A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-09 through 2012-04-15

In the last weeks Miguel, Calvaris and myself, developed an application for the N9/N950 mobile phone and we called it Aura.

Basically it uses the device’s camera (either the main one or the frontal one) for video recording, as a normal camera application, but also it exposes a set of effects that can be applied, in real time, to the video stream.

For example, here is a video using the historical effect:

Aura is inspired in the Gnome application, Cheese, and it uses many of the effects available in Gnome Video Effects.

The list of effects that were possible to port to the N9/N950 are: dice, edge, flip, historical, hulk, mauve, noir/blanc, optical illusion, quark, radioactive, waveform, ripple, saturation, shagadelic, kung-fu, vertigo and warp.

Besides of these software effects, it is possible to add, simultaneously, another set of effects that the hardware is capable, such as sepia colors. These hardware capabilities do not impose extra processing as the software effects do.

Because of this processing cost, imposed by the non-hardware video effects, Aura has a fixed video resolution. Otherwise the performance would make the application unusable. Also, we had a missing feature: the still image capture. But, hey! there is good news: Aura is fully open source, you can checkout the code at github and we happily accept patches.

Honoring Cheese, the name of Aura is taken from a kind of Finnish blue cheese.

We hope you enjoy this application as we enjoyed developing it.

Front Page

Quim Gil soundly settles ceaseless suggestions surrounding a "sudden switch-off" of certain servers

In an email to the Community mailing list, Quim Gil firmly put down rumours of any unannounced shutdowns of maemo.org or its services in the near future: "Ok, this is not going to happen. Whatever happens we will know 3-6 months in advance since this is how budgeting goes. All 2012 is covered as we speak (and afaik it was never under question). The time to discuss about 2013 will start approximately after the Summer. It's always like this, by the way. You have my word with my @nokia.com domain and all. You can quote this whenever someone has fear, uncertainty or doubt about maemo.org hosting." About an unambiguous an answer as you could want. Hopefully it will put to bed the FUD about maemo.org and Nokia's continued infrastructure support, which has been one of the most pernicious and infectious distractions which has afflicted the Maemo community since Harmattan was revealed to be branded "MeeGo" (despite, under the covers, being Maemo).

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-04-02 through 2012-04-08

Overview

StatusNet for MeeGo makes it possible for Nokia N9, N950 and similar phones to connect to StatusNet compatible microblogging services such as Identi.ca. It supports viewing statuses in the phone’s event feed alongside Twitter and Facebook updates, viewing conversations, posting new status updates and replying to other people.

Assuming no issues are encountered by testers I plan on submitting this version to the Apps For MeeGo repository, and later also the Nokia Ovi Store.

You’ll need to restart your phone before statuses start appearing in the events feed, although you’ll be able to use the main app straight away. Because of some changes in the dbus services its also necessary to restart your phone even if you’ve already installed version 0.1 (this won’t be needed after future updates though).

New features

• Posting updates.
• Posting replies.
• Viewing messages in the application.
• Display full conversations.
• Load additional statuses from earlier in time.
• Splash screen while connecting.
• Improved dbus handling.
• Asynchronous message loading and posting.

Planned features

• Support for displaying rich content (pictures, videos, etc.)
• Ability to mark statuses as being “favourites”.
• Option to subscribe to new users in the app.

Download

Ovi Store: StatusNet for MeeGo
Direct download: statusnet-meego_0.2-4_armel.deb

Source

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

There’s one thing that my Nokia N950 has been lacking and that’s a StatusNet client, so I set about hacking one together. I love the way that the N9/N950 events feed displays messages from Twitter and Facebook, so my main focus so far has been to integrate with this. I’ve now got my client to a stage at which it covers most of my own needs so I thought I’d make an early release for others to play with.

Once I’ve extended it a little further I plan on submitting it to both Apps For Meego and the general Nokia Ovi Store, but for now you can download the Debian package directly here.

One thing to note is that you will need to restart your phone before events will start to appear (this is due to a limitation in the way the SyncFW framework loads plugins).

The client is written mostly in Python, with a little C++ for integrating with the events synchronisation framework. It makes use of the StatusNet module written for the command line StatusNet client IdentiCurse and the python-eventfeed module written by Thomas Perl.

Features

* OAuth login for identi.ca.
* Standard login for any other StatusNet services.
* Shows messages in the events feed.
* Fetches (and caches) user avatars.
* Displays messages from the events feed in the browser when clicked.
* Automatically fetches new messages in the events feed based on your events feed preferences.
* Can manually fetch new messages via the events feed ‘Refresh’ button.

Not yet implemented

* Posting messages.
* Displaying messages locally within the application.
* Displaying rich content (messages with multimedia attachments)

Download

Ovi Store: StatusNet for MeeGo
Direct download: statusnet-meego_0.1-3_armel.deb

Source

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

Front Page

Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended

The Maemo Community Council election nominations have been extended for an extra week. If enough interested candidates come forward during the extension the voting will be extended another week as well. Anyone interested in running is encouraged to come forward on the mailing list to express their candidacy.

At the time of writing, RM Bauer claims there have been three nominations, but none of them has accepted it on the maemo-community list.

Read more (lists.maemo.org)

Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"

Last week the Internet was set a twittering with the report, via NetbookNews, that "according to an industry insider Nokia is working on 2 new low end MeeGo handsets, and information was recieved directly from Nokia’s Next Billion Group." This is, almost certainly, referring to "Meltemi": Nokia's not-so-secret-now project to replace the aging S40 on their low-end devices with a Qt+Linux platform. Ideally, this new platform would have binary compatibility with Harmattan so that Harmattan apps would run on Meltemi, and vice versa. This would give an enormous boost to the Qt ecosystem: a "superphone" in the form of the N9 and a range of "little sisters" running Meltemi. Combined with smartphones running Symbian and a push to standardise Qt Components across Symbian & Linux, this could reinvigorate Nokia's cross-platform and next billion strategies.

Unfortunately, the article itself repeats many "well known facts" about Harmattan, including its ability to run Android applications. Myriad may have demoed Alien Dalvik on video, to try and entice OEMs, but this is a long way from an end-user being able to run Angry Birds Space.

Read more (netbooknews.com)
Read more (slashgear.com)

In this edition (Download)...

1. Front Page
   • Maemo Community Council elections: nomination period extended
   • Nokia "working on two new low end MeeGo smartphones"
2. Applications
   • gPodder updated to 3.1.0 for N950 and N9
   • get_iplayer works on N9
3. Development
   • Maliit Keyboard: Word suggestions and error correction
   • Testing requirement for Harmattan PR1.0 removed from N9 Nokia Store
4. Community
   • maemocommunity.org - a fragmentation too far?
5. Devices
   • USB audio on N900
6. Announcements
   • ZoneMinder on Nokia N9

I thought I'd see how well some pledgie tasks would do in the wild. Some of this code is stuff I've been wishing to write for a while but unable to make the time.

If you want to get at some of the funky filesystems offered by libferris from your KDE desktop, you might like to support my "KIO Slave for libferris" pledgie:



If you've always wanted to add support for Off-the-Record messaging to your project, or help entice somebody else in that direction, I have a tutorial article on offer here:



If you want a REST interface for libferris, listing directories and getting at files over HTTP/HTTPS, you can help make that happen here:



And finally, last for today but not least, if you want to get at jpeg images on your Zoneminder server using nice normal command lines like the following:

$ fcat zoneminder://server/monitor | okular -

Then you might like to throw a little loose change at the zoneminder plugin pledgie:

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-03-26 through 2012-04-01

I’m very pleased to announce that after eight years of research and development, I can present the world’s most revolutionary filesystem: πfs!