Overview

Eyrie is an application for the Nokia N9 and N950 phones that can find out information about music that’s playing nearby. It does this by making use of the EchoPrint algorithm to extract musical features from whatever you’re currently hearing. This is then used to find out the name of the artist and track from The EchoNest. Currently the database of songs accessible via EchoPrint fingerprints is a bit small, but it has the advantage of being an open database that anyone can submit fingerprint information to (although at the moment the process for adding new fingerprints isn’t very clear).

Screenshots

Video

Video of Eyrie

Download

eyrie_0.1-1_armel.deb

Source

License: GPL version 3.0 or later
Gitorious repository: https://gitorious.org/eyrie/eyrie
Ohloh project page: https://www.ohloh.net/p/eyrie

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

Twitter’s last Privacy Policy Update helpfully informs all users that they do now support the Do Not Track (DNT) browser setting, which aims to stop the collection of information at the user’s request (a collection which Twitter is actively engaged into).

Spurred by all this I sat down and added DNT support in Epiphany, which thankfully is an extremely simple spec to implement. It’s now in master, so anyone willing to enable just needs to go to the Privacy tab in Preferences and click:

Now the pages that choose to respect this setting (unfortunately not everyone does; by a long shot), should be able to detect your request. We can see that things are working in the donottrack.us page itself.

Note that the page claims our browser does not support the feature, yet it is enabled; this is because DNT being an HTTP header extension the only way for the page to tell you whether your browser supports it in theory is by having a hardcoded list of supported browsers, which does not include Epiphany. Oh well. Either way, enjoy your newly untraceable goodness, which should make its way into the next unstable release.

Last month I mentioned that a community based solution for bringing WhatsApp to the Nokia N9 was in the works, and today it is finally available for download. Its developer Tarek Galal had realsed a first look video of it running on the N9 a while ago, and now you can grab the .deb file and install it on your own device.

The application is still beta so there might be a few bugs here and there, but its a pretty great accomplishment for the community. Head over the Wazapp.IM and download the app.

The lack of a WhatsApp client was a huge blow to the N9, and I hope WhatsApp reaches across to the developer and helps him in his efforts, rather than try and kill the unofficial port.

[via: My Nokia Blog]

Similar Posts:

• WhatsApp Coming To The N9 With Wazapp
• WhatsApp Coming To Windows Phone Mango
• Nokia’s ‘Drop The Pin’ Campaign Takes On BlackBerry’s BBM With WhatsApp
• MeeGo 1.2 Summer Release For The N900 Out Now
• WhatsApp For Symbian Updated – Now Supports Multimedia & Location Sharing

As I already said the other day in Twitter, I became Qt Ambassador because of Aura. The only problem is that is a project-person program, meaning that it is granted to a person because of having worked on a project. Aura was a project developed by three Igalians, who were Miguel, Víctor and me and I consider a bit unfair that it was granted only to me because they deserve it as much as I do.

The procedure I followed was:

• Applying with Aura
• When that was accepted, I submitted Aura project page.
• After the publication I was told that I was going to receive the Qt Ambassador Merchansise

Does anybody know if more people can become ambassadors for the same project and how?

Overview

Recently I’ve spent a little time getting the Ogre3D engine into a state where it’ll work on the Nokia N9 and N950 MeeGo phones.

To test the port out a bit more extensively I decided it’d be a good idea to try porting an existing game, at which point rzr suggested Those Funny Funguloids. So after a fair amount of hacking to make it compatible with my version of Ogre and to make the controls work reasonably on a touch screen device I have a playable version.

The aim of the game is to collect mushrooms (…IN SPACE), and bring them back to your base without running into any asteroids. Only mushrooms of the same colour as your base are added to your score and your base changes colour each level (but you can hang on to mushrooms between levels and score them later). The controls are fairly simple, touch the left side of the screen to turn left, the right side to turn right and the middle to start moving.

When I have a bit more time I’ll see about writing a little tutorial on making use of my modified version of Ogre3D to create 3D applications and games in a way that’s easy to distribute.

Screenshots

Video

Video of gameplay

Download

funguloids_1.0.6-3_armel.deb

Source

Modified version of Funguloids 1.06
Modified version of Ogre 1.7.4

In the last few weeks, as part of my work here at Igalia, I’ve been playing a bit with the concept of hybrid applications. In this case, I’ve created a basic prototype of a mail application, with its user interface completely written using JQuery Mobile, and with backend code in C and GObject. The result is iwkmail.

Screencast of iwkmail in action

Though it’s a simple experiment, I’ve added some mail basic functionality, so I could try to catch as much as possible of real requirements for how  we could improve the developers WebKit+GNOME experience creating hybrid applications.

My first conclusion is that it’s surprisingly easy and fast to develop such applications. Second, I could reuse tons of source code and modules from my old projects. This approach surely provides a way to create cool GNOME applications, using the most fashionable web client technologies.

So, you’ll get:

• Browsing messages
• Read/unread flags
• Deleting messages
• Creating and deleting mail accounts.
• Storage protocols supported: IMAP and POP.
• For sending mails, we support SMTP. There’s support for an outbox holding the messages to be sent.
• A plain text composer, allowing to add attachments.

The UI is completely written in Javascript + HTML, using JQuery Mobile.

The backend side is done using Camel library inside Evolution Data Server, so we rely on a library well tested for more than 10 years.  All the code related to this is implemented in C+GObject, and I reused a good set of code from Modest, the default mail client for Nokia N810 and N900. I’ve got involved on its development for 3 years, so that’s a bunch of code I know well enough.

For communication, I use the AJAX-like JSONP protocol, and custom SoupRequest URI scheme handlers. Basically I expose some methods as iwk:addAcccount, iwk:getMessage, etc, and arguments are passed as usual in a web request. The result I obtain from this calls is a JSON object with the results of the call. Simple, and works very well.

I’ve pushed the work on github: https://github.com/jdapena/iwkmail. Feel free to try it!

Oh, I guess it’s very obvious that I did not spend too much time thinking on the project name… So, anyone proposing something that matches the IM acronym (I don’t want to rewrite the class names!) would deserve a beer.

Last, lots of thanks to Igalia for giving me the opportunity to do this experiment. As usual, fun stuff to work with.

The number of available phone applications is growing at top speed. I am trying to learn new languages and love traveling, so a good grasp of several languages is what I really need.



Recently I came across a superb course of English language history and begin to understand better grammar rules and language phenomena.

Hopefully there will be more other applications for language learning and I will review them with great pleasure.

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

The Linux Foundation sponsored my trip to the Tizen Conference 2012 in San Francisco last week, and I'm supposed to blog about it. Also, I think it's good to share what I've seen with fellow Maemo/MeeGo community members, even if Tizen is something different. You can find my photos of the event on Flickr.