Amarok Blog

In the weekend leading up to the Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, 13 KDE hackers and community members, and Nokia employees Knut Yrvin and Ralf Engels have got together in the Nokia Offices near by. There they discuss the potentials of Nokia's Ovi services offering and what opportunities exist in Ovi for KDE as well as what KDE can offer Ovi. The meeting was sponsored by Nokia, and approved by the KDE e.V. - both of these indicating that both parties are interested in seeing such a collaboration succeed.

I am "sorry" to report that we have been so busy here that i have not been able to set aside time to do a proper blog entry about the sprint each day as normally happens during the KDE sprints, but as you can tell from the following, and the Dot article which is going to be posted soon, this sprint was really quite a heavy deal - in the good way!

Friday

My Friday started out with me getting up at horse o'clock England time (that is, the moment in time when by all rights only horses ought to be standing, in this case meaning 03.15), and as my poor house mate had offered to drive me to the airport, he of course got up a matter of minutes later. So, off to the airport we went, and i shall not bore you with any details of the entirely uneventful remainder of the trip itself.

Arriving at the Nokia office in Munich to find Rune 'dimse' Jensen already there, i promptly got my little, already prepared signs ready to be hung up. Unfortunately, as it turned out, their monochromatic nature, caused by our printer's lack of colour quality, meant that they were mostly unnoticed by the intended recipients, but oh well - i know to make them bright KDE-blue for next year


After spending the day waiting for people to slowly trickle in and chatting with Knut and each other in general, we decided to go into town and find a place to get something to eat. So, off we went, finding a nice bar, which in stark contrast to so many places in Germany simply had English language menus by default - an obvious hint to the fact that central Munich is a place where a lot of people come from all over the world to drink beer and gawk at really pretty architecture.

After managing a really nice steak for a surprisingly small amount of money (EUR 19 for a perfectly prepared, rare cooked steak, very good!) and further chatting - this time including beer - we went off to the hostel. We had ordered space for 13 people, which in A&O Hostels speak seems to actually mean "the smallest number of rooms we can fit that many people into", which here meant four people per room in six person rooms... which when we arrived were even equipped for eight people, with four bunk beds in each room. Somewhat confused, we tucked ourselves in and prepared ourselves for an early start the next day.

Saturday

Early starts are not something geeks traditionally are particularly brilliant at, and as a result we did not manage to get everybody up and out before almost an hour after the planned time. At least we got to the office before mid day

So, with everybody arrived at the office, we started out by attempting to describe in some detail just what Ovi actually is. A lot of people have been confused about this, so this helped streamline the whole thing a lot: Ovi is not just the app store, or more recently Ovi Maps. It is, in essence, an umbrella term which covers all of Nokia's service offerings. And it means "door" in Finnish - yes, door, not gateway or portal or somesuch, simply door


After getting the basics done, we began our discussions - in particular this happened by putting three big pieces of paper up on the wall. Each then had a title added, reading: What can Ovi do for KDE, What can KDE do for Ovi, and What features could be added to Ovi.

During these discussions, another piece of paper was added when we realised that one of the Ovi services, Ovi Files, would be shut down (in fact it is being shut down as i am writing these words). As a result, we made it one of priorities to come up with specific ideas for Ovi Files, and how to offer a sensible replacement for the service. As we are reasonably well informed that the reason for shutting it down is technical and not a lack of users or the like, we spent some time coming up with ideas for what we could possibly offer in this area, and came up with what we believe is a sensible business model for using ownCloud to provide an Ovi Files style service.


After working out the first details of this, it was time to get ready for the fact that Germany is entirely shut down retail-wise on Sundays. As such, we went out and bought enormous amounts of food. To be exact, 120 euros worth of food was purchased, preparing us for lunch on both days. Bread, meats, cheeses, salad things, and even some pasta and sauce, in case of occurrances of The Geek Hunger

In the evening, after much more talking, including a round table, where we talked about our individual wishes and interest areas (with notes taken by Chani), it was pizza time. However, getting 15 geeks to agree on which pizzas to buy can be quite a task. One we managed to complete in only two hours! While waiting for the pizza to arrive, more work went into getting some arguments put onto the sheets of paper on the wall and generally discussing the various potential topics. As you can possibly tell by now, the structure of this day was very, well, unstructured: This was in part a deliberate move, to allow people to get their heads wrapped around the concepts in Ovi itself - Sunday would be the day of more structured work.


Before catching the train back to the hostel - something which was much fun, and took two hours(!) due to strike action, and leading to the discovery that the extra bed had now been removed - was that Knut handed the devices over that he had brought. This meant that the first two people, Dipesh and Arjen, were given an N900, to assist in their work: Dinesh on his PIM work, and Arjen for his work on making GluonGraphics work in other places than the desktop. The remaining devices were put back in the bag and put to one side for the next day.

Sunday

Sunday started with a breakfast in the hostel's hotel section. While some people seem to have assumed this would be in any way different, it was of course discovered that, being A&O, the only real difference was the fact that it was higher up and had families with children in there Oh well, the food was the same, so at least there was no change in quality there - except for the fact they'd run out of croissants when i got there, but oh well - the cereal was nice, as was the bun. All in all, a successful second visit to the A&O Hostels Hackerbrücke - certainly recommendable. Simple, cheap and pleasant enough, with actual bathrooms rather than dorm showers


After a relatively successful getting out of the hostel (only twenty minutes late this time! ), we arrived at office to find that our final participant, Pradeepto, had arrived. After people got themselves woken up a touch and caught up on email, µblogs, feeds and other such things, we began discussions again - both one on one and in groups. One of these things end up with Pradeepto giving a short lecture on history of Symbian S60.

At some point, we finally reached the point where some structure was needed: We split into the groups suggested by the round table presentations from the previous day, with yours truly joining the group discussing Ovi Store related items. This, in essence, focused on how we could potentially convince Ovi that exposing their store through a web API would be advantageous to them, and have no real drawbacks. Seeing as the Ovi Store seems to run as a web page as opposed to a fat client on the various devices, we have based our ponderings and suggestions on there being no API already. Talks with the head of device development at Orange Labs R&D, Rafel Uddin, at Qt Developer Days following the sprint have shown that this seems to in fact be the case: Orange have wanted to create a rebranded version of the Ovi Store, and they would very much like to do this as a fat client rather than the current solution which requires them to do it as a web application. The suggestion this group comes up with is to suggest basing this exposure on the well proven and by now extensively implemented (both for clients and servers) web API named Open Collaboration Services, as this would instantly bring support in various places around the world - including directly in the KDE desktop.


At some point when most of the teams were reaching some level of completeness in their discussions, it was agreed that it was time for food. And so, lunch happened. This consisted of leftovers from the previous day, as well as something which translated roughly to white saussages. I am told this is a Bavarian specialty, and they are eaten by peeling the skin of the rapidly boiled sausage, and with mustard and brezes - the soft version of pretzels as you might know them from beer drinking

After lunch, people slowly start working again. Rune mentioned that he is in need of arguments for the mobile devevelopment camp he helps run for UNF.dk (the Danish youth association of science) to use Qt rather than Android. Pradeepto consequently offered to put him in contact with Jarmo Rintamaki, the manager at Forum Nokia responsible for contact with universities and other educational institutions. This finally happened at DevDays - networking, people, is the name of the game

Arriving at dinner time, we were all more or less ready to round off the sprint. The video below is the current end result of what has become an on-going discussion of what we need to contact Ovi about: In summary, we have many very good arguments for why it would make all kinds of sense for Ovi to help us and also let us help them. Drop by the wiki page to see where we are at the moment, it's already looking good, but needs much more work on the formulation part before we can hand it on to go further.