Note : This document is an approximate translation and a free adaptation of the official meeting report issued by the GeosCrewEurope. It then reflects the point of view of both the Crew and the author. Sorry for the bad english and private jokes.
The meeting has been successful for two reasons : the first is that a lot of interesting things were going on in the great "Chesseli" room of the "zur Mühle" hotel and the second is that the weather was not motivating the attendees to go outside. Anyway, the clouds were obstructing the surrounding mountains that nobody was looking at, except some spouses who were obliged to go shopping or visiting the Basel puppet museum.
What's eventually and officially gone out the meeting, casually chaired by Werni Grieder ?
Whithout any doubt, the "german patch", made by Gérard Niefergold and Andreas Peter. The "french patch" was also presented in beta version by Marc Sinsoillier (realized with the help of Gérard). These "patches", which represent several months of hard work, allow german or french people to use New Deal Office, SchoolSuite ou Web Suite in their respective languages. Six years after the last official german version, here comes Goethe's language in the Geos court.
Note that the word "patch" will be suppressed, superceded by "update", which is less "Hacker-oriented". New Deal did not appreciate the GeosCrewEurope initiative at the beginning, but now admits that these localizations may be welcome. Everyone agrees on the fact that localizations for german, french and others are a major factor of the adoption of the software in Europe.
New Deal and Nokia did also notice that the Euro symbol is also of major importance. Its presence in fonts is mandatory today. On that point, the GeosCrewEurope has taken the lead, since it offers several new fonts including the Euro symbol.
More casually, Wolfgang Bartnicki, Denis Döhler and Burkhard Öerttel have presented their especially-customized localizations (for some dialog-boxes only), dedicated to their respective cultural environment, dialects from Bavaria, Berlin, Hamburg et Saxe. Geos is certainely alone on these markets ;-)
Everybody was showing what they could do with Geos on a powerful PC or a 8086, a Zoomer, a GeoBook, a Communicator, etc. Different versions of Geos were running on these machines, some of them being curiosities, like a 286 with 2 Mb RAM, formerly a cashing-machine. My little Quaderno, a visionary A5 notebook running the visionary Geos, amused some people, in spite of a lot of problems and an almost unreadable screen. In a few words, a real GeosFest !
Besides the Geos stuff, Helmar Rudolf did a convincing demonstration of BeOS, which shows what could have been Geos if... Unfortunaltely, it seems impossible to run Geos under BeOS.
The magician Mikki came on Friday afternoon to distract us from Geos, errr... by encouraging to shout "New Deal !", "New Deal !", "New Deal !" or "I love New Deal !". After having amazed its public with clever tricks, he lefts us content and ready for dinner.
New Deal was represented by Mark Tenney (the other Mark ;-). Satursday, Mark presented GeoSafari, which is a tool for authors of didactic pieces of educational software. This tools demonstrates the capacities and will of New Deal in this domain. He also showed the next release of NDO (in alpha) to a small group of selected people. No details can be disclosed now (we promised) but the evolution is really positive with significant improvements in the user interface as well as in the system. Some key applications will also be included. But let New Deal make the offcial annoucement when it will be ready.
After that, Mark played a swiss lotto (official swiss lottery), but did not win. Be reassured, Mark, very few does.
Nokia was represented by Matti Parkkali and Hari Hellsten, who told us about the place of the Communicator in the Nokia strategy, and some aspects of the Communicator future (wireless technologies, from 9600 bits/s to 2 Mbits/s, etc.). They insisted on Nokia implication in the Communicator platform, which turns out to be a commercial success (maybe, this will convince them to go on further with Geos...)
They presented the 9110 SDK 1.01 and a graphical integrated development environment for the Communicators. This tool perfectly completes the SDK, since it offers GOC colored syntax edition, graphical ressources edition, integrated compilation and debugging. Note that the number of Communicator applications grows and that Nokia is promoting them trough a catalog and the Nokia Ok logo program.
Satursday afternoon, the contest programs have been publicly presented and (for some of them) commented by their authors. In the Desktop category, we found :
- Jupiter Credit by Clemens Kochinke,
- Scrap&Drop and BestSound Mixer by Dirk Lausecker,
- Yacht, a game by Ken L,
- Pocket Vault by Lysle,
- Universal Installer the game Wuppels by Rainer Bettsteller,
- the Scanner application of Jens-Michael Gross,
- ICQ and Web Page Control Centre by Edward di Geronimo,
- New Basic Startup by Konstantin Meyer.
- Euro Rechner by Nico Schu (Desktop version).
For the Nokia Communicator the contenders were :
- Geonoid and level editor by Jörg Polzfuss,
- Pick-a-Pic and NView by Marcus Gröber,
- Font Installer by Achim Finger (don't confuse with the freeware made by Burkhard Örttel, dedicated to the Desktop),
- Euro Rechner by Nico Schu (Nokia version).
The contest jury, composed by Werni Grieder, Hari Stellen, Johannes Müller, Matti Parkkali, Andreas Peter and Helmut Quirxtner announced the winners on satursday evening :
- in the category Desktop applications, the winner is Dirk Lausecker with Scrap&Drop, an album showing thumbnails that can be drag and dropped on documents ; he wons also fifth with his BestSound Mixer, a sound mixer application for BestSound cards. By the way, Scrap&Drop handles sounds as well !
He is followed by Nico Schu with Euro-Rechner (he also announced a Zoomer version), and Rainer Betsteller, ranked ex-aequo with Nico in the Desktop category with Universal Installer, a program installation builder.
Jens-Michael Gross has been ranked fourth (Desktop) for his program that scan documents under Geos from Agfa SnapScan 600 SCSI scanners. He was represented at the meeting by Wolfgang Seiten, who made astounding demonstrations. The project includes future support for other scanners. For that matter, Helmut Quirxtner will give two scanners, one for Jens and another for Konstantin Meyer, so that developments can continue, in order to support a wider range of scanners. Many thanks to Helmut for this initiative.
In the Nokia Communicator category, the winner is Marcus Gröber, for NView, a document viewer with search capabilities. He won a Nokia 9110. He is followed by Nico Schu with Euro-Rechner for the Nokia (bravo Nico) and by a surprising Achim Finger with Font Installer. Surprising because the program has been designed after discussions at the beginning of the meeting and developed during it.
Then we assisted to an online chat on the BreadBox channel with several international "Geosians". Geos definitely entered the internet area, a bit late but with simple, stable and useful applications, like Meeting Room or the future ICQ from Ed di Geronimo.
We have also appreciated the presence of several Geos personalities, like the Draw-artist Roli Feuz, Rainer Wiegärtner from the GeoClub, Dirk "Optohoppler" Haase or Geobart de Hambourg. The meeting did last two days, but it did last two nights as well, during which the newbies or experimented developers fought against the machine, until they won on sunday morning.
Helmut Quirxtner made a "catalogue" that captured the attention of the attendees.
The meeting was officially closed on satursday night, but the participants were not keen to leave, because they were having so much fun with Geos or were discussing about it. The participants actually decided not to go to the Love-Parade in Berlin, however they woke up sunday morning with the feeling that they had a two-day party ;-)
Since a lot of digital cameras were used during the meeting, it is likely that some images will be rapidly available on the Web, on private or on the GeosCrewEurope Web-sites : http://www.geoscreweurope.ch/aktuell.htm. This should provide with enough information about the ambiance here, while waiting for the free download of the winners programs.
Your GeosCrew.
Translated and adapted by Philippe Dallemagne