last night, while i already had some beer, and we were right into celebrating my birthday, which actually is today, i figured out something: exactly on this very day, a year ago, i released cheese 0.1.0, which was the first release in a long series of versions of that program.

while looking back, it was awesome to develop the program, it was awesome to get so much feedback, it was awesome to receive and apply patches, it was awesome to get and fix bug reports, all that was just awesome. and i want to thank everybody, who did something, which made cheese even better, be it documentation, translations, patches, bugfixes, bug reports, usefull hints, feature requests, or even if you just used cheese to take a photo of you, your family, your friends, your goldfishes or three-headed monkeys. thank you!

a year has passed, and it seems, that cheese actually works on most computers and with most webcams. awesome! im quite satisfied with the state of cheese right now, as i planned to have an equivalent photobooth clone made in one year. in my opinion, we already reached that milestone with 2.22, but of course, some things are still different, some small features still not available, for example movie recording on the apple side or live previews and better effects on the cheese side.

now, whats next? we are concentrating on two big things: closer integration into gnome and even more fancy bling bling! we definitely want to do those things better for 2.24. but more on that later

a year has also passed for me, a year which transformed me from nobody, the gnome user, to a guy, who has a gnome svn account and is presuming right now to be a soc mentor (dont even believe him). that passed year was just awesome. i met many new people, and i even had the possibility to met some of them face by face, which was also awesome of course. some of them became friends, which also is just awesome. after all, i just can say one thing: every single people in the gnome community is just awesome and i am glad that i have the possibility to work beside so many geniuses and awesome people.

now to my two slaves..ehm gsoc students, who are working on cheese with their great ideas:

filippo is adding some new opengl based effects to the gstreamer framework, which cheese can use to finally morph you into the real hulk, in order to even scare your goldfish. he is doing a great job and i cant wait to see the first effects working and implemented in cheese. a great thing about his task is that he is working on a gstreamer plugin called gst-gl, which can be used by other applications, to provide the same awesome effects. just awesome!

felix, who still does not have a blog, is working on the integration of cheese into the gnome desktop. he already enhanced cheese to use XDG folders and is working right now on the dbus side of cheese. he will make it possible to remote control cheese and allow each single application to use cheese to take photos or movies just by using dbus. this of course is awesome for buddy icons, which then can be used in gdm, empathy, evolution, social network websites and many many more. isnt that also awesome?

oh.. by the way: i just found out, that nautilus has a preview mode for audio files, which totally kicks ass, ehm i mean is totally awesome. not just because of those small things gnome totally rocks and i wouldnt talk about decadence in any way.

thats all for now, happy birthday cheese! people, rock on, make gnome even more awesome!