Richard Hughes talks about ‘colord’
RedHat has allowed Richard to work on a really cool framework for setting up and managing colour management in freedesktop using dbus. It’s a framework which expresses profiles and devices and provides methods to allow management. This is then plugging into gnome colour manager and the kde colour manager.
The colord is in Fedora 15 already and will probably be in Ubuntu 11.10 later this year. Hopefully Ubuntu/Debian won’t be too far behind this important functionality.
Thanks to JonCruz for allowing me to use his screen correction device to create a screen profile for my laptop to allow me to correct my screen. This should make my art look better and make prints easier to judge colours for. I might have to buy myself a screen calibration tool, but using it showed me how dificult it is to mess about with colour profiles today (i.e. command line, guis a broken etc).
Eric Schrijver and the text only programmers culture
Eric did a very interesting talk about the difficulties in getting programmers to recognise that the command line (while being awesome) is not the only input method that should be scrutinised for key parts of the system. Specifically under criticism was the high use of text only programming languages and text only command building.
These ideas are near to my heart as working on Ground Control showed me very vividly how cruel and unwelcoming traditional programmers can be to innovative graphical expressions of command line functionality. The people who report positive use are the people least able to help with programming, which is a shame as it needs love.
Christopher Webber talks animated advocacy
Chris walked us through some basic 3D animation and more advanced 2D animation using blender, surprisingly to me he showed how easy it would be to bring in inkscape layers and animate them into a nice looking video. He’s interested in using animation to promote free software advocacy, convinced like me that new mediums can express and explain complex ideas and philosophies in new ways that allow new people to really et on board to the whole free software movement.
This is particularly interesting to me as the only animation I’ve managed to do has been using inkscape to generate a hundred frames which are then put together manually in openshot. Not exactly quick or easy to manipulate after the creation.
I’ll be attempting to talk to Chris during LGM more about the prospects of animation to explain Free software principles.