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maemo.org and Nokia 770 turn seven

On May 25, 2005, Nokia announced Maemo, the Nokia 770 and maemo.org went live. Ferenc Szekely highlighted the go-live of the community on the community's mailing list. At the time of the launch, GSMArena wrote: "Today Nokia announced the new Linux based Internet Tablet product category, the first device in this category is Nokia 770. The tablet has no phone functions, but it's a very powerful accessory. It can connect to the internet via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and it's optimized for internet browsing and email communication. The Nokia 770 features impressive wide touchscreen with resolution 800x480 pixels, the resolution is enough to see most of the web sites without a horizontal scroll bar. Additional application for Nokia 770 include Internet Radio, RSS News reader, Image viewer and Media players."

It's been a rollercoaster ride for the past seven years. As November 2005 approached, your editor was repeatedly hitting F5 on store.nokia.com to order the 770 as soon as it was available. Each device, from the 770 through the N800, N810, N900 and now N950 & N9 have offered something more than the previous one; though usually at the expense of another feature, which was bound to be a "deal-breaker" for someone.

Unfortunately, Nokia's change in direction has meant we're approaching the end of that journey. Rumours abound that Nokia will continue the Maemo spirit with Linux on a range of new low-end Qt-based phones. Nokia's brief encounter with Intel has re-energised Moblin as MeeGo and now Tizen. It would be easy to be maudlin looking back at the promise, and hope and the current situation. However, let's take time to look back on the successes of the last seven years, rather than bemoan the future in store.

Read more (gsmarena.com)
Read more (lists.maemo.org)

Results of Maemo Community Council election announced

Ivan Galvez Junquera (ivgalvez), Piotr Jawidzyk (Estel), Craig Woodward (woody14619), Niel Nielsen (NielDK) have been elected as new members of the council. They join RM Bauer (SD69) who was re-elected from the previous council. The new council have already sprung into action, launching the Community Awards (see later) and selecting Piotr as their chair.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)
Read more (wiki.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • maemo.org and Nokia 770 turn seven
   • Results of Maemo Community Council election announced
2. Development
   • Shared Harmattan space on github
   • Open source replacements of Fremantle's hald-addon-bme and libbmeipc
3. Community
   • Launch of Maemo Community Awards - apply to receive a Nokia N9 or N950
   • Maemo & MeeGo community meet ups at BlackBerry BB10Jam events
4. Announcements
   • MeeCoLay - run Harmattan apps on Fremantle
   • Wazapp - WhatsApp client for Harmattan - is open sourced
   • Eyrie - identify music you're listening to on Harmattan
   • Billboard now in Nokia Store for N9

Front Page

Despite additional timing difficulties Maemo Community Council election is now running

The seven candidates in the Maemo Community Council election are now after your votes. Voting runs until May 23nd 2012, 23:59 UTC. If you have not received your voting tokens, but think you should be eligible, contact Niels Breet.

Read more (wiki.maemo.org)
Read more (bugs.maemo.org)

Launching the Summer'12 Device Program: N9s and N950s to giveaway

Quim Gil has consolidated discussion on the N9s and N950s Nokia plan to distribute to the Maemo community, and branded the efforts under a "Summer'12 Device Program" moniker: "Nokia is sponsoring a maemo.org device program consisting of 60 Nokia N9 + 40 Nokia 950 with free delivery. One of the goals of this program is to help reducing the list of missing apps (or alternatives & related features). The devices will be distributed through 4 activities." Hopefully this will result in a burst of high-quality, innovative, Qt apps for Harmattan.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Despite additional timing difficulties Maemo Community Council election is now running
   • Launching the Summer'12 Device Program: N9s and N950s to giveaway
2. Applications
   • Showing current song in N9 standby screen
   • FM Radio updated with new theme and RDS capability
   • Official ESPN Formula 1 app for Harmattan
3. Development
   • How to have service-specific notification icons in Harmattan
   • CSSU decides how to ship rewrites of non-core Maemo Nokia binary components
   • Demo of Cordova (PhoneGap) Qt version running Wikipedia Mobile on Nokia N9
4. Community
   • Speakers and programme announced for Devaamo Summit
5. Announcements
   • Wazapp public beta for Nokia N9 - access WhatsApp IM from Harmattan
   • Ogre 3D engine and example game to Harmattan
   • PushUp - fine-grained DLNA/uPNP content sharing on Harmattan
   • reset-root-password for times you've forgotten your root password

Front Page

Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started

An administrative mix-up seems to be to blame for delaying the start of the Maemo Community Council election, which was scheduled to start on May 6. There has been lots of back-and-forth on the forum thread about whose responsibility it was to start the voting process and who should be initiating communication to get it started now. After a bit of a rough start it seems the wheels are moving on the process, thanks in part to the level-headed Quim Gil stepping in. It remains to be seen when the voting will actually begin, but hopefully there will at least be an announcement made soon with an updated timeframe.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Delays in getting Maemo Community Council election started
2. Applications
   • Plonk running on BlackBerry Playbook
   • Update on reverse engineered WhatsApp port to N9
3. Development
   • Qt Creator 2.5.0 released
   • Why bundling apps which can be installed via Extras is a bad idea for Maemo CSSU
   • Why "shell apps" and HTML5 apps are a bad idea
   • Sending emails in Harmattan with Qt/QML
4. In the Wild
   • First Tizen Conference gets mixed reviews
   • Nokia N9 removed from Nokia's Finnish website
   • N9 increasingly available direct from US retailers
5. Announcements
   • Late - real-time public transit info for North America
   • Mobile check-in app for SAS (Scandinavian Airlines) now available to download for N9
   • KhtSimpleText editor available for N9
   • last.fm client under development for Harmattan
   • USbS - Useful Standby Screen - gives configurable N9 sleep info

Front Page

How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?

A chance encounter with Henri Bergius and Michael Hasselmann in California led Quim Gil to share a few beers with them. Part of the conversation involved their shared experiences with Maemo and maemo.org. Quim reports that "Henri had a very good point: [top-level] pages like Intro or Development have been unchanged for years and now they don't reflect anymore the community that exists here."

"Updating these pages would require to think what is this website and this community today, and what does it want to become. It sounded like a good task to be driven by a newly elected Council. Six months is a decent period for discussion, planning and implementation considering that we are talking basically about editing plain web pages."

"In our discussion we agreed that maemo.org is still strong in the mobile user aspect. It is a community continuously active since 2005, open to discuss, experiment and collaborate on Maemo but also on related mobile topics where "related" can have a flexible definition."

Quim had to clarify he was asking this as a member of the community, rather than in any official capacity from Nokia. Separating Quim as an active and independent member of the community from his official role at Nokia is something that many people seem to have difficulty with. However, it would be a shame if such opinions prevented Quim from sharing his thoughts.

Read more (talk.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • How will maemo.org introduce itself in 6 months?
2. Development
   • Cocos2D port for Qt for Harmattan and Symbian
   • Fremantle on OBS status update
3. Community
   • Rob Bauer (SD69) running in Maemo Community Council election
   • Help improve maemo.org Packages interface
   • Proposal to rearrange TMO to provide common home to Maemo, MeeGo, Mer, NITDroid
4. Devices
   • Slideout Bluetooth keyboard turns N9 into N955
5. Announcements
   • Work-in-progress: Ubuntu One client for Nokia N9
   • gPodder 3.1.1 for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan

Front Page

Nominations close today for Maemo Community Council elections

Today is the last chance to nominate yourself, or someone else, for the next six month Maemo Community Council. Currently, six candidates are standing meaning there will be a vote for the five person committee:

1) Iván Gálvez Junquera (ivgalvez)

2) Piotr Jawidzyk (Estel)

3) Joseph Charpak (jcharpak)

4) Craig Woodward (woody14619)

5) Arie Mark (Aries)

6) Niel Nielsen (NielDK)

Read more (wiki.maemo.org)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Nominations close today for Maemo Community Council elections
2. Applications
   • Nokia Public Transport app now available for Harmattan
3. Development
   • Getting Python PySide apps into Nokia Store
   • Replacing MeeGo Community OBS discussion meeting minutes
   • Cordia HD alpha release (20120424) provides Fremantle stack for Mer
4. Devices
   • Memory/swapping tweaks to "improve N9 performance"
   • NITDroid - Android for N9 - alpha 3 now available
5. Announcements
   • Seagull Strike for Harmattan

Front Page

Maemo Community Council meeting outcomes

On Tuesday, a Maemo Community Council meeting was held with the following agenda:

Front Page

Maemo Community Council meeting, 17th April @ 15:00 UTC

RM Bauer has announced a new Maemo Community Council meeting, tomorrow (Tuesday) at 15:00 UTC: "Preliminary Agenda:Welcome (back) to Quim Gil/Update from Nokia(?); Community OBS; Council Election voting; Left-over topics from last council meeting (if timely):Qt style license agreement for maemo; Co-maintainership for CSSU repo." The discussion continued to try and define what a "Qt style license agreement for maemo" meant, as there have been various different suggestions. The conclusion was that it was a grant of a licence for maemo.org to continue distributing Nokia binaries for the purposes of the autobuilder, SDKs and firmware images.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)
Read more (timeanddate.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council meeting, 17th April @ 15:00 UTC
2. Development
   • How to port Qt 5 to N900 Fremantle
   • Latest Harmattan updates plug security hole used by Inception; Inception updated to bypass
3. Devices
   • Replacing housing of Nokia N9
4. Announcements
   • Mosh - high latency & roving IP supporting SSH bridge - for Harmattan
   • Aura - video recording with realtime effects on N9 using front or rear camera
   • Pre-release of Sociality, Facebook client, for Harmattan
   • QZeeControl - control Harmattan phone using Zeemote

Front Page

Quim Gil soundly settles ceaseless suggestions surrounding a "sudden switch-off" of certain servers

In an email to the Community mailing list, Quim Gil firmly put down rumours of any unannounced shutdowns of maemo.org or its services in the near future: "Ok, this is not going to happen. Whatever happens we will know 3-6 months in advance since this is how budgeting goes. All 2012 is covered as we speak (and afaik it was never under question). The time to discuss about 2013 will start approximately after the Summer. It's always like this, by the way. You have my word with my @nokia.com domain and all. You can quote this whenever someone has fear, uncertainty or doubt about maemo.org hosting." About an unambiguous an answer as you could want. Hopefully it will put to bed the FUD about maemo.org and Nokia's continued infrastructure support, which has been one of the most pernicious and infectious distractions which has afflicted the Maemo community since Harmattan was revealed to be branded "MeeGo" (despite, under the covers, being Maemo).

Front Page

Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended

The Maemo Community Council election nominations have been extended for an extra week. If enough interested candidates come forward during the extension the voting will be extended another week as well. Anyone interested in running is encouraged to come forward on the mailing list to express their candidacy.

At the time of writing, RM Bauer claims there have been three nominations, but none of them has accepted it on the maemo-community list.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)

Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"

Last week the Internet was set a twittering with the report, via NetbookNews, that "according to an industry insider Nokia is working on 2 new low end MeeGo handsets, and information was recieved directly from Nokia’s Next Billion Group." This is, almost certainly, referring to "Meltemi": Nokia's not-so-secret-now project to replace the aging S40 on their low-end devices with a Qt+Linux platform. Ideally, this new platform would have binary compatibility with Harmattan so that Harmattan apps would run on Meltemi, and vice versa. This would give an enormous boost to the Qt ecosystem: a "superphone" in the form of the N9 and a range of "little sisters" running Meltemi. Combined with smartphones running Symbian and a push to standardise Qt Components across Symbian & Linux, this could reinvigorate Nokia's cross-platform and next billion strategies.

Unfortunately, the article itself repeats many "well known facts" about Harmattan, including its ability to run Android applications. Myriad may have demoed Alien Dalvik on video, to try and entice OEMs, but this is a long way from an end-user being able to run Angry Birds Space.

Read more (netbooknews.com)
Read more (slashgear.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended
   • Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"
2. Applications
   • gPodder updated to 3.1.0 for N950 and N9
   • get_iplayer works on N9
3. Development
   • Maliit Keyboard: Word suggestions and error correction
   • Testing requirement for Harmattan PR1.0 removed from N9 Nokia Store
4. Community
   • maemocommunity.org - a fragmentation too far?
5. Devices
   • USB audio on N900
6. Announcements
   • ZoneMinder on Nokia N9

Front Page

Android ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) gets alpha release for Nokia N9

allboutn9 summarises the progress made so far on getting Android running on the N9: "Those who don't want to be limited to MeeGo might soon have a very well running port of Android ICS ("Ice Cream Sandwich") called NITDroid which allows to use two systems on the N9 with dual-boot."

"NitDroid might always remain a project which is rather dedicated to experimental users. But it's very impressive to see what the N9 is able to do and why not having two platforms on one phone than buying two different devices? The recent Alpha-version shows that the port was successful. Many drivers for the N9 were found and basic tasks are already possible."

Read more (allboutn9.info)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Android ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich) gets alpha release for Nokia N9
2. Applications
   • Extraplugins for additional IM accounts on N9 removed from Nokia Store
   • Importing OPML files into N9 feed reader
   • Another review for Firewall+ - a call & SMS blocker for N9
3. Announcements
   • Smoke the Bugs game in pure QML in Nokia Store for N9 and Symbian