I’ve been a loyal pidgin user for a long time, and for the last couple of years it’s sat somewhat uncomfortably on the Ubuntu desktop. Obviously, Empathy became the default IM client a while back, but the more troublesome part, for me, has been Unity dropping support for the well established system tray icon specification in favour of their own Application Indicators. Ignoring the relative merits of the standards, and the questionable claim that you can unilaterally deprecate a widely used standard, Ubuntu has been good at providing indicator replacements for all the tray icons I care about, with one notable exception – Pidgin. Rather than providing a pidgin icon, they instead provided integration with the central messaging indicator. While this is a fine aspiration, I find the messaging indicator a very poor replacement – it doesn’t offer reasonable behaviour for showing and hiding pidgin and has problems dismissing new message notifications.

Initially, it was possible to turn on the system tray compatibility function in Unity with a simple dconf setting, but in 13.04, this was changed so that it would only work for java, and nothing else. In turn, this led to the creation of ppas for 13.04 and 13.10 to provide patched versions of Unity with the general purpose system tray restored (a one line change, apparently). I’ve been running with that for a while, but I didn’t want to swim upstream on this issue forever, so I decided to write a pidgin plugin that provides a proper indicator, with the same menu and behaviour as the tray icon.

It turned out to be an interesting exercise – creating indicators is extremely simple – all credit where it’s due – with the main challenge being building the menu without reinventing a wheel that’s already present inside pidgin. The pidgin tray icon (docklet is the internal name) is not a plugin, although there is a partial concept of different providers. Unfortunately, the interface can’t be used to drive an indicator as it assumes it can show the menu itself, while indicators require the menu be shown by the indicator. Ultimately, I had to copy the docklet code into my plugin to make the necessary modifications.

It would be possible to modify the docklet interface in pidgin to allow for an indicator provider with minimal impact on the existing providers, but I wanted to offer a working solution without requiring a newer version of pidgin, never mind the complexities of feeding changes upstream, etc. But, there’s an aspirational project there.

So, without further ado, I’d like to offer to all the stubborn people who want pidgin to work they way it always used to in Unity.

At some point I’ll get around to producing a deb for it, but just source for now.

Enjoy!

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Michael Demetriou (qwazix), Paul Healy (sixwheeledbeast), Gido Griese (Win7Mac), warfare, Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Proposals for next contest
- Proposing date and time for the next meeting
- Things to be settled with Nokia
- PayPal account

Topic (Proposals for next contest):

• There were few ideas presented;
  • Native opensource applications for SailfishOS
  • Fremantle porting Hackathlon/Contest
  • Multiplatform SW Contest.
• It was pointed out that before a proposal for a contest could be taken into consideration funding for the prizes should be cleared out.
  • If contest would be about apps for Jolla, then Jolla should donate for the contest
  • If contest would be about Fremantle porting, then funding could be arranged from neo900.org

Topic (Proposing date and time for the next meetings):

• It was agreed that meetings would be held every tuesday 20:00 UTC

Topic (Things to be settled with Nokia):

• DNS/domain ownership transfer is imminent.
• Firmware and flashing tools cannot be transferred.

Topic (PayPal account):

• The maemo donation PayPal account is still frozen. Workaround is to use the account of Joerg instead.
• Joerg told that generally the donations sum up to 20...30 eur/month. Infra costs come up to 60 eur/month.

• N/A

Meeting held on FreeNode, channel #maemo-meeting (logs)

Attending: Joerg Reisenweber (DocScrutinizer05), Ruediger Schiller (chem|st), Michael Demetriou (qwazix), Christian Ratzenhofer (merlin1991), Paul Healy (sixwheeledbeast), Aakash Sadh (thedead1440), freemangordon, Craig Woodward (Woody14619), chainsawbike, Gido Griese (Win7Mac), Jussi Ohenoja (juiceme).

Absent:

Summary of topics (ordered by discussion):
- Announcing election results
- Farewell to stepping down memebers and welcoming new members
- Nominating new chairman
- Proposing date and time for the next meeting
- Planning for next election
- Proposals for next contest
- Discussion on state of maemo infra
- Things to be settled with Nokia

Topic (Announcing election results):

• chem|st announced the MCC/Q4 election results. Members are DocScrutinizer51, chem|st, juiceme.

Topic (Farewell to stepping down memebers and welcoming new members):

• The stepping down council memebers qwazix and merlin1991 were thanked for their valuable contribution to MCC/HFC.
• Also sixwheeledbeast and thedead1440 were recognized for support to community.
• juiceme was welcomed to council.

Topic (Nominating new chairman):

• chem|st proposed that as the newest addition to council, juiceme should be nominated to chair.
• juiceme accepted on the condition that screwups will be tolerated :)

Topic (Proposing date and time for the next meeting):

• There was a lot of discussion on the date of the next meeting. The holiday season breaks the end-of-year and it was difficult to agree on a date suitable for all.
• Finally it was agreed that next meeting will be held on Tuesday 2014-01-07 19:00 UTC.

Topic (Planning for next election):

• DocScrutinizer51 suggested that it would be important to start planning immediately for next elections so that it can be synchronized with Hildon Foundation board elections.

Topic (Proposals for next contest):

• chem|st asked for participants to dream up a new maemo contest topic over christmas holidays.

Topic (Discussion on state of maemo infra):

• qwazix brought up the topic of upgrading the infrastructure. There was some discussion on using the funds reserved for HW upkeep.

Topic (Things to be settled with Nokia):

• The "Maemo" name licencing from Nokia is still an open issue. To properly transfer the name and domain name to us from Nokia needs some paperwork.

• N/A

Android consists of three parts relevant to rooting

A new minor release of ownNotes is available.

Changeslog:

• Replace busycircle on Cover for a label (Sailfish)
• Add remorse to publish menu (Sailfish)
• Use pull down busy instead of ugly progress bar (Sailfish)

Where to ? same place as usual, on openRepos.net or in the downloads section.
Why not in Harbour ? Python apps are currently not accepted in Jolla Harbour, but will be soon (©Jolla)

A new version of ownNotes is available in OpenRepos or in downloads section.

Changeslog

• Bug fix : lock token wasn t always properly initialized
• Bug fix : Deleting multiple item at the same time could cancel some deletion
• Feature : Cover provide now actions to sync or create a new note
• Bug fix : Fix refreshing bug on bew note creation
• Bug fix : translation are now properly loaded
• Feature : Partial french and russian translation.

More information on ownNotes

This post was published with ownNotes and written on Jolla

Overview

Rockwatch allows your N9 to communicate with a Pebble smart watch. It makes it possible to install and manage Pebble apps, upgrade your Pebble’s firmware, receive notifications of e-mails and SMS messages and control your music from your Pebble.

New features in version 1.3

• Support for incoming calls and caller ID.
• Fixes incorrect time offsets when setting the watch’s time from the phone.

Download

Available in the Ovi Store

It has been a while that I don’t write here but I thought this subject was worth it

We just opened the Flowhub website for pre-orders. Flowhub is the collaborative development environment for NoFlo and other flow-based programming systems.