maemo.org summer coding competition

kojacker has officially announced a coding competition for the N900, intended to bolster the development community and deliver some cutting edge applications in six categories. The prizes, to be decided by forum poll from the entrants, include a donation pot (so far standing at over $150) and travel & accomodation paid for, by Nokia, to the MeeGo Conference in Dublin in November.

"Are you bored waiting for new games to be released for your n900? Is your forehead wrinkled stressing about the lack of applications in the Extras repository? Does the emptiness of the Ovi store make you urinate in your sleep? And do you call out your mother's name when making love to your girlfriend because of step 4 of 5 disappointment and unrelated mental issues? Well now YOU can change that, my friends! Introducing the first ever N900 Coding Competition!"

The competition runs under 21st July 2010, and there is plenty of time to get submit your application to one of the categories.

Brainstorming maemo.org's future

Following the maemo.org team review meeting, it was decided to hold a 7-day brainstorm to set some high-level goals for the team - and the community - to get stuck into for the next six months. Ryan Abel, one of your editors, introduced the brainstorm on the Community Council blog: "In 2008, after maemo.org started transitioning to community control, we had a 100 Days brainstorm to help shape the direction of maemo.org. The results of the 100 Days were very positive, and as we're going through a similar sort of shakeup here with MeeGo (if less immediately positive), we'd like to repeated the brainstorming process for the next 6 months. To that end, everyone in the Maemo community is invited to participate in a brainstorm over the future of maemo.org and threads have been created at talk.maemo.org for each of the main areas of the website and community." Only a few hours are left, so get stuck in with your ideas on how to improve maemo.org, the Maemo community, and thoughts for how, if and when we can transition to MeeGo.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • maemo.org summer coding competition
   • Brainstorming maemo.org's future
2. Applications
   • AGTL (geo-caching tool) 0.6.1.2 released
   • eSpeak speech synthesiser now with GUI
   • FeedingIt, RSS reader, new version has widget
   • ...and 3 more
3. Development
   • Autotools for Beginners
   • Maemo 5 notifications from Python
   • Business-focused development with Maemo?
4. Community
   • Minutes from maemo.org direction meeting
   • Transcript of maemo.org direction meeting
   • distmaster talks about his recent efforts for the N8x0
   • Quim Gil moving to California
5. Devices
   • MeeGo 0.90 in vehicle with XFCE 4 and 2.6.33 kernel
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • Will 2011 be make or break for Nokia?
   • Community member interviewed on Indian television about N900, Maemo and MeeGo
7. Announcements
   • U-Bahn, Keyboard Repeat Switcher and updated RaeMote
   • Android-inspired theme for Maemo 5
   • Grooveshark client under development

MeeGo's "big reveal" mentality hurting the project?

Carsten Munk, maemo.org distmaster and MeeGo contributor, has asked a question many have been thinking: does the desire for a large splash - a "big reveal" as Carsten puts it - hamper, now and in the future, the openness and viability of the MeeGo project? This desire is understandable for closed product launches, but was always the biggest impediment to true community collaboration on Maemo itself. However, the noises made by both Nokia and Intel - both of whom have a lot of experience now with open source development - at the launch of MeeGo were promising. Carsten doesn't think they're walking the walk, though: "We're not working in the open like we're supposed to - even though as has been said - Intel, Nokia and we all know how to do it! But when there's a big reveal mentality active, the mode of the people participating switches to internal/private development, even if you are only tangentially related to the object/UX being revealed." Carsten poses three questions to MeeGo's Technical Steering Group:

fMMS, enabling multimedia messages on Maemo 5, on its way to Extras

Nokia has been long criticised for the lack of MMS functionality in Maemo 5. MMS, a cousin of SMS, allows the sending of pictures, sounds and text via the mobile network. The iPhone was similarly criticised when it was first released. However, due to Maemo's open platform, the implementation wasn't dependent on Nokia releasing an update. Instead, Nick Leppänen Larsson stepped up and - after some initial promising experiments - his MMS application, fMMS, now allows you to send and receive multimedia messages on your N900.

Nokia Qt SDK beta gives preview of MeeGo application development

The next stage in Nokia's Qt strategy, and the evolution of Maemo, Symbian and MeeGo was unveiled this week through the beta of the Nokia Qt SDK. Building on top of the Qt SDK, this bundles Nokia's Qt IDE (Qt Creator) with simulators and targets (via MADDE) for all three of the above OSes. "The new Nokia Qt SDK leverages the power of the Qt framework and tools, combining them with tools designed specifically to streamline the creation of applications for Symbian, the Maemo platform, and the forthcoming MeeGo platform. The first beta release of the Nokia Qt SDK is now available, so you can explore how building applications for hundreds of millions of Nokia device owners will become even easier." This should make targetting multiple platforms easier but, above all, also massively lowers the barrier to entry of Maemo/MeeGo development. Hopefully, this will provide a platform on which hundreds of developers can build applications with relative ease.

MeeGo & Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit write-up

The ever-excellent LWN covers the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held in San Francisco just over a week ago. In addition to a MeeGo workshop, the Maemo community was represented by Ryan Abel and Randall Arnold. Jake Edge describes how both Ari Jaaksi (Nokia) and Imad Sousou (Intel) gave keynotes: "Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's VP for Maemo devices and MeeGo operations, spoke first, which he saw as an advantage because Intel's Imad Sousou would be sure to correct anything he said "wrong". The goal of the MeeGo project is to "provide industry with an open platform" for various kinds of devices. Both companies have been working on mobile distributions, which means that they "integrate the same components multiple times", and that is "stupid", Jaaksi said. That is one of the main ideas behind the merger." Numerous times during the keynotes, these senior figures described the development as happening in the open. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. There's an open Bugzilla, an open IRC channel and a code dump which has been "thrown over the wall". Real open development would have architectural discussions about the integration of various components happening on the meego-dev mailing list; it'd have the building of the first release (whether for the N900 or netbooks) happening in the open, with nightly integration builds; it'd have build plans on OBS open and available for others to inspect.

Debian's "Squeeze" devkit installed to autobuilder to bring accurate, cross-SDK dependencies

On 24th March, Niels Breet implemented the plan which had been discussed with the Maemo development community: deploy the PR1.2 SDK to the autobuilder so that applications in Extras can take advantage of new features when PR1.2 is released. Unfortunately, there were two unforeseen circumstances: pretty much every package started declaring a dependency on a later libhildon than is available on public devices and PR1.2 wasn't released as quickly as the community expected. The Maemo Community Council, and the maemo.org team, discussed solutions with the community and Javier S. Pedro outlined the plan: "to upgrade the Debian devkit in the Fremantle autobuilder to the Squeeze version (from the current etch one), and start using "improved shlibdeps" (a.k.a. .symbols files) to version dependencies on a much more granular basis (minimal required version of libraries will be calculated per symbol instead of per library). We plan to ship .symbols files for most of the SDK libraries."

This means that packages built in the PR1.2 SDK using no PR1.2-introduced functions will work on a PR1.1 device and even on a 1.0 device. This was done on 14th April and the repository re-indexed with rebuilt packages. After a brief problem with Akamai caching network, packages from Extras-devel are again installable. This allows developers to sanity check their applications before promoting them to Extras-testing for beta testing.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Debian's "Squeeze" devkit installed to autobuilder to bring accurate, cross-SDK dependencies
2. Applications
   • Nokia N900 Live Wallpaper
   • First user experience week concentrating on preferences dialogues
   • UX week #2 focusing on icons
3. Development
   • Maemo 5 "Info Center" provides centralised reference documentation for Nokia-supported frameworks
4. Devices
   • Example screenshots of MeeGo GUIs for netbooks and smartphones
   • MeeGo screenshots and Nokia: things to understand
   • Video: Intel & Nokia presenting MeeGo running on different kinds of devices
   • Mer 0.17 on Joggler with 3D acceleration
5. Announcements
   • Help Maemo make N900 and future MeeGo products better
   • Keep track of your N900's location with "I am here"
   • Ring Clock is a colourful clock applet for the desktop

PR1.2 SDK and the Extras autobuilder

Niels Breet has, in this month's maemo.org sprint, picked up a task to sort out the issues caused by the deployment of the PR1.2 SDK to the Extras autobuilder. This has resulted in new uploads from developers often getting dependencies more severe than they actually require, and users who are testing in Extras-devel and Extras-testing getting confused. Andrew Flegg, the Maemo Community Council chair, introduced a discussion on maemo-developers, saying, "After the PR1.2 SDK was released, Niels deployed it to the autobuilder; enacting a plan which was discussed on this list. This has caused problems with libhildon dependencies, but the problems aren't just limited to that library. Both Niels and the Council believe we should do something to assist." Although "real" end-users (who use Extras) are unaffected, anyone with an idea on how to meet the requirements now - and the next time this situation could occur - is welcome to contribute. The current leading option is one based on a deploying a newer debhelper and dpkg-shlibdeps to the autobuilder. This would mean that every package would have its minimal dependencies necessary for it to work.

Introducing the fourth Maemo Community Council

The election is over, and the new Maemo Community Council has been announced: Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Javier S. Pedro, Attila Csipa and Andrew Flegg as chair. About 400 votes were cast, and the new council's hit the ground running with a minor revamp of the council homepage and integration between the council blog and talk.maemo.org: "We're your council, so please get in touch via email (council@maemo.org); IRC; mailing lists or Talk. Please remember, though, that the council doesn't (and shouldn't!) do everything. If you want to step up to organise something and want our support, we'll be happy to give it!"

MeeGo: "Day One"

MeeGo has reached "day one": the source code has been released, the bug tracker open and the first of many weekly snapshots released. "Today is the culmination of a huge effort by the worldwide Nokia and Intel teams to share the MeeGo operating system code with the open source community. This is the latest step in the full merger of Maemo and Moblin, and we are happy to open the repositories and move the ongoing development work into the open - as we set out to do from the beginning." Also released are complete OS images for Atom-based netbooks and the N900, allowing your device to boot into an xterm and explore the lowest levels of the OS.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Introducing the fourth Maemo Community Council
   • MeeGo: "Day One"
2. Applications
   • CuteExplorer: fast, full filesystem file manager
   • Enna Media Center on the Nokia N900
3. Development
   • Extras-devel & -testing are "trunk"; building with PR1.2
   • MeeGo source code now available
4. Devices
   • MeeGo hardware adaptation for N8x0 "skunkworks project"
   • Overclocking the N900's OMAP3430
5. Maemo in the Wild
   • N900 makes TechRadar's "15 best mobile phones in the world today"
6. Announcements
   • Updates for MaePad & GPodder - now both PR1.2 ready
   • PrayerTime app under development
   • Simple Search Tool for files and content
   • Track Extras-testing and Extras releases through Twitter
   • Brain Party ported to Maemo 5

Maemo 5 SDK corresponding to PR1.2 now available

The next major update of Maemo 5 is getting closer: the software development kit allowing developers to write and test their software for Maemo 5 PR1e2 has been released. In the announcement, danielwilms said this "release contains many different additions/deletions/updates and features the Qt 4.6 library. It also contains package updates required for software designed for the next Maemo product software update coming out soon." MohammadAG has posted a set of screenshots highlighting some of the new features which users will be able to look forward to in the release.

Council candidates get set a tough set of questions

EIPI sent a set of ten of his own and three additional community-sourced questions to candidates in the Maemo Community Council election. Voters in the election will want to take a look at the answers for insights about the positions of their favourite candidates, or perhaps even help picking their favourites. Sanjeev introduces the piece, "The Maemo Community Council election is drawing near, and the nomination process is closed. As you have probably heard by now, the candidate list is quite strong, comprising former and current Council members, community veterans, and relative newcomers with strong community contributions. With the hype surrounding Maemo, the N900, MeeGo, and our uncertain future, this is the hottest political arena that our community has ever seen. It is therefore with great honour that Mobile Tablets! is presenting this unofficial Q&A with the candidates as part of the lead up to the election." The election ends at 23:59 UTC on March 30th, so be sure to get your votes in by Tuesday. As the voting uses a single transferable vote, you can vote for multiple candidates but your second choice will only be considered after your first choice is knocked out.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo 5 SDK corresponding to PR1.2 now available
   • Council candidates get set a tough set of questions
2. Applications
   • New RSS reader, ReSiStance, in development by Modest developer
   • Official Wordpress client application in Extras-devel
   • Hide pictures and videos from Media Player using tracker-cfg
3. Development
   • New game, mGraph, needs artistic help
   • maemo.org auto-builder now running PR1.2 SDK with Qt 4.6
   • Integrating Qt Creator and MADDE in Linux
   • ...and 2 more
4. Community
   • Maemo/MeeGo User Experience Framework
   • First MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting minutes
   • Proposal for a MeeGo Community Council
   • ...and 2 more
5. Devices
   • MeeGo release for N900 will be a code dump release: interesting to platform hackers only
   • PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users
   • Configuring borderless/4:3 TV out on N900
6. Maemo in the Wild
   • PUSH N900 USA winner announced: cycle dashboard
   • Will the real MeeGo please stand-up? The dangers of weak branding
7. Announcements
   • Updated versions of Panucci, Raemote and headphoned
   • SquareIt: FourSquare application under development
   • Premium themes and theme packaging service
   • ...and 2 more

Maemo community is again participating in Google's Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers salaries to write code for various open source software projects. Sponsored by Google, they: "work with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 2500 successful student participants and 2500 mentors from 98 countries worldwide, all for the love of code." maemo.org was involved in 2009, after organisation efforts by Valério Valério. His efforts this year have also resulted in the Maemo community being named as one of the organisations participating. Project ideas will now be submitted which will get whittled down and students allocated.

Ten candidates for March 2010 Maemo Community Council election

It's election time again and this year's Community Council election is more important than any other in the past, due to one word: MeeGo. Elections start on Wednesday, 24th March and run for a week. Eligible voters will receive voting tokens and instructions from Dave Neary. The voting is counted by "single-transferrable vote", meaning that if your first choice candidate isn't going to win, your vote for your second choice candidate is taken into account. "The Maemo Community Council is a five-person body chosen by the "Maemo community". The Council's primary purpose is to represent the views and opinions of the Maemo Community to Nokia, and vice versa.Maemo Community Council members are unpaid volunteers who are not employed by Nokia Coporation." Ten candidates are standing (Ryan Abel, Randall Arnold, Andrew Black, Attila Csipa, Andrew Flegg, Andrea Grandi, Cosimo Kroll, Javier S. Pedro, Arek Stopczynski and Steven Yeager). The page below lists summaries of their declarations and links to other various comments and Q&A sessions they've been involved in. Sanjeev Visvanatha is pulling together an extended blog-posting having asked a series of questions of all of the candidates.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo community is again participating in Google's Summer of Code
   • Ten candidates for March 2010 Maemo Community Council election
2. Applications
   • First release of PhotoTranslator application
   • Sygic Mobile Maps for Maemo Europe available for purchase
   • New Twitter client renamed to TweeGo
3. Development
   • Qt 4.7's "QtDeclarative" may help N900 run MeeGo and Symbian Qt apps with "little or no extra effort"
4. Community
   • First MeeGo Technical Steering Group (TSG) meeting: Weds, 24th March
   • MeeGo community forums to be powered by vBulletin
5. Devices
   • After CNET article, Nokia say "door is not closed" to MeeGo on N900
   • PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users
6. Announcements
   • Cosimo Kroll (zehjotkah) running for council
   • Andrew Flegg (Jaffa) running for the council
   • Attila Csipa (achipa) running for council