Birds of a Feather sessions (BoFs) are one of the most important events at Akademy. Just like every year, there were BoFs related to different projects. These BoFs  are a good way to get live feedback from other people in community.

Usability BoF

This  BoF was organized by Björn Balazs and Jos Poortvliet.

– For this BoF developers volunteered for having usability test of their projects.

– Members of  KScreen, plasma-nm, Plasma Media Center and  KStars project participated in it.

– Each application was represented by one of the developers who had two users for testing

– Users  don’t know anything about that project

– Users were given  task (related to the application) one by one  and developers navigate the  user through some steps as mentioned in http://community.kde.org/Akademy/2013/UsabilityWorkshop

– Goal of this test was to get input from user about application like what they expected and what they actually saw, was UI confusing to understand, etc

After doing usability test of Plasma media Center, we got some important feedback in which we already implemented few and will implement rest soon.

         

Mentoring program (GSoC, Google Code-in, SoK, Outreach Program for Women)

This BoF was organized by Lydia Pintscher and Cornelius Schumacher

– It aims to share experiences, discuss how to improve the mentoring programs, and talk about any questions come up.

–  Participants introduced themselves what they have done in past related to mentoring program.

– Most of the people first participated as student and later became mentor of these mentoring programs.

– We also discussed some of the issues which mentors faced while selecting students in mentoring programs and how to improve mentoring programs.

–  We also did a group photograph in which attendees were wearing different mentoring program T-Shirts

 Plasma Media Center (PMC) BoF

This BoF was organized by me

– Thanks to Marco Martin, Sebastian kugler, Shantanu Tushar, Thomas Pfeiffer and Vishesh Handa for being there and providing their valuable feedback

– Main aim of this BoF was to discuss future plans and implementation details for some of the  features in PMC.

–  One of the most important things were to consider plans for  improvements according to the Usability study done on Monday Usability BoF

– This study had highlighted issues with our UI that need fixing

– Other than fixing UI issues, Vishesh Handa from the Nepomuk  project pointed out that users should be able to add their media  collection to the nepomuk index straight from PMC without needing to go  to System Settings.

          

– Compare to last year BoF, this year we got good feedback for improvements we achieved in PMC. Thanks to all PMC contributors for their hard work and love for this project.

Cheers!

Hi! I am back with Plasma Media Center current status  😀 . It took me little more time to give updates due to migration from College to Office life 🙂

Various small improvements have been done according to suggestion from Akademy 2012 PMC BoF and new features has been added.

1. New Plasma Media Center home screen

2. Add media to Playlist. This option is obtained by holding mouse on media for small time.

3. Cover fetching of available music files.

4. Picture Slideshow

5. Flickr plugin in which user can search pictures by adding text into search box

6. Picasa plugin to view pictures available in user Picasa account ( Not fully completed)

7. Support for external devices by adding places

I am so happy that we got a new contributor for PMC, Fabian Riethmayer . I hope, more people will join and contribute in PMC by giving suggestion, feedback, code etc.

Don’t forget to give it a try. Need help? look into my previous blogs 🙂

Thanks to all and Cheers!