Even though it is a preview in GNOME 3.8, Photos already has a nice set of well-rounded features.

• Albums – create, add to, remove from and delete albums
• Favorites – mark and unmark items as favorites
• Printing, setting background and properties, etc.

With the basics now in place, we are going to start filling in some of the gaps during the 3.9.x/3.10 cycle.

• Cloud integration – starting with Flickr and Facebook
• Search – including a search provider for GNOME Shell

Please donate if you want to make a difference.

This year’s conference will focus on:

• Design of the core user experience (core applications, shell, toolkit)
• Design of the developer experience (tools, documentation, services)
• Integration and extension of the operating system plumbings into the core UX
• Application development and deployment
• Integration of web technologies into the GNOME user experience
• Improving the user experience on different form factors
• Outreach to new contributors
• Organization and governance of the project

I am sure you have a lot of cool things to talk about and the deadline is barely three weeks away on the 27th of April. So, hurry up and send those talks our way. We hope to see you in Brno in August.

Many thanks to Matthew Barnes for making the required adjustments in Evolution Data Server and making sure that it landed in time for the 3.8.0 release later this month.

Calendars and contacts can be accessed via CalDAV and CardDAV from their respective tabs in Evolution. Files in your ownCloud storage show up as volumes via WebDAV in Nautilus and GtkFileChooser.

Many thanks to Milan Crha for making the necessary changes to hook up Evolution with ownCloud in time for 3.8.0.

Internally, it works using the TplLogWalker API that was recently added to telepathy-logger, and by adding a #prepend node to each of the Adium themes provided by Empathy. Currently it is not a part of the Adium specification. So if you are a vendor (eg., Ubuntu) shipping your own themes, then you should update them accordingly.

There is room for further improvements to the user experience, but it works and it can be very addictive once you get used to it.

Thanks to Guillaume Desmottes, Xavier Claessens and Nicolas Dufresne for all their reviews.

If you are an end-user you can expect voice and video calls between Empathy clients on both ends to be much more stable. There are still a few oddities here and there, but you should be able to place and receive calls much more reliably now.

Voice calls between the proprietary Google Talk client and Empathy should also work, but if you are looking to place a video call then make sure you have the H264 encoder and decoder for GStreamer 1.0. Typically they come from gst-plugins-ugly and gst-libav respectively. Trying to place a video call without H264 support will not cause it to be gracefully degraded into an voice or audio only call. This is something that we need to address in the future. So, if you don’t have the H264 codecs then you should explicitly choose to make an audio call.

If you are a distributor or packager, then please make sure that you are shipping the following releases that were made for GNOME 3.6.2:

• empathy-3.6.2
• telepathy-gabble-0.16.4
• telepathy-glib-0.20.1
• farstream-0.2.2
• gst-plugins-good-1.0.3
• webrtc-audio-processing-0.1

So, go ahead and try it out, and let us know if it breaks.

Few days ago, Michael Scherer pointed me to ownCloud-OpenShift kickstart, and it is really as easy as the README.md claims to be.

Thanks to it I have now got myself owncloud-lostcase.rhcloud.com.