Big Changes Again

My life has seen some big changes this year with getting a new job, moving to Berlin, etc. Well, the changes haven’t stopped yet.

Before I applied to Red Hat, at the beginning of the year, I had applied to a position at CERN (if you don’t know what CERN is, look it up, but part of the reason you’re addicted to the internet is because of it). CERN has two periods throughout the year where it accepts applications, I knew it wasn’t easy to be accepted and I had to move on with my life so I was happily living in Berlin and working for Red Hat.
Turns out I was accepted and I had a decision to make.

On one hand, I was very happy to finally be living in Berlin, Helena was enrolled in an intensive German course (and doing great), we were living in the nice neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg and of course, I don’t need to tell you how great Red Hat is if you consider yourself a Free Software developer. On the other hand, I knew this opportunity with CERN would be hard to get again. So in the end I took the tough decision of leaving Red Hat and I have been working at CERN since last week. I am working on a project out of my comfort zone (and yes, it’s Free Software), but that’s part of the challenge.

I changed a unique company for a unique research center and I changed one of the cheapest, coolest cities in Europe for one of the most expensive in the world.

Regarding work and GNOME in particular, I will keep involved in it, even though my projects have been neglected with all the moving: I hope to finish the port of OCRFeeder to GI and to give some love to Skeltrack once I have time (and conditions: no internet at home yet…).

Even Bigger Changes

Oh, yeah, there’s something else I would like to share. I am in the first steps of what will surely be the biggest project I will ever develop: Helena and I are expecting a baby!
We just found out one week before moving out of Berlin. It surely doesn’t make all the moving easier but we can’t describe how happy we are with these news! It’s curious that we had to live in the “babyboom neighborhood” of Berlin to get a baby ourselves… there must be something in the water! ๐Ÿ™‚

And that is all for now, let’s see what the next months bring!

Wacom’s fresh button assignment and GUADEC

In what comes to assigning buttons’ functions for the Wacom tablets in GNOME, the approach in the GNOME Control Center was the traditional tree-view: one button’s label per row, allowing to choose the functionality but requiring the user to mentally map the tablet’s buttons’ layout to the names in the tree-view.

Since we already have a help window, provided by GNOME Settings Daemon, which presents a tablet’s buttons layout in a realistic, visual way to the user, we decided to make it more powerful and assign the buttons directly from there! This way it is faster and more intuitive to set the buttons. Here is a video showing these nice new changes:

Another change is that the keyboard shortcuts are now captured by a new widget which supports also modifier-only shortcuts, meaning that now Ctrl, Ctrl+Alt, Shift, etc. can be easily assigned to buttons, allowing for more flexibility when mapping the tablet’s buttons to applications’ commands. As shown in the video, the old GtkTreeView was also replaced by a nicer GtkListBox (which also makes use of this shortcut capture widget).

Going to GUADEC

That’s right, for the fifth year now, I am going to GUADEC! Besides attending the conference, it will be also a good chance to have a beer with old friends and team mates from Red Hat, who I only interact with on IRC.

See you in Brno!

Upcoming Wacom Features in GNOME

I had previously mentioned that, as part of my job at Red Hat, I was taking care of the Wacom tablets support in GNOME.
To show you a bit of this, straight from the nice Atopia Kaffeehaus in Prenzlauer berg, Berlin, I have cooked a little video with some of the upcoming features:

These are not, of course, the only new features but I had to pick the ones that are actually usable right now.

The tablets shown in the video are a Cintiq 12WX and an Intuos 5 M touch.

I am usually around #control-center on irc.gnome.org so if you got some cool idea for the Wacom tablets in GNOME, drop by and let me know!