Maemo 5 Alpha SDK released

Today, Nokia introduced the Maemo 5 Alpha SDK including the new UI framework and APIs for application development. The redesigned Maemo UI provides a simple and beautiful experience with a finger based full screen context. Developers can now use hardware-accelerated 3D graphics at WVGA resolution. We recommend that developers writing applications for Maemo 5 follow the UI style introduced with this Alpha SDK to provide a user experience consistent with the core applications.

The Alpha SDK is suitable for adventurous developers wanting to get first impressions of Maemo 5, either by porting existing applications or creating new ones. The APIs are not frozen and there is no documentation with the exception of auto-generated API references. However, it is a good basis to get started with Maemo 5 application development instead of waiting for the forthcoming beta release.

The Alpha SDK includes a simplified UI implementation of the Desktop and the Application Menu, as can be seen from the example screenshots published today. Even if the current SDK resembles a single-application environment, the final Maemo 5 release will be a multitasking platform as usual. The user interface components for multitasking will be published at a later stage.

The Maemo 5 Alpha SDK comes with new APIs:

• Location API: methods to build location-aware applications.
• City Information: methods to obtain information about cities, including city name, country name, and country code.
• Time management: an interface for handling time change notifications and collect relevant time and time zone information.
• Vibra service: methods for triggering and controlling vibrations.
• Device orientation: respond to changes in orientation and discover current orientation.

Other APIs available in Maemo 4 have been improved and are now available in this SDK release including: Alarm, Address book Access and Data notifications, Account, Battery and Logging development interfaces.

We provide Maemopad as a sample application in this SDK. The published Hildon libraries already offer the APIs developers need, but as such the APIs are still unstable and some UI features are not yet visible in this SDK.

More details about the changes between the second pre-alpha and the alpha releases can be found in the release notes, in the source code repository and in the content changes tables.