Maemo Summit
The Maemo summit in Berlin was much better than expected, though mostly for the meetings outside of the talks, where the NDAed people could whisper obscurely to other NDAed people. Many thanks to the summit organizers, to Nokia, and to C-Base.
Nokia announced some big hints about the next version of Maemo, including a major focus on finger and thumb usage rather than a stylus, better CPU and graphics, and the (unspecified) use of the clutter toolkit. For us NDAed people it took extra effort to remember what stuff was now public and what stuff was secret. To ease that problem, and to get valuable feedback, it looks like there will be early SDK releases with ongoing public work in svn, but I will believe that when I see it. I want to believe.
Listeners to Rodrigo Novo’s charming accent could be forgiven for hearing that it would be a tongeable interface rather than a thumbable interface. Maemo 5 will be great, but that’s an exaggeration.
Openismus Party
We hosted a party on the last evening of the Maemo summit, in our beautiful new offices, with Maemo/Nokia sponsoring the drinks and pizza. The numbers of people were just right, and the atmosphere was very positive and friendly. I saw many of my favorite people and met some new favorites too. People seemed to enjoy the place.
I took a few quick shots with my narrow-angle low-light lens, but the results are kind of abstract and fuzzy.
Apparently an upstairs neighbour poured a bucket of water on Philip Van Hoof, possibly annoyed at the noise at 11 o’clock. But I think that’s too early to be plausible, so it must be someone who doesn’t know that Philip is much nicer in person than online. Philip took it with good humor.
With the bucket of water, thats a kind of specialty in Kastanienallee, I think. I’ve seen that a few times there. I guess over the years, people who are living there get annoyed by all the parties and crowds on the street.
You just have to go on with your party and ignore that (if possible).
But this is absolutely no general habit in Berlin!
Regards
Thanks for the great party Murray! The only downside was my throbbing hangover the next day ;)
Really nice place you got there Murray! I am pretty sure you guys are gonna have a good time in your new offices. Thanks for the beer and pizza – a beautiful boy you have, I tell you I missed my own kids when I saw you with him on the arm :-)
Thanks for that party! NDAed Quimb realized in that party how good is NDAed Sasha with the bloody Wii.
About the bucket of water, nobody understand that it was an expression of pure digital art, being Philip the “1” and the donut _he_ draw with water in the floor was the “0”.