It was nice to see Jarno and Esko at the conference, too. We even stayed in the same hotel. I hope they enjoyed the Ethiopian lunch as much as I did. And perhaps they're not too angry any more that we lead them to drink Absinthe ;-)

Jon and I gave two talks. Jon's talk (slides) was about Maliit as a project, explaining what Maliit is (and what it is not), combined with a short history lesson about the project. I tried to outline the difficulties of mobile text input in general (slides), picking some use-cases that are known from the desktop world and showing why simply copying the use-cases and their known interaction models does not work very well. I honestly liked Jon's talk more though.

Neither of us two actually managed to visit other talks, even though we wanted to. We had to ask Jarno, Esko and others about what great talks we missed. Apparently there were quite a few :-(

Our Maliit T-Shirts were well received, though we usually only handed them out when someone listened to our Maliit ramblings long enough.

We were asked about accessibility several times, which is currently not within the scope of Maliit but perhaps something to think about in the future.

We also got to talk with the people working on (text) input in Redhat and Intel, mostly in the context of Wayland. There are some interesting opportunities to get things (more) right this time around.

Thanks to our employer, Openismus, for sending us there!

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Qt Innovation Challenge winners announced
2. Development
   • Qt SDK 1.2 released
3. Announcements
   • LPMCustomizer in Store for N9
   • Fremantle stack for Mer

CuteSoma (Soma.fm client for Nokia N9) has been available for 4 months now and it's the right time to publish some interesting statistics about downloads. First of all I didn't expect so much interest and I wasn't sure to have so many downloads, due to the fact that Nokia never advertised this device properly. But luckly lot of people don't care about advertising and buy a product anyway if they know it's one of the best available on the smartphone market.

I'm really happy to notice that the number of downloads is growing each month, this motivates me to continue with development (well... when my N950 comes back from Nokia, since I had to send it because it was broken).

I want to thank all the 3658 people that downloaded CuteSoma until now and all the people that are sending me their feedback, ideas and patches (yes Cornelius Hald, I'm talking about you ) you're giving me a big opportunity to learn C++/Qt/QML.

Michael Hasselmann and Jon Nordby are both giving talks about the Maliit input method framework, as seen on the N9. We are eager to find customers who need our help to integrate and improve this only real choice for an open-source on-screen keyboard. So we hope that some people of influence take the opportunity to get to know the project and its excellent developers.

Jens Georg is also giving a talk about Rygel, used in the N9 to support UPnP and DLNA. For German speakers, there are already video and slides online of a recent talk that Jens did about Rygel in Berlin for Deutsche Telekom’s Developer Garden. I was amused to discover that DLNA had specified themselves into a situation where a minimum certified server and a minimum certified receiver were only able to share a small resolution JPEG format. Apparently it’s getting better, and Rygel can deal with it all.

Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

There are several exciting things happening in this space, including the recently announced Spark tablet, open sourcing of webOS's Enyo framework and continuing interest in the Maemo platform. Saturday's program includes:

• Mer ... and what you can do with it (David Greaves, 11:30-12:00)
• Openmoko Freerunner - Present and Future (Niels Heyvaert, 12:00-12:30)
• Towards Accelerated UI's on Mobile Linux With Power of Qt5 (Saija Eteläniemi, 12:30-13:00)
• Intro to Tizen and the Future of the Community (Dawn Foster, 13:00-13:30)
• buildroot: flexible building of a custom embedded system (Arnout Vandecappelle, 13:30-14:00)
• Deep Dive into KDE Mobile development on N9/N950 (Laszlo Papp, 14:00-14:30)
• Community Qt apps repository - way forward (Jukka Eklund, 14:30-15:00)
• Maliit - the open mobile text input project (Jon Nordby, 15:00-15:30)
• Nemo Mobile - How to contribute to the project (Marko Saukko, 15:30-16:00)
• Introduction to the QtOnPi project (Rajiv Ranganath, 16:00-16:30)
• An update on PIM storage and sync: SyncEvolution (Patrick Ohly, 16:30-17:00)
• OS in the Mobile App Stores (Thomas Bonte, 17:00-17:30)
• Rygel: Free and Open Mobile DLNA (Jens Georg, 17:30-18:00)

If there are any last-minute announcements or happenings that people want to discuss, we may be a ble to squeeze in a talk or two. Contact Carsten about this.

Also, if you want to chat other things (like PHPCR or CreateJS), I'll be around the whole weekend including the beer event. Drop me an SMS.

Looking forward to seeing as many of you there as possible!

Indeed, Qt SDK 1.2 is released today, and it includes a Harmattan target.

The changes in this version are far smaller than in the previous Harmattan target update (in 1.1.4 the Harmattan target got de-experimentalized), they are described in the release notes.

This time around the most visible changes are outside the Harmattan target. The installer now works without additional trickery on Ubuntu Oneiric Ocelot. Qt Creator is updated to updated to version 2.4.1. Within the target, the QML debugging works again on the Harmattan 1.2 release (available only to N950 owners right now).

Happy Hacking!

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Harmattan PR1.2 beta now available for N950
2. Development
   • Version numbering of Harmattan explained
3. Devices
   • Nokia N9 "may have sold 1.4m units last quarter"
4. In the Wild
   • Nokia N9 up for People's Choice Award at Interaction Awards for its swipe UI
5. Announcements
   • Widget system UI framework for N9 Harmattan
   • lpsmagic - system information on N9's standby screen

As of 2012-01-30 Extras contains:

• total items 2821 (4)
• total open items 959
• open bugs 544 (1)
• critical/blocker 44
• "easyfix" 3
• "moreinfo" 4
• "crash" 2
• "patch" 9 (2)
• reopened 7
• unconfirmed 329 (1)
• open enhancements 415 (1)
• "easyfix" 3
• "moreinfo" 5
• "patch" 6
• reopened 1
• unconfirmed 175 (1)

Top Tens

Ten biggest open bugs by number of votes:

1. (6%) 7334 [FM Radio] audio disappear using other device functions(connecting-disconnecting wi-fi,hspa)
2. (6%) 11961 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] Random email application (modest) crashes with CSSU
3. (4%) 7351 [Recorder] Recorder app closes automatically after few mins
4. (4%) 6511 [Canola] Unable to type text in Canola on N900
5. (3%) 11031 [PyMaemo] python-all depending on specific python version breaks updating python modules
6. (3%) 11842 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] RDesktop halt on connection screen
7. (2%) 6847 [gPodder] gPodder does not attempt to connect to internet if no ambient connection
8. (2%) 8508 [The One Ring] Integration with System Contacts isn't working
9. (2%) 7500 [BlueMaemo] Hardware keyboard doesn't work in Maemo5 (new this week)
10. (2%) 7505 [Mauku] Claims to be free, but ships no license and says 'You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.' (-1 this week)

Ten biggest open enhancements by number of votes:

1. (6%) 8224 [Hermes] Support for getting orkut contact details with Hermes
2. (5%) 5453 [Hermes] Add google as a source for contact information (feature request)
3. (5%) 5823 [Personal GPRS Monitor] programmable auto-reset
4. (5%) 7738 [FM Radio] Scan and auto-preset feature
5. (4%) 11976 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] viewing sms conversations in portrait mode without horizontal scrolling (patch) (+1 this week)
6. (4%) 5045 [Conboy] Add undo and redo (-1 this week)
7. (4%) 5452 [Hermes] Don't overwrite pre-existing contact info
8. (3%) 6383 [PasswordSafe] Add support for V3 Format
9. (2%) 5018 [StockThis] Create a Desktop widget to display portfolio
10. (2%) 7374 [FM Radio] Record FM radio to file

Ten hottest open bugs:

1. 10227 [Batlevel] Batlevel uses extremely high amount of power as normally installed.
2. 10238 [stopwatch] Uses, and causes services to use lots of CPU, even when display blanked.
3. 7505 [Mauku] Claims to be free, but ships no license and says 'You are NOT allowed to modify or redistribute the source code.'
4. 4089 [Canola] SystemProperties plugin error crash after upgrade to beta11 (+2 this week)
5. 7351 [Recorder] Recorder app closes automatically after few mins
6. 12540 [qt-components] Segfault for ProgressBar component when running with opengl graphicssystem (-2 this week)
7. 12405 [qt-components] [CORE] Toolbar layout only covers minimal set of configurations (new this week)
8. 9750 [FriendStatus] FriendStatus fails to load contact history (+2 this week)
9. 12434 [Miniature] SeekGame doesn't filter Atomic games (new this week)
10. 9969 [BlueMaemo] cant install BlueMaemo (new this week)

Ten hottest open enhancements:

1. 12411 [Miniature] OnlineBoard: Implement game end dialog for abort during move 1 (+8 this week)
2. 11896 [nQa Audiobook Player] Package for Meego (+6 this week)
3. 12341 [Miniature] Filter buttons for FICS seeks could be simpler (new this week)
4. 11893 [Waters of Shiloah] Improved Meego Integration (new this week)
5. 11901 [Gonvert] Package for Meego (new this week)
6. 11894 [Quicknote] Package for Meego (-3 this week)
7. 11892 [nQa Audiobook Player] Improved Meego Integration (new this week)
8. 11895 [Multilist] Package for Meego (-3 this week)
9. 10901 [The One Ring] Proxy Support Needed (new this week)
10. 11900 [Dialcentral] Package for Meego (-6 this week)

Ten oldest open bugs (unchanged for 93 weeks):

1. (1289 days) 3472 [Advanced Backlight] LCARS and Hildon iconsets aren't complete
2. (1164 days) 3886 [Canola] Interface buttons disappeared: video, podcasts, internet media
3. (1126 days) 3974 [Browser Extras] webaddons category applications have inconsistent name convention
4. (1110 days) 4005 [Canola] AudioBroadcast UPnP items not showing when browsing
5. (1102 days) 4036 [Canola] Canola cannot properly merge multiple tracks into one album
6. (1098 days) 4050 [mNotes] random comments about make/mnotes_framework
7. (1086 days) 4083 [Canola] cannot access to video and internet files after upgrade to 2.0.b11
8. (1085 days) 4084 [Canola] Intermittent hangs on audio play
9. (1084 days) 4087 [Canola] There is no GUI way to discover podcast URLs after creation
10. (1084 days) 4089 [Canola] SystemProperties plugin error crash after upgrade to beta11

Ten oldest open enhancements (unchanged for 8 weeks):

1. (1102 days) 4037 [Canola] Ability to switch between "Play Random Track" and "Album" mode
2. (1095 days) 4058 [Canola] Vertical lists are not scrolled properly
3. (1084 days) 4090 [Canola] Own radio stations and playlists are not supportet by canola last.fm plugin
4. (1080 days) 4117 [Canola] Tracks in playlists should be sortable by album and track
5. (1027 days) 4255 [Canola] libre.fm support (instead of last.fm/audioscrobbler)
6. (962 days) 4662 [BlueMaemo] Ability to connect to Windows Mobile/Symbian devices
7. (962 days) 4663 [BlueMaemo] Configurable buttons Zoom -/Full screen/Zoom + on the N8*0-side
8. (962 days) 4664 [BlueMaemo] 770 support
9. (962 days) 4665 [BlueMaemo] drag&drop and digitizer mode
10. (962 days) 4666 [BlueMaemo] Add scroll bar feature to keyboard mode

New Items

3 bugs were opened:

• 12564 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] microb-engine: Daemon does not shut down properly when no connection and browser closed when connection dialog opens
• 12565 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] Edit Menu in Portrait
• 12566 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] libxml2: CVE-2011-2834 DoS via double free in XPath handling

0 bugs were critical/blocker.

1 enhancement was opened:

• 12563 [fMMS] dont sed mms

Resolved Bugs

1 bug was resolved "fixed":

• 11974 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] Holding down left on right on the home screen leads to a black screen

0 bugs were resolved "invalid".

0 bugs were resolved "wontfix".

1 bug was resolved "duplicate":

• 12565 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] Edit Menu in Portrait

0 bugs were resolved "worksforme".

0 bugs were resolved "moved".

Resolved Enhancements

0 enhancements were resolved "fixed".

2 enhancements were resolved "invalid":

• 12562 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] camera has no new enhancements or functions
• 12563 [fMMS] dont sed mms

0 enhancements were resolved "wontfix".

0 enhancements were resolved "duplicate".

0 enhancements were resolved "worksforme".

0 enhancements were resolved "moved".

Confirmed Items

1 bug was confirmed:

• 11875 [Maemo 5 Community SSU] Battery drains quicker

0 enhancements were confirmed.

Reopened Items

0 bugs were reopened.

0 enhancements were reopened.

Unloved Items

10 bugs were needing love:

• 3974 [Browser Extras] webaddons category applications have inconsistent name convention
• 11034 [PyMaemo] hildon searchbar popup when typing into a hildon.Entry field
• 11388 [PyMaemo] python-location not available on n810
• 11638 [PyMaemo] HTTPS doesn't work with IPv6
• 10129 [Mussorgsky] With albums named the same, Mussorgsky ignores "[year]", adding same album art to both
• 10982 [contacts-merger] contacts-merger crash when starting
• 11317 [ringtoned] cpu usage and battery drain with ringtoned installed
• 7939 [Mauku] Mauku Widget wakes up device when in offline mode
• 11757 [eCoach] Multiple trainings on same day are not correctly uploaded to HeiaHeia
• 11436 [qtirreco] Single click on a button is frequently interpreted as two clicks

10 enhancements were needing love:

• 12023 [Catorise] Local Path Inclusion
• 9938 [conky] Time % in different CPU states visible on Conky display and temperature
• 10118 [Multilist] Add simple filter options for fields with predefined values
• 10119 [Multilist] Add date selector to the date field or restrict entering non-date data
• 10860 [Load Applet] Split screenshot/screencast functionality into separate applet
• 10888 [contacts-merger] Unable to exclude fields from merge analysis
• 11810 [FM Radio] Need to develop portrait mode for FM Radio Player
• 11889 [FM Radio] Radio for n900 didn't work fine
• 12264 [SolarWolf] configurable keys
• 11062 [Hermes] Suggestion - Excluding fields

Keyworded Items

0 bugs were tagged "crash".

0 bugs were tagged "easyfix".

0 bugs were tagged "moreinfo".

0 bugs were tagged "patch".

0 bugs were tagged "performance".

0 bugs were tagged "security".

0 enhancements were tagged "easyfix".

0 enhancements were tagged "moreinfo".

0 enhancements were tagged "patch".

0 enhancements were tagged "performance".

This summary is also posted to the Maemo developers' list and talk.maemo.org.

Check out our new page Funny LOL Pictures (click here) - it brings you daily funny pictures that will make you LOL!

Are you in a liking of chess games? Playing with the AI doesn’t seem as good as playing with real players for you? Then you should totally check out Miniature, an FICS client for Maemo!

Miniature is currently only available at Extras-devel, which means you would want it enabled in your repo list. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean the game is not good enough for everyday use, I myself have tested many releases and they work perfectly. In case if you need help enabling it, check out this wiki article. Make sure to disable it right after downloading the package though.

Now, Miniature enables you to play games hosted at FICS with thousands of players all across the world and even allows you to play P2P games with people nearby or with people in your contacts list. Registering at FICS is not required, but is recommended, if you want to keep easy track of your own games and stats. Host a game or join one of those already available and you’re ready to dive into a nice game of chess with anyone. And you even have easy to use text chat!

Miniature also holds quite some learning possibilities, as you can watch games already played, view chess lessons and participate in one of the tournaments FICS often holds! In case if you would want to play different kinds of chess, like antichess, Miniature allows that too.

A great client for every chess player, or just somebody who would want a nice game while waiting for the bus to arrive, Miniature is definitely worth checking out.

The PR 1.2 firmware update has just been rolled out to the developer only N950 MeeGo Harmattan device, and it comes to us in the form of  beta version number 3.2012.02-6_PR_RM680. This update is a precursor to the N9 update, and will give you a fair idea of what new features to expect on your N9.

Highlights include support for five new languages, face recognition, enhanced copy-paste, software update notifications for applications and games in Nokia Store and folders in the application view. If you own a N950, you can find all the details and download links here.

Here is a slightly more detailed changelog, if you have a time, a complete list of the bugs that have been fixed has also been published.

• New languages
  • Persian
  • Hebrew
  • Kazakh
  • Thai
  • Vietnamese
• Software update notifications for content in Nokia Store
• Face recognition for gallery and face tags for Facebook
• Support for folders in the application view
• Mail for Exchange global address book lookup
• Mail thread support in the Email client
• Extended copy-paste support
• Media sharing with DLNA compatible devices
• Improved browser history view
• Compass support in Maps
• QtWebKit update to version 2.2
• New font taken into use
• Front camera support
• Video editing support in the Gallery application
• MeeGotouch Framework
• Visual hint for differentiating swipe close gesture from normal swipes
• Timestamps shown in notifications
• Notifications sorted by timestamps
• Improvements in Event Feed area
• Music controls in Lock screen
• New feedbacks added to MeeGoTouch theme.
• Kernel updated to be in sync with the upstream kernel version 2.6.32.48

• Connectivity

• Android NDEF Push Protocol disabled
• NFC polling enabled in lock screen
• Separate switch for controlling mobile background connections while roaming

• Camera

• Self Timer support
• Composition grid + on/off control

• Calendar

• Better handling of To-Do lists, recurring events and timezones
• Private flag support for events
• Support for read-only events
• Ability to forward/reply/reply-all for received events

• Clock

• Clock alarm becomes silent by flipping the device face down instead of snoozing
• Updated time picker

• Gallery

• People view added to the grid toolbar
• Improved multiple selection indication in grid view

• Music Player

• Audiobook and podcast support
• Ability to create playlists
• Ability to delete music files from music player library views via object menu
• Possibility to see songs that are on the current play queue

[via: My Nokia Blog]

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Harmattan 1.2 comes with a number of user experience improvements making it appealing for consumers. Five new supported languages, face recognition, enhanced copy-paste, software update notifications for applications and games in Nokia Store, folders in application view just to name a few.

There are a few additional things for you to consider before taking this upgrade. Read on...

No downgrading to Harmattan 1.0 or 1.1(.1)

The N950 (or Nokia N9) software version cannot be downgraded. This unfortunately means, that it is not possible to go back and forth between different releases. Once you take an update you are stuck with that release until there is next version available. The challenge a developer is facing is that big portion of consumers are still running Harmattan 1.0 or 1.1 where personally one would always love to run the latest and brightest release.

A majority of all users are already running Harmattan 1.1 instead of 1.0. The penetration of Harmattan 1.1 over 1.0 is steadily growing as more and more people are updating their devices, and factories are pushing new devices with latest software. And in China, all (003 variant) devices are running minimum Harmattan 1.1 as we never shipped Harmattan 1.0 there.

This means that you as a developer, should always ensure your app is running smoothly on both Harmattan 1.0 and 1.1, depending on your target demography. If you have only one device on your possession you have a dilemma. Will you update to Harmattan 1.2 and enjoy all cool new stuff but simultaneously risk missing a glitch on 1.0/1.1, or will you stick to Harmattan 1.0/1.1 for now?

Naturally you can buy a stock of Nokia N9’s for your testing needs. But if that is not working for you then you can rely on the Remote Device Access (RDA) service as well as the SDK QEMU tool.

Upgrading your N950 to Harmattan 1.2 beta

Due to the above reasons, the upgrade from Harmattan beta 2  (same as 1.0) or 1.1 is not offered as over the air SSU on N950. A developer needs to make a conscious and informed decision to go and flash the device with latest software.

While at it, the OCF will erase the device, you can use backup-restore from Harmattan 1.0 (1.2011.34-2) and 1.1 (2.2011.39-5) but not from beta 1 (1.2011.22-6 or older). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Included fixes, limitations, known issues and so on

We have listed the most significant bug fixes in release notes and marked the fixed items in bugzilla. We excluded a long list of fixes e.g. on localization / terminology. Also, we put together information about known issues, limitations and differences between Nokia N950 developer Device and Nokia N9 for your convenience in the Release Notes. Suggest you read it carefully.

Key links

• Harmattan 1.2 beta for N950 (3.2011.02-6) OCF download 
• Release Notes
• Bug fixes in Harmattan 1.2

• List of path name exceptions now contains more directories where data storage is allowed. This section will continue to be updated in the future.
  
• Accessing protected X server interfaces is a new section about an upcoming Harmattan platform security feature. Use these instructions if you are developing a special application that needs to access protected X server interfaces.

Remember that the Developer Library is also available for downloading in HTML and as a QCH file, which you can integrate into your Qt SDK.