Measuring MeeGo activity?

Jarkko Moilanen has a thought-provoking article that sets out to try to measure MeeGo community activity by the participation in various mailing lists:

"I noticed someone mentioning that mailing lists seem to be quite quiet. I agreed with the statement. In the past months there has been a lot more activity, but lately not so much. One obvious reason came to my mind immediately: holidays. Yet I was not completely convinced that all can be explained with that. So I decided to take a closer look."

The author acknowledges that a straightforward conclusion cannot be drawn simply by looking at mailing list participation, but he offers some interesting insights as to why the numbers may be trending the way they are.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Measuring MeeGo activity?
2. Applications
   • Wordsler updates
3. Community
   • Follow forum.meego.com with forumemail bridge
4. Devices
   • MetaWatch shipping
5. In the Wild
   • Nokia N9 commercial leaked
   • Samsung buying MeeGo? (No.)
6. Announcements
   • glol - global orientation lock on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan
   • Developing Harmattan sharing plugins
   • Spectrum, NES, GameBoy and TI emulators now available for Harmattan

Rumours of Intel "pausing" MeeGo work - not true they say

A number of sites have picked up a news story quoting unnamed "industry sources" saying that Intel will temporarily halt work on MeeGo, to focus on OEMs requiring Android and Windows. CNET quote an unnamed "Intel spokerperson" saying they remain "committed" to MeeGo:

"Intel plans to "temporarily discontinue development of its MeeGo OS due to a lack of enthusiasm for the platform from handset and tablet PC vendors." Instead, Intel will focus on hardware that is paired with either Android or Windows Phone in 2012, according to the report, citing industry sources."

""We remain committed to MeeGo and open source, and will continue to work with the community to help develop and meet the needs of customers and end users," an Intel spokesperson told CNET"

Although denied by Intel, such a move would make some sense: MeeGo's brand has been tarnished by Nokia's change of strategy and the openness - touted as MeeGo's unique selling point over Android - has disappeared as Intel have withdrawn from public, and open development, into corridor- and watercooler-based discussions in Intel offices (along with private mailing lists and bugtrackers).

Although MeeGo still remains open source, its promise of open development processes and open governance has fallen apart.

Public Maemo Community meeting to be held on September 6th

RM Bauer calls attention to the upcoming Maemo Community meeting

"A September Maemo community meeting has been scheduled for September 6, in #maemo-meeting, at 15:00 UTC. It appears this will be the last meeting before the next election. The tentative agenda for the meeting is: Election *operation* (so election runs smoothly and *not* to discuss issues that may be debated in the election); *Current* status of maemo.org"

There is also a need for a trusted community memember (skilled in SQL) to learn the opertation of the election from Dave Neary for use in any future elections.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Rumours of Intel "pausing" MeeGo work - not true they say
   • Public Maemo Community meeting to be held on September 6th
2. Applications
   • RC Flyers Toolkit Box
3. Development
   • javispedro gets the N950 FM radio working
   • Proposed patch to add colour theme support to Qt Components
4. Community
   • Nokia N9 hackathon in Vienna next month
5. Devices
   • MeeGo developer devices
6. Announcements
   • Virtual MIDI Piano Keyboard for Harmattan
   • Orientation game for Harmattan

Future of Nokia's PySide project for Python & Qt

PySide was a Nokia-led project to produce a more liberally licenced set of Python Qt bindings (compared with PyQt). Matti Airas has started, on the PySide mailing list, a discussion on the future of the project:

"Currently, the vast majority of the PySide core development is done by the OpenBossa INdT team in Brazil and funded by Nokia's MeeGo Computers team - the PySide project has internally been an enabler for the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan Python project. Unfortunately, the Nokia N9 is the only MeeGo (Harmattan) phone to be published by Nokia, and Nokia's MeeGo team is being ramped down already in the near future. Because of this, the Nokia MeeGo funding for PySide is slated to end after this year, and I have also failed to find a new sponsor for the project within Nokia."

"So, what are the implications? What I hope and believe will happen is that the project is already sufficiently healthy to stay alive and grow without Nokia acting as a midwife. This would imply the community to take a leading role in both the project guidance and actual development. This can of course happen in several ways. First, independent open-source developers may pitch in. Second, there are many companies using PySide by now. They might want to contribute to PySide due to their own interests. Third, there might be some companies providing support and services for PySide. (INdT?) Finally, their might be some company with sufficient interest to take the main responsibility for future development."

Pleasingly, Luciano Wolf has come along and said that "INdT/OpenBossa intends to maintain this project even without monetary support from Nokia".

Do you read talk.maemo.org? Want to help MWKN?

Your editors are doing the majority of finding of content (as well as fleshing it out). A lack of time has meant that reading talk.maemo.org isn't getting the attention it deserves. If you read TMO, we're interested in knowing what threads and posts you think are valuable. All you have to do is "tweet" the URL to the @mwkn Twitter account with a set of keywords. Details and examples on the link below.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Future of Nokia's PySide project for Python & Qt
   • Do you read talk.maemo.org? Want to help MWKN?
2. Development
   • Core MeeGo OBS API experiences frequent downtime
   • Quim Gil's experiences with Qt Quick
   • MeeGo Architect team changes?
3. Announcements
   • Perth Trains - live departures for N950
   • MyMoves - system gestures for Harmattan
   • EmuMaster for console emulation on Harmattan
   • Miniature chess engine for Harmattan
   • TwimGo updated with auto-loading of tweets and pull-down-to-refresh

Upcoming vote for Maemo Community Council and referendum on the future of maemo.org

One of the bigger long-term issues resulting from the Elopocalypse in February is the status of maemo.org and its funding through next year. RM Bauer is looking to have a conclusion to these issues with a referendum as part of the election of the next Community Council: "Community members should be considering whether they want to stand for Council. Anyone who has karma of over 100 is eligible to stand, including employees and sub-contractors of Nokia. When nominations open, you can nominate someone via an email to maemo-community (which they must reply to to accept) or you can put your own hat into the ring by emailing the same list. A further announcement will be made when nominations open, with more information."

A number of corrections have been pointed out to Rob, following his initial post. Nokia have not said they will not fund the servers past 2012, nor will the referendum be "binding" to the Council. Articles dealing with the debate will be part of our "future of maemo.org" series - if we miss something, please let us know.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Upcoming vote for Maemo Community Council and referendum on the future of maemo.org
2. Applications
   • Preview of MeeCast (from the people who brought you OMWeather) for Harmattan
   • gPodder 2.18 in Extras-testing needs votes; and problems with package promotion?
3. Development
   • Shared Harmattan repo for developer libraries
   • Requirement for Ovi: single instance Harmattan apps
4. Community
   • Future of maemo.org: "The end is coming"
   • Future of maemo.org: A "modest proposal for a direction for maemo.org activities"
   • Future of maemo.org: Are the options for the Maemo community really limited to not-for-profit or death?
   • ...and 3 more
5. Devices
   • Unlocked, SIM-free Nokia N9 in UK - soon for £520 for 16GB (ouch)
   • Progress in getting CrystalHD video acceleration on ExoPC
6. In the Wild
   • HP stop producing webOS devices. Exploring options to "optimize value" of webOS
7. Announcements
   • Jeremiah Foster running for Maemo Community Council
   • Scrobbler for Maemo; on N900, N9 and N950
   • Sandora falling sand game for Harmattan, available from COBS
   • ...and 3 more

Linux Foundation statement on apps.meego.com -> apps.formeego.org

Brian Warner, one of the Linux Foundation's few members who are visible within the MeeGo Project, answered questions during the Community Office IRC meeting and followed up with an email statement:

Linux Foundation will not permit apps.meego.com

MeeGo is a project of The Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation which "promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms". It provides the hosting and infrastructure for meego.com, as well as owning the overall governance structure and trademarks of the project.

Thanks be to the helpful, redux

As some of you may know our Edit-in-Chief and Glorious Leader, Andrew Flegg, abandoned us to the pitiless whims of fortune last week when he left for a multi-week vacation to France. To best facilitate his temporary replacement by automatons and monkeys, he helpfully set up a series of scripts to handle issue fetching and publication for the duration of his unavailability. Due to confusing timezone interpretations (variously to be blamed on monkeys and unclear emails), a problem arose when the scripts succeeded in publishing the issue, by my clock, an hour early. Unfortunately the result was the perfect excising of Andrew Olmsted's well-earned kudos from last week's issue--due, in no part (I'll note), to my forgetting about my omissions until 5 minutes after the real publishing time.

Forum <-> Email integration for forum.meego.com

One of the original requirements for the software powering forum.meego.com was that it allowed offline participation, preferably through people's normal email clients. Reggie Suplido, who manages talk.maemo.org, suggested that vBulletin allowed this; but activation of the feature was delayed because of the potential load on the server.

With the MeeGo IT team now managing the upgraded servers, the discussion about enabling the feature has moved on. After a few prods from Andrew Flegg and David Greaves, Reggie has started a thread on how it would work, and the potential limitations: "I'm starting this thread to discuss the Forum <-> Email Integration that has been planned for quite some time now. This was recently brought up on the July 12, 2011 Community Office Meeting (starting at the 14:49:47 mark). This might be the best time to discuss if we really want these features, what really needs to be implemented, propose features, and help with the coding and testing."

The IT team took this weekend's meego.com maintenance window to create the necessary aliases, so hopefully we'll see a trialling of the feature shortly.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Forum Email integration for forum.meego.com
2. Applications
   • Treemaker game ported from Symbian for Harmattan
   • JanKenPon game pre-release available for Harmattan testing
   • Non-official build of Fennec for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan
   • Space Invaders for Harmattan
   • Aerofy streaming media client for Harmattan: coming soon
3. Development
   • Wanting to contribute a fix to Picasa sharing service - but where are the sources?
   • Box2D and Box2D-QML for Harmattan
   • Porting Fremantle applications to Harmattan
   • ...and 4 more
4. Community
   • Harmattan IRC channel on FreeNode: #harmattan
   • What is a community device champion?
5. Devices
   • Relaxing Harmattan security restrictions on unsigned executables
6. In the Wild
   • Nokia N9 ad series: quick, simple, slick
7. Announcements
   • Icon pack to get Harmattan look on N900
   • Screenshot app for Harmattan

July update from Maemo Community Council

RM Bauer, a member of the current Maemo Community Council has posted thoughts on the the N9 launch on the Council blog:

"There are numerous directions in which the community may move. For example, the Swipe UI/UX layer of the N9 is closed source and so there will be interest in developing an open source community alternative. Alternatively, the community can simply continue on with support for previous versions of Maemo. The staying power of maemo.org in the two year interim between the N900 and the N9 has been recognized even by Nokia. There are approximately 1 million downloads per week. A minimal level of support will continue to be provided by Nokia for at least a year. In keeping with its history of open governance, the community itself must decide the best direction forward."

The most interesting pieces of news are that Matti Airas is the new Maemo community liaison from Nokia and that another year of support is going to be provided. Given Nokia's budgetary process has previously been based on six month cycles, this is an improvement.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • July update from Maemo Community Council
2. Applications
   • Getting Harmattan home screens in landscape
   • Pre-release of "Trap, Shake, Kill 'em" for Harmattan
   • Pre-release of "Plonk"/"Mong" for Harmattan
   • Novacut video editor preview on N900
3. Development
   • How to replace tklock (touchscreen/key lock) SystemUI plugin on Maemo 5
   • Qt Quick Components now also available for Symbian
   • Cloning Maemo 5's vibration plugin - help wanted
   • ...and 3 more
4. Community
   • Sections on MeeGo forums for discussing N9, N950 and Harmattan?
   • Prize fund donations for Community Coding Competition pass $1,000
   • MeeGo Community Office meeting: Wednesday, 12th July

MeeGo and Harmattan: Clearing a path

One of your editors, Ryan Abel has started the conversation about what's necessary to ensure the N9/Harmattan and MeeGo communities work together: "The lack of interesting devices shipping MeeGo is currently the platform's biggest problem. Despite the technical differences between MeeGo and Harmattan, leveraging the N9, its users, and its developers is likely to play an important part in determining future success for MeeGo. If Nokia's plans for MeeGo end with the N9, we want to retain as many of those users and developers as we can when they decide to buy new devices. So capturing them early and ensuring they're welcome in MeeGo.com is important." Discussion is trying to capture the obstacles and differences between Harmattan and MeeGo proper, to ensure a seamless adoption of MeeGo for developers enticed by N9.

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • MeeGo and Harmattan: Clearing a path
2. Development
   • Community apps' repositories on Nokia N9 and other MeeGo devices
   • Qt SDK, Harmattan, Scratchbox and autobuilders
   • Release schedule for MeeGo 1.3 finalised
   • Icon generator for Harmattan
   • Using Scratchbox with Qt Creator for faster Harmatan development
3. Community
   • "MeeGo Pong" (re)naming competition winner!
   • Additional features for MeeGo forum?
   • Should talk.maemo.org have Nokia N9 sub-forum?
4. Devices
   • Update on Nokia N950 Developer Device Programme
   • Hot Summer release for MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for N900
5. Announcements
   • WhoAreYou? - facial recognition