I seem to have not blogged about this, but Open Advice, our book on Free and Open Source Software: what we wish we had known when we started, was published last month.

The book was edited by Lydia Pintscher and includes essays from 42 authors, many of whom you'll recognize if you tend to go to FOSS conferences. The LWN book review concludes:

Open Advice is a book that will be helpful to those who are new to FOSS, but, because of the individual voices, styles, and tones, it doesn't read like a "how to". It could even be recommended to those who aren't necessarily interested in contributing, but are curious about what this "free software thing" is all about. It is, in short, a great book for a variety of audiences and the (mostly) two or three page essays make it easy to read, while the anecdotes and recollections personalize it. The authors, editor, and everyone else who helped should be very pleased with the result. Readers will be too.

I probably shouldn't give the ending away, but my essay on cross-project collaboration, a subject I've also blogged about, ends with:

Good luck with breaking down the project boundaries! In most cases it works if your ideas are good and presented with an open mind. But even if you do not find a common ground, as long as your implementation solves the use case for you it has not been in vain. After all, delivering software, and delivering great user experience is what counts.

The book is licensed under CC-BY-SA, and is available as free download in ePub, mobi and PDF formats, and as paperback from Lulu. The book sources are available on GitHub, patches welcome!

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2012-03-12 through 2012-03-18

It's time for the next Maemo election.  Any community member who has karma of 100 or more may be nominated for Council or may nominate themselves via the maemo community mailing list (nominations must also be accepted on the mailing list).  The nomination period will close on Saturday, 31 March.

The voting is preliminarily scheduled to run from Thursday, 5 April, to Wednesday, 11 April.  If there are less than four nominees, then they will be considered to be the consensus choice of the community in the election and no vote will be necessary.

Each member of maemo.org, who has an account that is more than 3 months old and who has earned over 10 karma points on that account, gets an electronic ballot.  The election is a "single transferrable vote."  They rank their Council candidates in order of preference; if their top candidate cannot get elected with the votes they receive, the votes are redistributed until all council seats have been allocated.

 

Please give consideration to nominating people you trust with the future of maemo.  Nokia will stop future funding for maemo.org and cannot commit to handing over or licensing the website or parts of the infrastructure to the community.  The current council has concluded that reorganizing maemo.org is not feasible and has started looking into a Plan B.  There have also been proposals to bring Harmattan into maemo.org, and to coordinate with other similar projects such as WebOS, Qt or Nemo.  It is preferable that the future of maemo be made by a deliberate decision of the community.  Please help that happen by nominating and voting in the election.

Openismus has recently had to let some great developers, and good friends, go. We are now much smaller.

In last weeks, I’ve been taking a look at the web applications standards support in Epiphany, as part of my work at Igalia. Xan wrote about the Save as web application feature present in Epiphany 3.2, that is a base for very simple (and userful) web applications support in Gnome desktop.

To continue with this work, I’ve been investigating on adding support for some web app stores. So I’ve done an experimental implementation for Mozilla Open Web Apps (as in 2011 tech preview), Chrome Web Store hosted and packaged apps, and Chrome CRX-less apps.

Screencast using Chrome Web Store.

This is an experiment. Not supported, and it may actually stay out of official Epiphany. So there are lots of things not working at all. This is first a way to have a big number of apps to play with our application mode, and improve it. So no permissions check, URL’s match may be broken, many apps will fail to even log in… Did I say it is an experiment? Most obvious issues are related with this external links handling bug.

But, if you just want to play with it, just try my branch webapp in my Epiphany Github repository. By default, support is disabled, so you’ll have to enable these keys:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web enable-chrome-apps true
$ gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.web enable-open-web-apps true


You can try with Mozilla Labs Apps Dir from 2011 tech preview and Chrome Web Store.

As part of my foray into n9 apps, a new one that displays information from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology on the n9. Being pure QML + Javascript it also runs on the desktop. The forecasts include min and max temps, and for the Europeans reading this, the middle line "10..." is the UV prediction and roasting window for the day... all your sunscreen are belong to us.



Apart from saving a little on downloads for the topology and background images when on the move, you get to customize those as they are just png files living in the images subdirectory. So I have the local rocket launch site indicated. I'd like to make a LOTR style topology overlay, perhaps mt Glorious becomes Mordor?

Code available at https://github.com/monkeyiq/qmlbom

We have published a new example application for Harmattan developers.

The application's source code is available on harmattan-dev. It can be built in Qt SDK using the enclosed project-file.

The application features several key elements in the Harmattan application programming interface, and thus provides a good starting point for learning about specific technologies and application development for N9 in general.

The initial version of the showcase application concentrates on Qt Mobility interfaces (ranging from maps, multimedia and messaging to visualizing the sensor data with a compass overlaid on camera input).

In the messaging area it provides insight how NFC is easily integrated into an application.

Feedback on the application are best given as comments in this blog entry.

This Developer Library and API reference update includes documentation for PR 1.2 features and documentation enhancements for existing features:

• Information on the new Instrumentation Dashboard, and how to use strace, latrace, swaplogger and mem-cpu-monitor with it.
• New section on Multimedia APIs which brings together the documentation of all multimedia-related functionality.
• New UX related materials: Gestures, Themes, Using Bottom Toolbar, Non-visual feedback and Using Shaders.
• New items on the List of path name exceptions.
• New section on Integrating account management to applications.

As always, your feedback about the Developer Library is very welcome!

 

 

We have released updates for both software development kits.

The Harmattan target for the Qt SDK can now be updated online, using the SDK maintenance tool. The additional functionalities concern mostly improved runtimes for testing. The Qt Quick Components in the Simulator have been upgraded to the same version as is used on the device, and the Simulator now supports both landscape and portrait orientations. Also, there are now three separate QEMU images - one for PR1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 each. The full release notes are available in harmattan-dev.

The Platform SDK is no longer tagged beta, though some usability issues remain, as described in the release notes.

The API baseline remains at PR1.0 (to ensure that all users can safely obtain and use the applications), but a few additional interfaces are now available as extensions: Frankencamera is supported in all Harmattan releases, Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol is supported only in PR1.2. The development packages containing the additional interfaces are available for download.

The Nokia N9 UX Guidelines site is now up to date, so go have a look. We've also improved the organisation of the site to serve UI designers and developers better. Improved linking between the UX site and the developer documentation means that it's easier to match what you want to do with how to do it.

However, the Chinese-language UX materials have not been updated at this point. If you are using them, we'd like to hear from you! Do you think it's useful having some material available in Chinese? Should there be more? Less? Different materials?