Chinook look’n'feel

The Chinook desktop with Plankton theme looks quite ok. It has some transparency as you can see from the desktop screenshot. It seems to work decently although is has some minor and some major issues. They are probably solvable but at least didn’t work out of the box for me. For upgrading your application to match the Chinook’s APIs it’s stable enough, imo. Although I’m not sure which new APIs the Chinook alpha SDK includes, in addition to the new Hildon Desktop.

The Navigator application menu has a new big look. I’m sure some people will love it and some hate it, as usual. The menu behaviour seems a bit odd, like it remembers my last position in the menu when I reopen it, but is buggy.

Some of the old apps work, some not. I could get screen shots with my screen grabber, I could play OGGs with kilikali but although evince started up, it just jammed there. Mirage didn’t even start. And I couldn’t find File Manager from anywhere. Opera works OK when started from the application menu but the Hildon Desktop crashes when I try to open the Browser menu from Navigator. The most important app, osso-xterm, luckily works :)

Connectivity (wlan, bt, usbnet) seems to work.

Power saving, on the other hand, does not. Or at least for some reason the battery didn’t last even for a day when it lasts easily several days on the latest official release. I might have had the usbnet running though which can affect the situation.