Last night after our first day of hacking a group of intrepid developers had tapas.

We ate way too much and followed with some great ice-cream. Try the dulce de leche.

As most of our event destinations have been within walking distance, we figured we could also walk to the Collabora sponsored party.

Map: check.
GPS: check.
Location close: check.
Sugar induced enthusiasm: check.

It soon became obvious that walking to the golf course wasn’t as simple as we’d first hoped. We had to jump a few highway barriers.

And we clambered along dirt shoulders.

We played frogger with Spanish traffic, and then decided it was time to head back to find a taxi.

We made it and went straight the the bar where the fun was flowing.

Danimo and Chani in serious conversation.

And Thiago decided to recite some shakespeare to us.

And Markey was eyeing off the bar.

Más fotos

You might know that Akademy 2009 is going to be held in the Canary Islands in July. It’s going to be fantastic and fun and hot and warm and we’ll be absolutely spending time at the beach rather than listening to some technical mumbo jumbo.

But I have to say – it must be one of the most ill conceived locations to put a conference. It’s far from the US. It’s relatively far from Europe, and it’s fucking far from Australia. The only people that will have a short trip will be those in Western Sahara.

My tentative flight route is ridiculous – via Singapore, Milan and Madrid. That’s 3 stop overs. 38 hours of travel time. Plotting straight lines from stop to stop puts the trip at a whopping 19514.39km. Just so you know just how far this is: it is 32% of the radius around Saturn. I’m not even going to tell you the cost.

The Grote Markt in Mechelen (HDR).

The HDR which I’ve posted here proves that you can indeed create impressive shots only using free software, as long as you have a little perseverance and know how. Maybe Uga’s blogs will get there eventually .

The rest of the images are on flickr.

I’ll start by saying that l think we had very productive week, getting lots of design and development done towards our goals for Amarok 2.0. We focused heavily on critiqueing the user interfaces of the major components in our GUI: the playlist, context view and each of our sidebar browsers. In between hacking hours, Mark, Leo and myself hosted design and release-breaking-issue sessions. These have provided valuable direction and motivation to all of our developers, so you can look forward to some exciting progress as we gear up to an imminent beta (and eventually final) release!

We also brainstormed a number of post 2.0 ideas such as interface adjustments to enhance your application experience, including, but not withstanding, mobile and embedded devices. Yes, that’s right folks, before too long (hopefully) you’ll be able to run Amarok on your favourite (maybe) small form factor device. The main use case would be for remote collections and streaming, but we’re not going to shut out users who like carrying 8GB of music on memory cards.

All this talk of small form factor devices is making me drool over my N810 as I write this. Some observations: all this very slow and awkward typing makes me much more coherent; leeching off random wireless to blog has never been easier; and, the inbuilt GPS has already proven invaluable to the Amarok crew as we used it to find our restaurant when we got lost cycling through the mid-west of Belgium. Note: never cycle 15km immediately after eating a huge meal, and never let Casey on a bicycle.

Finally, a big thanks to all that made Akademy so great: the organisers, the participants, the speakers, the boffers, the paparazzi, and all the people that were responsible for either brewing, frying or coating things in sugar.

Coming up: Amarok talk. Must write notes.