Mappero has always been distributed under a GPL licence. However, since when I started selling Mappero Geotagger (which is built from the same source), I decided not to publish the source code in a public repository, but only to provide it to those who made an explicit request to obtain it.
I spent some time reconsidering the matter, and I've finally decided to let the source code live in a public repository. I also setup a mailing list for it. And indeed I welcome code contributions, however there's a small catch: a CLA. While Mappero is distributed under the GPLv3 licence, I request that all contributors send me an e-mail in which they give me the right to re-licence their contribution under any licence published by the Free Software Foundation.
Since I believe that the busiest time for my involvement with speculo has passed, I expect to be able to spend some more time developing Mappero. The qt5 port is more or less working, but most of the cool features are missing, so it's little more than a map viewer at the moment (Mappero Geotagger, however, is fully working under Qt5!).
Here you can see Mappero running on an Ubuntu Touch powered Nexus 4. Pinch zooming and GPS are not yet working, but I promise they'll be there in less than a week. Also I found a nasty bug which can cause the application to crash when downloading map tiles, and I'll fix it ASAP (I'm mentioning it just so that I won't be flooded with identical bug reports now :-) ).
Planet maemo
The last few months I've been dedicating most of my (very little) free time to a new project: speculo, a library which implements IPC (Inter-Process Communication) on top of shared memory. Since developers appreciate conciseness and minimalism, here's a description of speculo in a few bullet points:
At some point the garbage collector will kick in, when the conditions specified by the writer are met or when the SHM area is completely full. All the chunks which are still valid will be copied over to a new SHM object, and then the SHM objects will be atomically switched. Readers will be able to complete their ongoing reads, and transparently move on to the new SHM object as they request to read a new data chunk.
- written in C
- POSIX (tested in Linux and FreeBSD)
- small (~850 LOC)
- well commented (~400 lines)
- good test coverage
- zerocopy
- lockless
- one writer, many readers
- data is written and read in chunks of arbitrary size
- a data chunk becomes visible to the readers as soon as the writer commits it
- data chunks can have an expiration time
- data chunks can be obsoleted by a newer copy
- garbage collector
- no file descriptors are permanently kept open
- no change notification
At some point the garbage collector will kick in, when the conditions specified by the writer are met or when the SHM area is completely full. All the chunks which are still valid will be copied over to a new SHM object, and then the SHM objects will be atomically switched. Readers will be able to complete their ongoing reads, and transparently move on to the new SHM object as they request to read a new data chunk.
due to the lack of nominees we decided to extend the nomination period by one month.
From the merger with HiFo-Council we furthermore need to extend the election process by another week, adding a one-week contemplation period.
We are extending the acceptance of nominations till the end of the day 2013/11/30 (GMT).
Contemplation will start 2013/12/01 ending with the end of the day 2013/12/07 (GMT).
The Election then starts 2013/12/08. You will be notified with an election-token within the week before.
For detailed information on upcoming elections, general information about the process and if you are an eligible person to vote or as candidate - see:
Election Process http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_Council/Election_process
On behalf of the Maemo Community Council
Best regards
Ruediger Schiller
Community Council Chair
I ve just release a new software for Harmattan: Tirelire. A fast, easy to use, and simple expenses tracker.
Currently available only for Meego / Harmattan, port for SailfishOS and Nemo Mobile planned.
ScreenShots
Following the update of the Sailfish SDK, with the availability of the ARM compilation, i ve packaged ownNotes for ARM for SailfishOS. You can find it in the downloads section.
The Sailfish and Harmattan version are also available on OpenRepos.net
QMake users: public service announcement. If you use CONFIG+=ordered, please stop right now. If you don't, I'll hunt you down. I promise to god I will.
There is simply no reason to use this, ever. There's two reasons this might be in your project file:
If you fit into category 2, then you're doing it wrong. You should specify dependencies between your targets properly like this:
And then you'll have docs built whenever the build tool feels like it, and the rest built when their dependencies are built.
If you have subdirectories involved in this, then you need an extra level of indirection in your project, but it's still not rocket science:
For those of you wondering why I sound frustrated about this, I've fixed so many instances of this by now that it's just getting old and tired, frankly. And I still keep running into more. That's countless minutes of wasted build time, all because of laziness boiling down to a single line. Please fix it.
There is simply no reason to use this, ever. There's two reasons this might be in your project file:
- you have no idea what you are doing, and you copied it from somewhere else
- you have a target that needs to be built after another target, and you don't know any better
If you fit into category 2, then you're doing it wrong. You should specify dependencies between your targets properly like this:
TEMPLATE = subdirs
SUBDIRS = src plugins tests docs
plugins.depends = src
tests.depends = src plugins
And then you'll have docs built whenever the build tool feels like it, and the rest built when their dependencies are built.
If you have subdirectories involved in this, then you need an extra level of indirection in your project, but it's still not rocket science:
TEMPLATE = subdirs
src_lib.subdir = src/lib
src_lib.target = sub-src-lib
src_plugins.subdir = src/plugins
src_plugins.target = sub-plugins
src_plugins.depends = sub-src-lib
SUBDIRS = src_lib src_plugins
For those of you wondering why I sound frustrated about this, I've fixed so many instances of this by now that it's just getting old and tired, frankly. And I still keep running into more. That's countless minutes of wasted build time, all because of laziness boiling down to a single line. Please fix it.
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 1.1
- Preliminary support for the HTTPebble protocol which allows watch faces and apps to communicate with HTTP servers via the phone’s network connection and also provides them with location information. For example this provides support for watch faces that display local weather information, like Fair Forecast.
- The ability to set the watch’s time from the N9’s clock.
Upcoming features
In the next version I hope to add support for accessing the two-way SDK via DBUS, this will allow other N9 applications to communicate with watch apps and get feedback from the watch.
Download
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.
Upcoming features
The next release will add:
- Preliminary support for the HTTPebble protocol which allows watch faces and apps to communicate with HTTP servers via the phone’s network connection and also provides them with location information. For example this provides support for watch faces that display local weather information, like Fair Forecast.
- The ability to set the watch’s time from the N9’s clock.
Videos
Video showing installation of apps
Download
This new release 1.1.0 of ownNotes is the first stable version of ownNotes for Harmattan and SailfishOS.
That's also the first alpha release for the desktop. Even if all features aren't yet implemented in desktop, and if the ui need some works, that s version is working and can sync notes too. Unfortunately, the desktop version require that you compile it yourself from git, i ven't found time yet to package it.
Changelog :
- Fix highlighting on Harmattan and SailfishOS
- Change highlight color of links on Harmattan
- Fix refresh of notes after a sync
Screenshot of ownNotes on Linux :
The Sailfish and Harmattan version are also available on OpenRepos.net
Another six months are quickly running away and it's time for our Community Council to be succeeded by a new one, voted by the community.
The last election finished 8th of May 2013 so the election should begin on the 4th of November. Elections duration is one week, until the 10th of November. Nominations should open 2 weeks before that, thus on the 21th of the current month.
Please contemplate to throw your hat into the ring for the upcoming election, and help this community drive forward.
We will probably have two new devices to call our own during the next few months so the gloomy future that was in the horizon during the previous two elections has been avoided, and exciting times are coming.
In a personal note, I always regretted not being around here or active enough during the golden days of maemo, i.e. right before the N900 was announced and during the first months of it's availability. Don't lose the new opportunity to be part of new fun times that are coming fast.
On behalf of the outgoing community council
Michael Demetriou
(Joerg Reisenweber)
Wow, September was a busy month. As you probably know, our NoFlo Development Environment Kickstarter succeeded with 115% funding. Thanks everybody!