in an attempt to tear down the wall between coders and interaction designers, that at least I perceive is existing in OOo.