Here's the first bit of braindump from LGM. (Please keep in mind that I typed this up while flying back to the States, and am not sure how jetlagged I was)
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Overall, I think the whole get-together was an amazing success. Many different projects were represented, and a fair mix of end users and potential contributers were also in attendance. Although I would like to see more of the users and just curious there, enough were present to help give a good insight with fresh perspective.
There were perhaps up to a couple hundred people in attendance, and it clearly seemed to be even a better turn out than Bryce or I had expected. We had four people with "Inkscape" on their badges, with a few extra people here and there like Cedric. The GIMP had a good presence, as did Scribus and even Xara.
The atmosphere was one of the really good aspects of the whole meeting. Unlike many other conferences, this was not just a one-way dispersal of information. Though the presentations were similar, afterwards there was a lot of interaction between people with different groups, and even and users. Also, there seemed to not be any real conflicts or posturing, but rather a lot of genuine collaboration going on with win-win situations popping up all over. Probably the best illustration of this was with the SIOX presentation. Part of the presentation's purpose was to get the word out about the capabilities, and to try to spur more interest. That night one of the Blender guys got hooked, and by the next day had hacked together basic support for SIOX as a standard Blender effect.
Each of the teams took advantage of the face-to-face time to have their own group meetings. For example, this was the first time that Craig had actually gotten to actually meet the other people on Scribus. But there was also a lot of communication with people of different groups, and most of the hitting dinner, etc, was completely inclusive. I know that some of the GIMP people expressed a little regret at not being able to get together with some of the non-GIMP people as much as they'd like, but this was only due to being able to get so much done in the various GIMP sit-downs going on. Even so, there was quite a lot that did get done, with various people in different groups each talking with others about all sorts of things.
Xara had a booth outside the main amphitheater, and had three people showing what they've been doing. As you probably already know, they took the opportunity to release their source-code, and it seems like the delay 'till now was time well spent. I know that Carl Worth mentioned he downloaded it and not only did it build first try for him, but it actually ran too. The funny thing was that he didn't realize how much progress had been made since the initial demo, and that most of the tools are functional now.
Their developers seemed like really good people, and very interested in the whole meeting and everything going on. I'd also met them on the bus from the airport the night before. So there was time spent talking with them on various Xara stuff, but then also a lot of time talking about all the other things going on, the stuff the other developers were talking about, and also some more questions on how best to fit in with the general open-source community.
Charles from Xara made it down on Sunday, and after his presentation we had the opportunity to all sit down with him and discuss various Inkscape-Xara issues. The great news is that he honestly seems to "get it", and is working well to try to ensure the release of Xara has the best chance of being a win-win both for the business aspect and for the open-source community. By the end of things it was very clear that both Xara and Inkscape had their own focus, and each has their own reason for being around for quite some time. Probably the main issue for some will be the contributors agreement, however as everyone had time to drill down on things, and also others like Carl Worth from Cairo, it seemed to be a fair approach and my personal feeling is that it won't be a deal-killer for most.
Speaking of Carl, he also had time to meet with Charles on his own, and they came away with quite a lot resolved, and a strong interest to see where things will go from here. Among other things, they were looking at various ways that Xara might get things to have Cairo to use their engine, so it will be *very* interesting to see how things progress in that area.
One surprisingly inspiring presentation was Marti's talk on color management and littleCMS. Even though I'd been familiar with the concepts, and even had drilled down on littleCMS's API to figure out how to hook it into Inkscape, the talk suddenly made all the pieces fall into place. More importantly, it did so with several groups, and after the talk there was a lot started between us and Scribus in regards to managed color-flow, and we realized that together we actually almost at the point of having base things there and integrated. A lot of stuff they had been doing had gotten them close, and lot of the stuff I'd been doing had gotten us close. Then again, Marti confirmed that for basic support, only three functions of the littleCMS API are needed, so we might see that go in *very* soon.
Additionally, we were able to use this to help hammer out with Scribus what direction they might want to take on SVG vs. EPS import, and whether things should be done in Inkscape or in Scribus, and to what degree. We probably ended up changing some minds and getting their focus back on enhancing SVG import, since we figured out some basic ways to support spot colors along with full ICC-profile targeted colors in SVG we will end up putting out. And, of course, Marti will be able to help advise us on the proper approach for a lot of the SVG/CSS color-profile details.
One of the Inkscape-specific things that came up was someone from Slovenia being interested in animation support. We discussed quite a few things, including some general ideas of what Inkscape should and should not do in regards to UI and feature support for animation that Andy, Bryce, and I had just been tossing around the day before. This also leverages a bit more resources for enhancing the extensions mechanism, so look for new people to possibly show up soon.
Speaking of extensions and plugins... there was a lot of general interest in this from many different people, with many different priorities. One of the more interesting exchanges on this was between myself and Craig from scribus. After some Scribus demos it had come up to me that what we were thinking of might be helpful for them also. Craig got really excited about the main idea of exposing a DOM for plugins, and some of the ways that they might go about doing that. Then we moved on to my ideas for abstracting UI for plugins by using XForms. He hadn't been aware of it before (and in fact was very light on XML background in general) but as I drilled in on more and more details he came to feel that it was a very good approach, and cold solve quite a few of the problems they are hitting up against right now, and even more in the future. He also mentioned this might be a concept to push over to the Xara guys (he'd been spending a fair bit of time with them also).
One of the last things to go on was a CREATE BOF. It followed our Inkscape BOF, and ended up being very productive. We had lots of people from many projects, and got some good issues hammered out. Watch for more details on the CREATE mailing list, but a lot was about shared assets like palettes, brushes, etc., ways to share them, and how to make that work well (directories, daemons, things like font mangers, etc.) and not lagging. Another aspect was brought up from the drag-n-drop stuff I've been working on lately. Aside from knowing what to share, we also need to come up with how to put those things properly on the clipboard and for drag-n-drop. One point brought up was that it might be good to work details up and then leverage freedesktop.org to actually get MIME types registered.
I'll follow up with more, like how Andy's demo went (great), Pippin's impressive stuff, and ReJon's great talk...