Back in November 2011, while tracking developments and projects we should look forward to in 2012 for a feature in LXF 153, I quizzed some Linux developers about the projects they were tracking themselves.
OpenSUSE's Community Manager, Jos Poortvliet is hoping new cloud initiatives like ownCloud don't fizzle out: "I hope that the latest Free Software cloud initiatives like OpenStack and ownCloud will really get somewhere."
Fedora developer Rahul Sundaram, is interested in seeing where projects such as the glick2 application bundle and Zif a replacement for Yum, lead to.
Since Fedora is now the flagship distro for Gnome, post Ubuntu's move to its home-brewed Unity desktop, Sundaram is curious about the release structure of the Gnome 3.x series and how its focus on providing an integrated solution with its own apps such as Documents, Gnome Online, etc, is going to impact Fedora.
Sundaram would also like to grow his Ask Fedora effort which aims to plug a serious gap in Fedora's documentation. Sundaram argues that while Fedora has great longer length guides it lacks user level documentation and answers to common questions aren't as easily accessible as they could be.
Core Xfce developer Jannis Pohlmann is looking forward to Ardour 3. He's been using the app for a couple of years to record rehearsals and demo tracks of his band: "Right now I'm waiting for a Linux-compatible USB audio interface and a couple of microphones to arrive at my home so I can record guitar, bass, and drum tracks for a new demo of my stoner/post rock/metal project. For multi-track recording and mixing, Ardour is really the best open source tool that I know."
He also uses other open source apps such as Hydrogen: "I also use Hydrogen from time to time to add drum concepts to my riff ideas. JACK makes it easy to synchronize the two apps and record Hydrogen tracks into Ardour, etc."
Some of the new features in Ardour 3 Pohlmann is interested in are Stereo Panning and the new matrix-style audio routing interface. He says that routing with JACK has been "so painful" that at one point he tried to write a shell-based connection editor with support for common routing profiles.
Og Maciel who is involved in the accessibility and internationalization teams of several Open Source projects such as Gnome, Ubuntu, and Foresight Linux is keeping track of the Accerciser accessibility explorer, the dogtail GUI test tool which uses accessibility technologies to communicate with desktop applications, and Transifex and Pootle for managing translations.
