Calligra Spring 2013 Sprint started

The Calligra contributor community finally is meeting again for a sprint weekend, both virtually and in real life: There are 6 people at the ThoughtWorks Bangalore office in India, sitting and hacking on stuff already since the morning. And 11 people are gathering at the Linuxhotel in Europe until the evening, to follow and join them the next two days. Other people are popping up in the random Google Hangout sessions, and of course in the IRC channel #calligra.

Today was arrival day, so more or less dynamically structured. Still the Krita people had already their BoF, as most of them arrived early. Tomorrow then there will be great discussion day, topics will be e.g. a new document/view-architecture and improving QML-support.

With doing a few more 2.x releases in the futures, Calligra is slowly approaching the 3.0 version, as a milestone where the individual programs not only are useful as serious viewers, with e.g. excellent import filters for MS formats, but finally also as reliable, easy to use and well integrated editors (which most still need to become).

Krita, as the current flagship, is already making waves in the world of movie and GFX studios, also Intel having used a special version (Krita Sketch) at their CES booth!
Author is going to find a so far unclaimed niche, while Kexi is getting closer to occupy its targetted one. Words, Stage, Sheets are offering alternative UX to what AOO | LO | MS have. Plan quietly evolves into a serious project planner. And more.
While these are all exciting developments, there are also new challenges in the future: KF5 & Qt5 & QML2 & Plasma Active.
Also some old challenges are still around: while now only more Kexi has Qt3Support dependencies, the started big refactoring of the central Calligra libraries waits to be finished.

There are lots of reasons to keep on pushing Calligra programs and libraries: built on Qt/kdelibs and with a quite modular architecture, it’s quite easy to adapt to new platforms out there, which e.g. can be seen with Calligra Active or the plugins for Okular, which have been done with only little effort in comparison. And Qt5 brings even more hope and options.

This sprint would not be possible without the supporters of KDE e.V., thanks to them to make it financially possible for us to meet up to develop plans for the future roadmaps. So if you, dear reader, want to do your little contribution to the future of KDE software as well, consider to Join The Game as a supporter of the KDE e.V. !

Thanks also to KO GmbH for supporting the sprint, to ThoughtWorks Bangalore for hosting the Indian part of the sprint and for the Linuxhotel for the community-friendly offering in their great setting for the European part. And thanks to Claudia, the KDE e.V.s business manager, for her quick and uncomplicated handling of any issues.

Next here in Linuxhotel: Pasta self-cooking for dinner (that’s why there are pasta sauce recipes on the sprint planning page 😉 ). Oh, got ready while writing this post, actually next is Pasta self-eating 🙂