As per tradition, the new Openismus T-Shirts are ready for GUADEC 2009 (GCDS). They are again unlike last year’s, and simple enough to wear among civilians. We were a little rushed this year but they turned out nice. Thanks to Kat for fixing things in Inkscape and getting them done.

We only printed a limited number, so seek out an Openismus developer over the first weekend to get yours.

Now that we’ve found a place to get these done in Berlin we’ll probably do a new design (2009 1/2) for the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam in October.

I’m currently involved in the Tracker project and our project will be presented by Ivan Frade at the Desktop Summit this Sunday.

The GNOME press contact alias got a mail last weekend from Sam Varghese asking about the possibility of new Mono applications being added to GNOME 3.0, and I answered it. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but I see now that the reason Sam was asking was because of Richard Stallman’s recent warnings about Mono - Sam’s article has since appeared with the ominous looking title “GNOME 3.0 may have more Mono apps“. And indeed it may. It may also have more alien technology, we’re not sure yet. We’re still working on an agreement with the DoD to get access to the alien craft in Fort Knox.

I am going to collect data for the idea I had for a maemo summit presentation even if it is not presented in Amsterdam. My first step is a generic survey posted here. Please help me understand tablet users more by taking this survey.

Qaiku's twitter-like API has been one of the first major contributions I've made to the project, and it is great to see some first applications start to use it. Here are some examples:

Mauku is a microblogging client for Maemo. The new Fremantle version supports Qaiku nicely:

Gwibber is a Linux desktop microblogging client. Qaiku support is now available in the development version:

There is also an XMPP bot that we're going to launch soon for wider use. This enables you to monitor your mentions or some channels and post via any Jabber client:

If you're doing something cool with the API, please let me know! The #Qaiku-api channel is good for usage questions and ideas.

Every now and then people ask me why we're doing Qaiku instead of "just using Twitter". Here are some points why Qaiku just works better:

• Qaiku culture and features promote more meaningful and threaded discussion - in general, people comment much more than start conversations which is a good sign
• Qaiku has language tagging and filtering meaning that when I post in Finnish it will not bother my international friends
• Messages and comments are proper Markdown, reducing ugliness typical of tweets
• Features like feed import and image sharing are built-in, removing need for external tools
• Channels, and especially private channels enable us to do workstreaming in Qaiku

If you want to comment, you'll anyway find me both on Qaiku and on Twitter.

Technorati Tags: mauku, gwibber, qaiku, xmpp

The presentation that I had hoped to show at the maemo summit has been declined. I hope someone can take the idea and make something better out of it - so here's the abstract:

Attracting the Masses

• Intended audience: Developers - but other parties may be interested
• Abstract/description

Tablets have hundreds of applications now - but who are they for? If the Internet Tablets are intended to attract a more mainstream mobile market, the maemo community needs to get in touch with the needs of the target market.

The first part of this presentation will give an overview of the most popular applications on competing platforms. This information will be collected through app store sales/download counts, direct communication with a sampling of mobile consumers, and communication with some other high-profile mobile technology journalists. This will include actual applications, connectivity options, peripherals, interface (touch/keyboard/icon/etc) preferences, and related consumer desires.

The second part of this presentation will give an overview of the state of the existing maemoplatform including commercial partners, independent contributors, and ports of more popular Linux software.

The conclusion will analyze mobile consumer desires compared to maemo offerings and, hopefully, give developers ideas on what they can write to make the platform more appealing.

The feedback from the Dave, Jamie, and Valerio is (in part) as follows:

Thanks for your submission for the Maemo summit, we appreciate the effort.
However, we don't think the content is compelling enough for the summit
as is. And certainly "reaching the masses" will be covered by Nokia
during the Nokia day. So we are sorry to inform you that we are not
accepting the presentation.

Since I'm more of a "put the tablets in others' hands and get a reaction" type and not a "developer" type, I figured that's the only topic on which I am qualified to talk. I'm open to ideas, though. I'm still looking forward to seeing what comes out of the summit.

Since a while ago, and during my work at Igalia, I’ve been porting EOG to Maemo using the new and great Fremantle widgets!

The project is still in an *early stage* but I couldn’t wait more to let everyone know about it so today I’ve published the git repository.

The project is being done as a branch of the original EOG. You can get the source by doing:

$ git clone http://git.igalia.com/eog.git
$ git checkout –track -b mobile origin/mobile

And then, you know, inside scratchbox:

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install
$ run-standalone.sh eog

Thank you to the people who helped me porting EOG, mainly Claudio and Berto.

And here you have a screencast and some nice screenshots, hope you like it:

EOG for Maemo from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

       

       

As I've written before, the cell phone is the computer for majority of world's people. Google's new set of SMS services for Africa follows this idea in an interesting way:

...mobile applications which will allow people to access information, via SMS, on a diverse number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather, sports, and more. The suite also includes Google Trader, a SMS-based “marketplace” application that helps buyers and sellers find each other. People can find, "sell" or "buy" any type of product or service, from used cars and mobile phones to crops, livestock and jobs.

This brings my earlier "solving the logistics of mamona" post to mind.

Now, how about making maemo support SMS? That would be another step to turning our tablets into universal communicators.

Technorati Tags: google, maemo, africa, sms

Reading blog comments about Meiga out there, I’ve found one particularly interesting. Python has an embedded HTTP server that can serve the current directory from a given port. It can be instanced for port 8282 simply issuing this command:

  python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8282

The funny thing is that… it works on the N810 also!

More info about SimpleHTTPServer here.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-06-22 through 2009-06-28